How to Get Much More Done Today - and Tomorrow Too!

Because we're all crazy busy these days, I asked Dan Markowitz, efficiency expert and President of TimeBack Management, to share strategies to help us squeeze more out of each day.
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Does this sound like you? You've mapped out your strategy for making the big sale. You're going to track trigger events, you're going to prepare questions in advance, you're going to sharpen and practice your unique value proposition, and you're going to purge your website and marketing materials of vacuous puffery. You're going to start now...
 
... except that you don't quite get to some of those things today. You got caught up in email, and by the time you finished, you had to get onto some other work. So you try again tomorrow, except that after a bit of email and some web browsing, you're running late for a meeting with a prospect, so it has to wait.  Something else happens the day after that. Etc.

What's going on?

You're finding out the hard way what happens when you don't have a clearly defined routine for doing your work. You're like a ship without a rudder, with no control over your direction. You're thrown off-course by the slightest external interruption or internal distraction.

Peter Bregman makes a compelling case for the power of routine in a recent blog post at Harvard Business Publishing. He writes that recently his work day went quickly and quietly down the toilet as he was ambushed by emails, solving other people's problems, and fire-fighting, all of which kept him from getting done what was really important.

He points out that even with his daily to-do lists, "the challenge, as always, is execution. How can you stick to a plan when so many things threaten to derail it? How can you focus on a few important things when so many things require your attention?"

Bregman looks to fitness expert Jack LaLanne for the answer:


"At the age of 94, he still spends the first two hours of his day exercising. Ninety minutes lifting weights and 30 minutes swimming or walking. Every morning. . . . So he works, consistently and deliberately, toward his goals. He does the same things day in and day out. He cares about his fitness and he's built it into his schedule."

Bregman argues that
, "Managing our time needs to become a ritual too. Not simply a list or a vague sense of our priorities. That's not consistent or deliberate. It needs to be an ongoing process we follow no matter what to keep us focused on our priorities throughout the day."

Call it ritual, as Bregman does, or call it routine.

It's the same thing. A routine enables you to define the best way to manage your day. For knowledge workers, that's no easy trick: the lack of level flow of incoming work, and the variation in types of work, makes it difficult to create routine. And let's face it: there's nothing routine or predictable about your company's new line of titanium escargot forks. So it's difficult, but not impossible.

But just as emergency room nurses can't predict what kind of patient is going to be wheeled in through the front door, they can still create routines for the predictable aspects of their job like rounding, or management of medical supplies, or administrative scut work.

Similarly, you can create routines to help you manage your day. Bregman suggests three steps:

Step 1 (5 minutes) Set Plan for the Day
Before turning on your computer, sit down with a blank piece of paper and decide what will make this day highly successful. . . . Write those things down.

Now, most importantly, take your calendar and schedule those things into time slots, placing the hardest and most important items at the beginning of the day. And by the beginning of the day I mean, if possible, before even checking your email. If your entire list does not fit into your calendar, reprioritize your list. There is tremendous power in deciding when and where you are going to do something.

Step 2 (1 minute every hour) Refocus

Set your watch, phone, or computer to ring every hour. When it rings. . . look at your list and ask yourself if you spent your last hour productively. Then look at your calendar and deliberately recommit to how you are going to use the next hour.

Step 2 (5 minutes) Review

Shut off your computer and review your day. What worked? Where did you focus? Where did you get distracted? What did you learn that will help you be more productive tomorrow?

The power of rituals is their predictability. You do the same thing in the same way over and over again. And so the outcome of a ritual is predictable too. If you choose your focus deliberately and wisely and consistently remind yourself of that focus, you will stay focused. It's simple.

And that's true of any routine. It reduces variability, brings the process under control, and allows for continuous improvement.

Really think about this for a moment.

Routine is NOT just something for weekly or monthly sales department activities. Routine can be -- should be, must be -- applied to the way you work on an individual level as well. Because when you start applying routines to your own work, you'll not only improve your own performance, you'll set a model that will inspire others as well.

For more information from Dan Markowitz on how to on apply routines (known as "standard work" in the lean community) to knowledge workers available here, here, here, and here.)

Comments

[Silvia Quintanilla]

Great article Jill. I found the info on Jack LaLanne inspiring. I've heard similar "discipline" stories about Michael Phelps. I would love to become more productive with things I enjoy each day. This helped. in particular, I'm going to apply the timer ring idea. Good one!

[Debashish Brahma]

Thanks Jill for an excellent post, I wrote in the Facebook you are doing an incredible job.
Time management:
S M A R T
S=Save Time
M=Make Time
A-Arrange Time
R=Ration Time.
T=Take Time.
Jack LaLanne is a SMART man.
Warm Regards