What To Do When There's Too Much To Do (4 page)

Moreover, this method can't possibly work for every business, no matter how well-established. The concept of “fun work isn't really work” aside, you can pare down work only so far in a business requiring your constant presence—especially a service business where
you
are the product. For instance, musicians must be present at their gigs every night, so there's only so much they can delegate. A speaker like me is paid to be on the platform. The turning point of a business like this, of course, comes when you're so much in demand you can charge whatever you like for your services. Then you can scale back to the number of hours that suits you.

Much of it depends upon your ability to get good help. Delegating and outsourcing your mundane or administrative tasks sounds good, but let's face it: good help is hard to find. Finding a customer-service person who can get a transaction right is hard enough; finding someone you depend on to run critical functions in your organization is even harder.

Ultimately, the idea of the 4-Hour Workweek is somewhat misleading, but the basic concepts underlying it are sound. You may never cut your workweek back to just four hours by following it, especially if you're someone else's employee, but you can certainly trim a lot of unnecessary fat from your schedule. Bottom line, you know you must fully commit to making the changes necessary to take control of your time.

Delegate or outsource whenever possible.
Get rid of the tasks other people can do more cheaply and more effectively than you can. Get over the idea that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself; this could be one of the reasons you're stuck in your office all the time. Trust your direct reports to do their jobs, until they prove they can't; don't hover over them or waste time nitpicking their work. If you can delegate without micromanaging, you'll be able to recapture a significant portion of your lost time.

Create your own deadlines
. If someone hands you a casual project with no official deadline, set one for yourself. Determine how long the full project will take. Then calculate how many days and how much time you'll need to complete it by your deadline by planning backward. If necessary, schedule personal milestones—that is, self-imposed intermediate dead-lines—and break large tasks into segments. They'll help you stay on track and keep an eye on the big picture, especially if the final deadline is far in the future.

Set priorities but be flexible
. Construct your HIT and Master lists based on the value-weighted priorities you define. Try to maintain these priorities once you have them sorted, but realize you'll have to reprioritize on the fly occasionally. For example, if you fall behind on a deadline, you may have to schedule extra time for that task on a particular day, and/or reprioritize the task to earlier in the day. Allow a little flexibility into your calendar, so you can productively deal with crises and other unexpected events—but not too much! If you use up that time on a particular day, fine; if not, then you can leave the office on time.

If someone hands you a project without a deadline, set one yourself to help you stay on track.

Take the time of day into account
. Think about the time of day you should work on certain tasks to get them done most efficiently and effectively, based on your personal biological cycles. Most productivity experts tell you to tackle the most critical and difficult tasks early in the day, and I have no beef with that if you're a “morning person.” However, I also think you should save some of these tasks for the time of day when you have the most energy. For most of us, this is during the morning hours; but for others, the peak energy period occurs before or after lunch or even in the evening. You're the expert on
you
, so keep track of your daily peak energy period, and hammer on some of your tough tasks during those periods, when your brain functions better. Leave simpler tasks for low-energy, “secondary time.”

Practice purposeful abandonment, letting low-priority tasks drop off your list—at least temporarily.

Many athletes have intricate routines for every little thing, such as a free throw in basketball (how many times to dribble the ball, timing, positioning, type of motion, and so on). Once they've fine-tuned everything to their satisfaction, they no longer have to think about the perfunctory portion of their game, and simply execute against it. Albert Einstein took routines to an extreme. For example, he had five identical suits in his closet, so he didn't have to waste mental energy deciding what he was going to wear each day. He just grabbed a clean suit.

I don't mean to undervalue spontaneity, as there's a time and a place for it, but without a routine, other people will happily dictate your day for you. In other words, if you don't determine what you need to accomplish and schedule the time to do it, other people are going to be perfectly happy to fill up your day for you.

Establish daily routines for common work tasks, such as checking e-mail or organizing your day. This allows you to make fewer decisions, reducing your energy expenditure.

Apply the idea of routines to all areas of your life, for anything you do on an ongoing basis. Routines help in so many ways:

• They reduce energy expenditure. You won't have to make so many decisions.

• They reduce anxiety. You'll have a plan in place for how to fulfill each activity.

• They build anticipation. Just as setting up a vacation in advance helps build excitement, defined routines can build anticipation … and sometimes motivate you when you're slogging through a dull task, if the fun time is already scheduled!

Here are a few helpful ways I've introduced routines into my life:

• Every weekend I'm in town, I have a scheduled date night every Saturday night with my husband.

• Every morning I'm in town, my husband and I go to the recreation center to work out at 7:00
A.M.
Period. No excuses.

• I have a monthly “fun day” for a pedicure, manicure, and a massage.

• At the end of each day, I plan the next day.

• Our morning and evening routines with the children create structure and predictability, while minimizing hassle.

• From 10:00 to 11:30
A.M.
—when I'm at my highest level of energy—I work on my most creative, difficult tasks.

Routines allow you to build time for reality into your schedule. Block out the time for the report you have to write. If someone tells you a meeting is going to take two hours, block out at least that long. If part of your job is to supervise the work of others in your team, make sure you give yourself time to do so. Make a reasonable estimate of the required time to complete routine tasks and block out the time to do them.

I'm the 2011–2012 president of the National Speakers Association (NSA), and often meet fascinating people at our meetings. One such person was Rick Searfoss, a former astronaut, who brings the lessons of teamwork, leadership, innovation, and peak performance he learned in human spaceflight down to earth for all to enjoy. I asked him what he'd learned about time management by being an astronaut, and if there was such a thing as productivity in outer space.

Rick told me there are certain activities when blasting off that are timed literally down to the second, such as the precise time to ignite the engines. But not all activities are timed, such as housekeeping, eating, restroom breaks, and so on. The astronauts struck a balance between having structure and having flexibility. They planned for the important things, allowing some movement on the lower-priority tasks.

So how does that apply to the real-life work situations we non-astronauts face? Basically, the lesson here is to make sure you block out time to get all the important things done first, and then allow some leeway with your secondary priorities. With that in mind, grab your calendar and start plugging tasks into time blocks. You should plug every top-priority task from
your HIT lists into your schedule if possible. It doesn't matter if it's a big task or a small one; estimate how long it will take to do, then block out the time. Yes, actually put an appointment on your calendar and mark it as “busy.” No one needs to know you're the only one invited to the meeting.

You can break down the process of scheduling into three steps. Fill in the:

1. Non-negotiable items.

2. Regular daily tasks.

3. Work from your HIT list.

Non-negotiable items are integral to your organization's operations. Let's say your boss schedules a staff meeting every Wednesday morning at 9:00. That's a have-to. If you're in the hospital, on the operating table, you could probably get out of the meeting; if not, forget it. Perhaps you have an ops briefing at 7:30
A.M.
You may also have to fill out the weekly time sheet that accounting uses to charge your time to various projects every Friday before you leave. Your son needs his allergy shot Mondays at 4:00, and so on. You rarely have control over have-to tasks, so you might as well plug them in so you can work around them.

Next, plug in your regular daily tasks. This includes things like any statistical or data tracking you're required to do as part of your job, time you block off for client calls, and checking on the status in your area of responsibility. These tasks are a regular and necessary part of your routine. If they aren't, then why are you doing them? If a regular task isn't helping the organization fulfill its goals, get rid of it. If you have to let something slide, you could ignore this appointment in a pinch.

What's that? You'd
like
to get rid of it, but your boss makes you do it? Well, have you written any sort of document to present to your boss, explaining what the task actually costs, and how little return the organization is getting for the cost? Have you tried to convince her that the organization is wasting money by having you do it? If not, why not? Even if your boss assigned you the task, proving it isn't in the best interest of the organization is the best way to get her to change her mind.

Once you've filled your schedule, stop. You'll always have more tasks than time.