Links to other parts of this miniseries:
How to find 5 extra hours per week – Part 1
How to find 5 extra hours per week – Part 3
How to find 5 extra hours per week – Part 4
How to find 5 extra hours per week – Part 5
How to find 5 extra hours per week – Part 6
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 13 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: How to find 5 extra hours per week – Part 2
— From Learning to Lead: Bringing Out the Best in People by Fred Smith (1915-2007)
In yesterday’s Part 1 of this miniseries, we learned what the basis must be to declare a time emergency, and roughly how long we can make it last without affecting our work or relationships. We also learned how to announce going into monk mode to the people that surround us in order to get their help and support. So far so good.
Today, we will start unpacking Fred Smith’s 20-point checklist in Learning to Lead. The goal is to help you find five extra hours per week, despite being completely swamped. There’s no time to lose, so let’s get started!
1. Clean off the desk. “To start the battle, sweep away everything you won’t be using in the next six weeks. When I diet I don’t leave food lying around the house to tantalize me. Unfinished work tempts me, makes me want to look at it, pick it up, finish it. I feel guilty about it. So the first step is to clean off my desk.” If cleaning your desk becomes a tremendous chore in and of itself, then grab a box and put all the stuff in there that you won’t need for the next few weeks. Once your emergency plan is over and you are back to normal, you can take the contents of the box, examine them and clean them up. For now, they’ll be fine in a box: out of sight, out of mind.
2. Stop reading the newspaper. “I can pick up three and one-half hours a week right there, and if I only need five hours, that’s a pretty good start,” says the author. If you’re hesitant to do this out of fear someone will ask something and you might appear uninformed, it’s easier to reply, “No, I didn’t see that. What did it say?” The person can tell you in a few minutes. Smith asks himself, What am I getting out of the newspaper that’s worth making my life frantic? In this post, I talk about lifestyle design guru, Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, who decided not to read or watch any news based on four factors. The same goes for TV: “Break the habit of turning on the set without first checking the listings. Make TV watching a planned occurrence,” says Fred Smith. His book was written when there was no easy way to record a TV show, yet nowadays you can record or stream your shows at will, so there’s no excuse for binge-watching when you can do this at a later time.
3. Get up 15 minutes earlier. Smith says, “Our wills may support getting up 15 minutes earlier, but they won’t support getting up an hour earlier. We say, ‘But I should be able to.’ That’s fantasy. We’ve got to be objective about what kind of resolution we have. Fifteen minutes each morning gives me an added hour and three quarters a week. Add that to the previous three and one-half hours and the goal of five extra hours is already reached.”
4. Delay unnecessary reading. Smith recommends, “I would postpone all reading that does not directly contribute to what I am doing during this emergency period.”
5. Read only parts of books. The author says, “I’m surprised at how many people feel they have to read a book cover to cover. If I’m in a hurry, I skim the table of contents, find the subjects I need to know immediately, and read those chapters.” Smith points out that we can still get plenty of ideas that way. Further, nowadays, you can subscribe to online summaries that do a good job of providing the core information in a book. Or I know of a daily blog called EntreGurus that I highly recommend… 😉
Come back tomorrow to check out the next few steps in Smith’s emergency time plan. You’ll learn why it’s important to avoid what he calls the wood-hay-and-stubble activities during a time crunch.
ACTION
TODAY: Get started today. Clean your desk and work area so that you can focus on catching up and working on what you need to get done over the next few weeks. Put your newspaper subscription(s) on hold, as if you were going on vacation. Set your alarm clock for tomorrow 15 minutes earlier than normal.
FUTURE: Keep a box by your desk where you will put the unnecessary reading during this period of time. Once your emergency period is over, you can come back to this pile of reading and determine whether you really want to do it or if it was necessary at all. Sometimes we read materials out of the habit and eagerness to keep up with as much as possible, and also due to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), but nothing happens if we let this batch of accumulated reading material go and, going forward, we just pick up from here.
Know someone who could use an additional 5 hours per week during a time emergency? Please share this post with that person. Thank you! Email, Facebook or Twitter.