Out of time

March 4, 2010March 17, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I just went to the hospital to visit some close friends whose baby will likely be born by the time this blog is posted. It is five days before the due date, and when I asked how things were going my friend said, “It’s going great, but it’s been kind of sudden.”

Because I was going to meet him after work, rather than heading home, I didn’t rush out of work in the way I normally do. Normally, my time is ruled by the strict deadline of the train I catch every day. Without the deadline, I “just finished up a few things,” and I left work 45 minutes later than I’d planned.

We fill the time we give ourselves. And nearly always it feels like the deadline sneaks up on us – even if we’ve been preparing for nine months.

It’s easy to scoff at the idea of holding 5 minute meetings without any chairs in the room, using an egg timer; or doing speed interviews of 20 job applicants in an hour rather than screening a zillion resumes and interviewing 3 people for an hour each. But until you’ve tried it, do you know which works better?

I’m not saying rush through everything. I’m saying time is precious and we have the opportunity to be deliberate about how we spend it. So you get to choose. Do you:

Decide in advance how much time something really needs to accomplish your goal, and stick to it?
Do things the way everyone else does them, because it’s so uncomfortable to explain why you do things differently?

(and by the way, just because Outlook defaults to a certain length of meeting doesn’t mean that’s how you should schedule your day).

100% of the time

October 30, 2009October 29, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A while back I wrote about the “125% rule,” the idea that having more on your plate than you can really get done as a good thing, because it forces you constantly to triage, to work better and faster and smarter, and to say ‘no’ to things that you shouldn’t really be spending time on.

That post was about work, and this one is about life. A perfect life is one in which at every moment you are doing exactly what you should be doing. Whether at work or at home or somewhere in between, you are fully engaged, fully energized, fully yourself.

I’ve never much liked the term “work/life balance” because of the dichotomy it implies – one is good (life), the other is bad (work), and somehow the idea that “work” is anything but “life” is confused at a pretty fundamental level (plus the phrase really is just corporate-speak for “let’s not make people work nights and weekends.”)

I’m much more interested in “balance,” and to me that means living your life in a way that is aligned with your own priorities, beliefs, who you are today, what you value, and who you want to be in the future.

Pulling “balance” off is tricky. If I break my life up into its component parts – work, spouse, family, friends, time for myself, etc. – it often feels like all of them could use more time. And if I run that idea over in my head enough times, I flip from a sense of fullness and energy into a perpetual cycle of “I’m not doing enough” in every phase of my life.

Which has led me to ask: if at (nearly) every moment I’m doing exactly what I should be doing, am I even allowed to be stressed about what I’m not getting done? Because if I’m doing what I need to do at every moment, yet I still have a never-ending list of incomplete “to do’s” in every aspect of my life, it seems like this means one of two things: either I’m spending my time in the right way but have the wrong attitude about what’s possible – and I need to change my aspirations– or I’m not really spending my time in a way that aligns with my priorities.

Or maybe this is just what life feels like in your 30s?

: : : : : : : : : : :

Go

May 12, 2009May 11, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I’ve noticed that every time the next big, important thing comes up, I always, always have time for it. A big project, an exciting opportunity…I’m there – and I’m sure you are too.

But wait a minute. Where did that time come from? Weren’t you flat out before someone handed you the plum project just waiting for someone to swoop in and save the day? Sure, you can work a little harder for a little while, but if this keeps happening time and again, you must be making bigger shifts.

Which must mean that there’s always space for something new if it’s important enough.

And this begs the question: what do I do with my time when I’m not stretching on the next big opportunity?

Put another way: “If I had all the time in the world and I really wanted to reach my goals, what I’d really give more time to is _________.”

How do you fill in that blank? And if the thing is so important, don’t you think you can find the time?

Here’s something I’ve been playing with: scheduling two 2-hour blocks on my calendar every week for the really-important-stuff-that-I-really-should-do-more of.* It’s probably not enough, but it’s a start.

This is about making your own time for your own most important stuff, because no one’s going to do that for you. You don’t need permission or someone else making a deadline for you. And you just discovered that you can make the time.

Go!

* * * * * *

*(I’m serious about the scheduling bit. I just started doing it. It makes a huge difference)

: : : : : : : : : : :

An email tax

April 13, 2009April 10, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

It’s pretty well-established that we have an email free rider problem. Since there’s essentially no marginal cost for each additional person I email….voilà, SPAM represents more than 90% of all email sent.

But what about inside your organization? I suspect you have a lot of email threads involving a back-and-forth conversation with 8 people copied.

What if you had to do the math? 30 seconds to read an email, another 30 to think about it and maybe respond x 8 people = 8 minutes of organizational time spent.

On average the people copied on your email earn $0.50 – $1.00 per minute (some more, some less, but let’s keep the math simple…and never mind that everyone’s supposed to be producing much more than they cost the company). So each time you Reply All, even if just to say, “Thanks, Cary,” or “This will be great!” it’s cost the organization $8. That doesn’t sound too terrible until you figure 50-150 emails/day/person in your organization…thousands and thousands of dollars per person per year because we’re lazily copying people.

Plus all the time people spend wading through emails instead of thinking.

Some ideas:

Disable the “Reply All” button for emails
Or if that’s too technical to implement, create norms that makes replying all unacceptable
When a chain gets going, after the second note it’s someone’s job to write the group and say, “We’re taking this offline, I’ll update everyone on where we ended up.”
Reply All and type “Remove me”. Short term this increases email traffic, but pretty soon people will start thinking twice.
Create an email tax: charge people $0.25 for each reply all, with a 3x match by the company ($1 total per Reply All). Give the money away to a charity, and have a “Reply All” volunteer day to boot. Everyone wins.
Pick up the phone instead.

There are some conversations that whole groups need to follow by email, but not nearly as many as we think. Make it cost something to send to everyone, and you’ll have more time left to do…just about anything.

: : : : : : : : : : :

Cut away what you do not need to do

February 11, 2009February 11, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Michelangelo would see a block of marble and say that all he had to do was cut away what was not needed to release the statue within.

Reaching your goals is just as much about what you DON’T do as what you do. You can convince yourself that you need to….check your personal email every 30 minutes; log onto the newspaper to scan headlines; watch an hour of TV every night to unwind.

The thing is, you don’t. And if you cut out all the little things that you’d convinced yourself you need to do, you’ll discover a lot more time to do the things you have to or want to do.

Here’s a clue: if you have a gap in the day, what do you do? Do you reflexively open up a browser, scan your email? Instead of that, why not tackle the list of things YOU (not someone else who emailed you) have decided is a priority?

Until I started blogging, I never would have imagined I had time to blog. Now I do. Something had to give to make that possible.

: : : : : : : : : : :

Tag: time

Out of time

Like this:

100% of the time

Like this:

Go

Like this:

An email tax

Like this:

Cut away what you do not need to do

Like this:

Share this post:

Like this:

Share this post:

Like this:

Share this post:

Like this:

Share this post:

Like this:

Share this post:

Like this: