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 2
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 6
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 6 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: How to find 5 extra hours per week – Part 5
— From Learning to Lead: Bringing Out the Best in People by Fred Smith (1915-2007)
Good morning! How is your time crunch coming along? I hope you are indeed finding/making additional time. So far the points in this miniseries from Fred Smith’s list have focused mainly on external situations or dealing with others. But what about our internal selves and our outcomes? This is as important—if not more—than anything else we’ve seen so far.
Let’s look at how to deal with our energy, our work, and our mind when we are in a time emergency so that we can, optimally, find a minimum of 5 extra hours each week.
14. Protect personal energy. Becoming stressed and pressured for time cuts down energy and alertness, says Smith. “Since I work so much more efficiently when alert, I must protect my energy when time is scarce [so that effectiveness doesn’t suffer].” He emphasizes the importance of sleep, and also says, “I find it very important during such a time to eat less and exercise more.” In terms of the workload, Smith reminds himself, “not to try to accomplish more by overworking. What I can do in fifteen hours is not three times what I can accomplish in five.” Since a person can only have a certain number of productive hours during any given day, it’s important to make them count.
15. Schedule work according to productive hours. Each one of us knows when our most productive and effective hours are (check this miniseries to create the right environment to Be Awesomely Effective). Schedule your most creative and productive things for those hours. You’ll get the most important projects accomplished, and the work you get done will be much more than during the rest of the day.
Want to know when your peak time is? Ari Meisel, productivity guru and author of The Art of Less Doing, has a fantastic (and free!) app for smartphones. It’s called Less Doing Peak Time. Backed by science, Meisel designed it in a way that takes less than a minute every time you tap on it, and over the course of a week, you tap at different times and the app will let you know the window of time when you are at your most productive. Brilliant! (And so easy too!)
16. Compile a list of second-wind jobs. These are jobs that actually refresh you, pull you out of a lull and give you an energy boost or bring about a second wind, hence the name. Smith explains, “Second-wind jobs kill downtime and get me going. I like to do something exciting that I’ve really been waiting to work on… [These jobs] increase my utilization of time.”
17. Discipline self-talk. The author points out that all of us talk to ourselves. The important thing—especially during an emergency—is to discipline the details, and this includes our own self-talk, to focus on achieving the outcome we want. Smith relays an example: “Going to a meeting, I say to myself, What do I want to come out of the meeting with? It’s clear in my mind if I have talked it over with myself. I walk into the meeting with my agenda set and don’t waste time.”
Years ago, my friend Patti DeNucci, author of The Intentional Networker (we will see some ideas from that book in here soon), taught me the power of setting intentions before going into meetings, events, etc. Just as Smith asks above, as you are planning to go to an event/meeting, etc., ask yourself what your reason is for attending and set an intention. You will now have a purpose to be there and to work deliberately in making it happen. This is a great practice, not just for time crunches. Also, as you are approaching your entrance to the venue or meeting/conference room, remind yourself of your intention and you will be focused the whole time on accomplishing it before you leave. Try it out, it works wonders — thanks, Patti!
Come back tomorrow for the last part of this miniseries. We will learn, among other things, why it’s important to leave meetings first.
ACTION
TODAY: Attending a meeting? Going to an event? Having a conference call or just a plain business phone call? Set your intention. What do you want to get out of it? Then focus your time on making it happen. It always works (as long as it’s a good intention for all involved, of course!).
FUTURE: Make sure that you are taking appropriate care of your energy, stress and sleep over the next weeks while you are in monk mode. Go back to this miniseries on how to create 2 awesome hours of work every day. This will help you enormously to get through your time crunch and crush your goals effectively.
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.