Cornerstone Habits

So the caffeine withdrawal headache is still there, but not as bad as yesterday.  I’m guessing I’m in for a few rocky days before my body gets used to the idea that we are on another mission.  100 days with no caffeinated drinks.  Why?  Well my reasoning is slightly different from last time.  Last time I wanted to find out how long it took to create a habit.  Naively I concluded about 100 days.  Boy was I wrong.  I think it can take years to override a habit you love like smoking or drinking (alcohol or caffeine), overeating or whatever.  Psychologists believe the habit will always be there, you just have to find ways to overcome it.  I’ve yet to experiment with how long it takes to establish a new good habit.

This time I’ve got two goals with my 100-day challenge.  Firstly, it’s to see if I function better without caffeine in my tea cup.  Secondly, it’s to see if certain techniques work and make it easier for me this time (last time I had three attempts over about a year and a bit).  You’ll hear about my experiences with both goals in the weeks to come, so find another blog now if this sounds marginally less interesting than the washing machine on spin cycle.

In fact, there is a sneaky third idea.  And that’s the idea of a cornerstone habit.  A cornerstone habit is a habit that starts off other good habits.  When I tried giving up caffeine a few years ago I found I was less likely to have a glass of wine in the evening, and more likely to exercise.  That sounds a bit like kicking-caffeine might be a cornerstone habit for me.  So I’m going to repeat the experiment and see what happens.

Clarity of Purpose

Anna Wintour: “People respond well to people who are sure of what they want.”

We somehow think that a clear purpose will come to us from above, as the Ten Commandments were given to Moses, or as Buddha achieved enlightenment sitting under the Bodhi  tree.  Some people are lucky enough to know early on their where their talents and interests lie.  Anna Wintour reckoned she was just 15 when her career in fashion was fixed[1].    For the rest of us, being clear about our purpose is hard work. 

There is no escaping the fact that a clear vision is essential to the success of any organisation, and essential to the success of those within the organisation.  

If being clear about your purpose was easy, though, everyone would be highly focused on their specific goals.  Sadly, that’s not the case for one very simple reason: being clear about your purpose means making a choice.  By choosing one path you close off others.  For many people that is very difficult; the grass always looks greener someplace else, particularly when things don’t turn out as you planned.  So our attention wanders to something we think might be more profitable, more interesting, or just plain different from the problems we are facing.  However, that is exactly why clarity of purpose is so powerful; choosing forces you to focus your time, resources, and energy on one thing.  And doing one thing vastly improve your chances of success.  The old saying that the hunter who cases two rabbits catches neither one is as true in business as it is in the woods.  

When we are sure we are doing the right thing, we can sink ourselves fully into the activity.  Free from distractions, we become absorbed in our work.  Disturbances that would normally cause annoyance are ignored as we focus on the job.   Concentration and effectiveness are at their highest when we have absolute clarity about what we are doing and why we are doing it.

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[1] When Anna Wintour was just 21 years old she told her co-workers that she wanted to be Editor of Vogue.  She achieved her ambition in 1988 and 24 years later she is still Editor-in-Chief of American Vogue.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Wintour.

What Steve Jobs Taught Me

Let me say at the outset that I didn’t know Steve Jobs, or ever work with him.  In fact I haven’t even read the book that EVERYONE seems to be reading at the moment – his biography by Walter Isaacson.  And I don’t intend to anytime soon.  Which I guess makes me supremely unqualified to write about any lessons he taught anyone. 

But Steve Jobs did, apparently, teach me one thing. 

It doesn’t involve any form of computing, is completely unconnected to tablets or smart phones, and is so ordinary that it doesn’t even begin to give away its power. 

What is it?  It is planning in analog. 

Unusually for me, I didn’t even need to read a book to get the idea; it came in a freely downloadable pdf.  Plan in analog.  So simple, so obvious, but so, so powerful.

I happened to be working on a presentation and tried the idea out.  I replaced my much loved but very broken fountain pen with a sleek, inexpensive silver number and invested in a nice notebook (without a power pack).  And I started to write.  And draw bubbles.  And more bubbles.  Turned the page and did it again.  For hours on end. 

It is notable how the brain is free to think creatively when it doesn’t get caught up worrying about point sizes, or whether boxes are lined up.  I thought about my BIG IDEAS.  I criticized them, turned the page and started again.  I have pages and pages of mind maps, notes, crossings out and ideas that run off the edge of the page.  Pen and paper isn’t nearly as flexible or forgiving of mistakes as my Office software, but it is superb at freeing the mind.

I hope I produced a better presentation with my inspiration from Steve Jobs.  I know I created it more quickly than if I hadn’t done my pen and paper planning.  I guess I won’t know until it closes a sale or makes an entire audience stand up to applaud. 

The process has taught me an important lesson – pre-planning on paper should be given plenty of time.  It produces better structure, better ideas, and hopefully a better end result.  It certainly saves time. 

I shall credit Steve Jobs with the lesson.  It’s not as earth-shattering as the iPhone or iPad, but looking at his presentations I can well believe he devoted considerable time to worrying about big ideas before worrying about how it might look on the screen.

Watch “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs” by Camine Gallo here:  http://www.slideshare.net/cvgallo/the-presentation-secrets-of-steve-jobs-2609477.  His book “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience” is also well worth a read.  OK – I’ll admit to having read that one!

Being Productive when Tired

There are different types of tiredness at work.  Like:

• No sleep last night because of noisy neighbours/  baby crying/ didn’t get in till 3am (delete as appropriate) tiredness
• Been in the office since 7am, now it’s 5pm and I’m running out of steam tiredness
• Had a super productive day, got loads done, and now tailing off fast
• Just got back from a business trip and I’m jet-lagged or just plain tired from several days intensive work
• Got a cold/ headache/ hangover/other type of unwellness
• Not got a good reason, just firing on much less than three cylinders and don’t seem to care …. tiredness
• You probably know other types of tiredness at work.  It’s a universal problem. 

No matter how many books get bought on Time Management, it’s a simple fact of life that we get tired and work gets a lot more difficult.  So how can we be productive when dog-tired?

As Philip Pullman once said – “A bad day’s work is a lot better than no day’s work at all”.

So here are my ten tired, tried and tested ideas:

1. Work on your To Do List – and prioritise it.  Make sure everything you need to do is written down and then decide what needs to be done next.  The act of sorting out what needs to be done, and in what order, is motivating in itself, and more often than not prompts thought and action on the task.
2. Set your stop watch to 15 minutes and work on your Most Important Task.  Just 15 minutes, even if you work slowly.  Getting started on a task, even a little bit, moves things forward and will make the next 15 minutes easier to do.
3. If you can, take a nap.  Even a short nap can make a huge difference in your productivity and might make the difference between a decent day’s work, or a totally wasted day. 
4. Work on routine admin stuff, like expenses, filing, accounts or something that doesn’t take too much brain power.  I often that I can get quite engrossed in little tasks, and get quite a lot done despite initial tiredness.
5. Track your time.  You are most likely to waste time by web surfing, reading the paper or generally wasting time when you are tired.  And most likely to lose track of time when you are tired.  We do it without thinking, or realising how much time has gone.  If you track your time then at least you get reminded where the time is going, and can use another technique to try and get back on track. 
6. Learn something new.  Reading is productive, and a good way to learn about important but not urgent things.  So if you’ve been meaning to learn a new software package, or get up to date on industry trends, tired time might be perfect timing. 
7. Give yourself a deadline.  Not having a deadline for tasks can be a huge problem – when everything is urgent, but nothing absolutely has to be done today.  Work ahead and figure out deadlines for mini-tasks and work in hour long chunks, tracking your productive time in each hour.
8. Work with someone else.  Hold a meeting, a telecom or something that requires interaction with someone else.  It’s amazing how you perk up when reacting to someone else’s ideas and views.  Just be careful not to waste someone else’s time in the process of trying to rescue your own day.  I like holding meetings at the end of the day because it helps everyone keep going a bit longer, and the ideas are just as relevant.
9. Work on something you love.  It’s always easier to work on something that naturally inspires you.  It may be better to get something done in an area that flows easily during tired time, and work on more difficult things when you are fresh.
10. Remind yourself of your ultimate goals.  Not giving in to tiredness is difficult, and often the only way to do it is remind yourself why you do what you do, and why you love it.  It’s easier to motivate a tired brain when you know why it’s worthwhile. 

What are your top tips for working when tired?  I’d love to hear them.  And I promise not to disappear for such a long time again!

The Value in Neat and Tidy

Tidying up is a thoroughly therapeutic task. Organising something that was previously chaotic has so many benefits, quite apart from the calming effect on the soul. My kitchen cupboards recently unattached themselves from the wall thanks to an over-enthusiastic washing machine. Rather than have their precious contents become part of an insurance claim, I emptied the cupboards. This was not only hard work (who would have thought kitchen cupboard could hold so much?) but also revealing.

I found ingredients that had been bought twice (a surprising number), ingredients that should maybe be eaten up (nothing earlier than 2009, but even so …) and bottles that had never been opened (but will be now). In short, I had only a vague idea of what was in my cupboards. And I only moved three years ago!

Although kitchen structural defects are not to be recommended to anyone, I have found the act of clearing out, cleaning up, and re-organising to be extremely valuable. I have reassessed what I really need, what is only used occasionally or not at all. And I have resolved to simplify: which should save money, save space, and improve efficiency.

Transferring the same ideas to work is even more worthwhile. Although my hard-disk is unlikely to fall off its perch due to too much data, a spring clean and re-evaluation of what’s important yields similar benefits. Pruning projects has even more value than throwing out duplicate ingredients. The CRM database is next ….

So, it’s Summer Cleaning for me! It doesn’t have the same ring to it as Spring Cleaning, but it has all the lemon-scented benefits.




PS Getting to Excellent isn’t going into semi-retirement, despite appearances. I was away for two blissful weeks in Provence and surprisingly not motivated to blog. I wasn’t sure you would be interested in thyme-scented hills or how all food tastes better in France …

To Do

I’ve been through my fair share of time management courses, books and systems. I suspect you have too. Some of them are actually been useful; some less so.

Yet the old stand-by that never fails is the good old To Do list. It’s not fancy, it’s not complicated, but it is effective. A day in the office without a To Do list is likely to be less productive than a day with a To Do list. Somehow it focuses the mind; even if the list only has one big item on it.

So why is a To Do list so useful?

I think it has two benefits. Firstly, it requires purposeful thought in order to write it. If you don’t know what you are trying to achieve, your lack of purpose becomes abundantly obvious. Deciding your objective then becomes your first To Do item. If your objectives are clear, then a little thought about what To Do next produces your list.

Secondly, having decided what should be done listing them provides focus through the day. When you get called into an unexpected meeting, or something takes longer than expected, the list pulls you back to what you hoped to achieve. It often produces a last bit of extra effort at the end of the day to get one or two more items ticked off.

There is something ridiculously satisfying in being able to tick things off.

The To Do list is so simple that it seems almost ridiculous to write several paragraphs on the subject. Yet I’m not the first fan to put fingers to keyboard and take up virtual air time with a subject that must seem second nature to any productive person.

So – can a To Do list be beaten? Is there anything better at aiding and abetting the person who wants to Get Things Done? I’d be interested to know whether anyone can trump it …

Thoughtfulness

I was standing in line in a café on Saturday afternoon when I saw a sign hanging above the counter: “Drink Coffee – Do Stupid Things Faster with More Energy”.  It made me laugh and brightened an already sunny afternoon.

It made me stop and think, though, about the number of things we do without thinking; and how infrequently we do things slowly and thoughtfully.  Getting through a lot of stuff makes us feel good, but doesn’t necessarily move things forward.  Whereas doing a well-chosen thing a little more slowly and thoroughly is likely to produce a better result.

Of course so much depends on what work needs to be done, and what your objectives are.  Despite my long battles with reducing caffeine, this isn’t a rant against coffee; I personally don’t drink the stuff, though, as I’m quite capable of doing stupid things without any chemical additives.

What really got me thinking was a visit to a local National Trust property some weeks previously.  It was a house I had seen on a number of occasions because it is so close to where I live.  This time, however, I visited with someone who isn’t quite as mobile as he was in his younger days.  So the visit was longer than normal, and we saw only half the house.  Did this spoil the day?  Au contraire!  It was twice as interesting as I had chance to look and think about what I was looking at.  I got more out of that visit than I had done in all the previous visits put together.  Yet given the choice, I would have bashed on at my normal speed.  Clearly, I had been missing so much.  And there is still more to go back and see.

There seems to be so little space for thought in our busy coffee-fuelled lives.  Yet slowing down and thinking always produces a better result.  The old saying: “there’s not enough time to do it well, but there’s always time to do it twice” sort of comes to mind.  Another coffee anyone?       

Know Thyself

To thine own self be true

Shakespeare’s words ring as true today as the day he wrote them. If we are not true to ourselves, we will forever follow the direction of the wind. But how well do we actually understand ourselves? Apparently I wasn’t the only one who didn’t come with a manual. We all go through life trying to figure out what we like, what we don’t like, what makes us happy, and what doesn’t. What are we good at, and what just doesn’t fit with our temperament.

It’s a slow and sometimes torturous journey with many twists and turns and a fair number of false starts. But as we grow as people, so our understanding of who we are also grows. Or at least it grows somewhere in the back of our minds, in our subconscious. It’s rare that we step back and take a good hard look at ourselves.

But when we do look at ourselves, we find patterns that repeat themselves. I make sense of the world through words – writing and reading. It’s how I am. You may make sense of the world through numbers. Others may be visual. There’s a big difference in these different types, and it moulds our careers and what we do when we want to relax.

So would our lives be different if we DID come with a manual? I think they might. Knowing whether we should put diesel or petrol into the car means our cars last much longer. If we just kept trying one and then the other, murmuring, “No, I think it went better with the petrol” we probably would never have built motorways. Yet still we insist on eating foods that don’t agree with us, we don’t take enough exercise, and we don’t really understand our strengths and weaknesses.

Of course the fact that a manual didn’t arrive in the package when we were born doesn’t stop us creating our own. It might take a few drafts to get to something that seems to work, but it might be a big improvement on having no manual at all.

Slow and steady progress to your goal

The lessons that business can learn from sport are well documented. I’ve written before about sports psychology in business, in particular about goal setting. At the time of my previous post I had only just started running. I was bright-eyed with my new running shoes and a great deal of enthusiasm.

My running shoes are now rather muddy and annoyingly prone to giving me blisters. And I am decidedly frustrated at my slow-coach style. I had to pull out of the track exercise last night because my legs just wouldn’t respond when my brain said accelerate. There was no more go in them. No matter how positively I thought about it. It’s a wry lesson.

In business, as sport, there is no substitute for slow and steady progress with an eye held firmly on the target. In business, as in sport, progress is often painfully slow.

Confucius is credited with saying:

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”

I repeat that advice to myself almost constantly as I run (completely ignorant of Confucius and his musings): just run, don’t stop, keep running. As you can tell I’m not what you might call a natural at this running lark, but after 6 months of plugging away at it I have just completed my half marathon. When I started I couldn’t run a mile without medical assistance.

So when I read Gretchen Rubin’s blog post quoting Vincent Van Gogh, it got me thinking:

“If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.”

It is beginning to dawn on me just how difficult it is to make real progress with my running. Difficulties in business can be equally frustrating. Yet keeping on going, continuing to make small steps may be the answer to both. Maybe understanding my limitations with running will help me understand my business better too.

I wouldn’t have believed 6 months ago that I could run a half marathon, and now I don’t believe I can run one in anything like a decent time. But if I continue to train, maybe I won’t be quite as hopeless in another 6 months. Maybe.

How to ensure good intentions are followed through

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Most of our good intentions – whether carried through or not – don’t lead anywhere close to hell. They lead to emails never written, untidy desks or turning up late to appointments: minor things that are nothing more than an irritation to us and our colleagues. And then, for some reason, we get thoroughly fed up our unhelpful behaviour and resolve to change. But like Toad in Wind of the Willows our good intentions are genuine but short lived. We simply fail to follow up on answering all our emails/being punctual/tidy or whatever.

Change is a great deal more difficult to affect than we realise. Habits get ingrained and are not easy to change. That’s why so many New Year resolutions are made and religiously kept through the first couple of weeks of January then abandoned without another thought.

So how can we ensure that good intentions get followed through? In my eternal battles to conquer tidiness and clear my inbox, here are six of the best in making lasting change:

1. Tackle one habit at a time. A list of resolutions isn’t really helpful to anything other than our ego. Start with the single habit that will make the most difference.
   
2. Write down your goal and progress. When I was living without caffeine I had a spreadsheet that I logged each and every day I didn’t drink caffeine. It sounds a little over the top, but unless you have a reminder mechanism, you are unlikely to follow though.
   
3. Tell other people what you are doing and enlist their help. Not just on day one, but a month or two into your change. Most of us don’t like to lose face in front of people we respect and so will work twice as hard to keep resolutions we’ve made public.
   
4. Recognise it takes time to change. My experiments indicate that it takes at least 100 days to get a new habit established, and even then you can’t relax. You have to keep reminding yourself why the habit is important, and put the effort in to keep it going.
   
5. Know why you are doing it. Any worthwhile change takes effort, so it’s important to understand how life will be better once you’ve established a new habit. Talk to other people to find out how they work – the more sure you are of yourself, the more likely you are to stick with it.
   
6. Make a change that’s right for you. If you like to work late into the night, and start work late in the morning, you are unlikely to be successful in changing into an early riser. Figure out what you are trying to achieve, and then work within your preferences and abilities.

Human beings seem to be designed to strive and change things for the better. We are never quite satisfied with what we have, or how we work. But setting the same resolutions time after time is a soul destroying exercise – better to put more effort into what’s really important. Leave the long list of “wouldn’t it be nice if” resolutions until you've got the important ones licked.

Raise energy levels by doing things differently

Habits are important – I would be the first person to admit that – but they can also limit us. As a good friend is fond of reminding me:

“If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.”

Breaking out of entrenched thinking, and re-evaluating entrenched habits can have an invigorating effect. And so I have found this week. I’ve not been doing what I’ve always done; I’ve been doing things a bit differently. It’s August and I’ve been letting my hair down. Green tea is back fuelling my days (oh, so good). A glass of wine has been allowed with dinner (don’t tell the neighbours). And a little more energy has been going into my work.

It may simply be enthusiasm for what I’m doing: SharePoint is an exciting new technology and I have some interesting projects bubbling away. Or it may be that occasionally things need shaking up. Rearranging the furniture in my mind, so to speak.

This has all been fuelled by a radical suggestion from Leo Babauta that great habits are formed when we enjoy what we are doing. It doesn’t sound radical – in fact it sounds stupidly obvious. But I think it has more depth than first appears.

So I continue to go with the flow and re-examine long held views about “what I do” and “who I am”. On a number of levels this has been enormous fun, and energising.

Meetings, bloody meetings

I noticed the heading of blog post a few days ago: "10 Ways to Get out of Meetings". I didn’t read it, but suspect it was popular. Too many meetings are less productive than they should be.

Instead of trying to avoid meetings, though, how about figuring out how to make meetings more useful, and more effective? After all, two or three or four heads are always better than one. It’s just that it takes a little effort to get a meeting to work well. When creativity and problem solving start to work in a co-operative way, meetings are worth their weight in gold.

So, with reference to John Cleese’s excellent film “Meetings Bloody Meetings” here are 10 ways to get more out of meetings:

1. Prepare in advance (Is the meeting necessary? Who should attend? What is already known? Are sensitive issues being discussed that merit face to face discussion, etc, etc)
2. Set clear meeting objectives
3. Have an agreed agenda
4. Make sure everyone is invited who needs to be there, and that they have the opportunity to give their input during the meeting
5. Give people time to prepare in advance (with sight of relevant information)
6. Ensure everyone is working from the same documentation (up to date agenda, budgets, documents, etc)
7. Keep to time (start, finish, take individual items off-line if they are taking too much time)
8. Record decisions and key points in the minutes
9. Follow-up after the meeting
10. Use a collaboration tool to keep everything together rather than relying on email (it provides structure and reduces the risk of missing things): Dates, times, attendees, objectives, the agenda, additional documents, minutes

It isn’t rocket science, but it is almost always more work than we first reckon. If that means having fewer, but better, meetings that would likely suit everyone. Including whoever is trying to get things done.

My very old copy of John Cleese’s book “How to Run a Meeting” always brings a smile to my face. Cleese’s eyes are raised skywards in sympathy in frustration at yet another unnecessary, unproductive and unbelievably long meeting.

Collaboration and knowledge-sharing is much more of a framework than it was in the 1970’s where the emphasis was on controlling meetings. Yet the dangers of rambling, unfocused discussion is as great today as it was then. So Cleese’s 1976 book stays on my bookshelf, alongside my 2010 collaboration software.

Why email isn’t the answer

Email has revolutionised our lives. No question. The days of typing memos and sending them round to the next office in a large brown envelope have long gone. (I realise the Facebook generation have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. You will just have to take it on trust that that’s what happened in the “old days”.)

So we’ve come a long way. In the blink of an eye my email can be in Edinburgh or Bangalore. I can even attach a document or a spreadsheet. Communication is easier than it has ever been.

But when it comes to organising information, email has a lot to answer for.

Yes, we can get our message across quickly. Yes, we can circulate documents to any number of people very quickly. But what we can’t do is order and prioritise information.

We can’t ensure everyone has remembered to read the agenda before the meeting. We don’t always send out everything for the meeting all together. And sometimes things have to be amended before the meeting.

So all you can be sure of is that your message has gone to the top of someone’s inbox - until the next message arrives. Then the next. And the next. Until your message is, well, somewhere in the pile of emails. Then it’s anyone’s guess what gets retrieved before that crucial meeting.

What’s needed is a way of organising information so everything is together:

• The meeting objectives
• The agenda
• The latest version of documents relating to the meeting
• Attendees
• Date, time and location of the meeting
• Minutes after the meeting

And indeed to make sure that other documents such as budgets or project plans are easily to hand.

Whilst email has revolutionised the world of work, there is still further to go.

Collaboration software complements email by adding organisation and order. It enables everything to be in one place for everyone to access. So there is one version of the objectives and agenda. And, crucially, everyone is working on the latest copy of the proposal/budget/project plan (delete as appropriate).

So there is no last minute scrabbling around wondering where the meeting is being held, or whether anyone circulated an agenda. Because it’s all there together to be reviewed when you’re ready. Cool.

8 Habits for Success

Like many people I have phases when I don’t eat well or exercise as much as I should. I’ve been making more of any effort lately as I have started running. It’s been sort of horrifying just how unfit and overweight I’ve become. So leaves are being turned, and habits examined.

Here is my wish-list for habits I think will encourage success:

1. Eat well. Or as Michael Pollan of the New York Times puts it: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Excellent advice and his essay Unhappy Meals is well worth a read. Eating well promotes health and increases energy.
2. Exercise. Make flexibility, strength and cardio exercises a part of your (and my) routine.
3. Take less drugs. Caffeine and alcohol are the business person's drugs of choice. Neither have any nutitional value and both can have a detrimental affect on performance, depending on the degree to which they are indulged. Drinking alcohol during the day went out with the '80's, and drinking on weekday evenings has (pretty much) gone out of my routine too. A difficult one as so much socialising is done "over a drink".
4. Personal reflection. This must be one of the most powerful, yet under-utilised habits. Reflect at the start and end of every day on what needs doing, what has gone well or not so well, and how things could be changed for the better.
5. Sleep enough. Not getting enough sleep is miserable, and does not create the right mood for excellent work. There are lots of articles floating around (the internet) about rising early and catching worms, but we all know how much sleep we need to perform well.
6. Get rid of clutter. Clearing clutter has a positive effect on mood and organisation. I have far too many books and need to send a load to the charity shop. Oh, so difficult! But it will be so much better when it’s done.
7. Surround yourself with bright people. Mix with people who will challenge your ideas, and encourage better performance.
8. Be a lifelong learner. Reading, attending courses, and writing all help to keep the mind stimulated and introduce new ideas.

So what’s on your list? What have I missed? Do tell …

Ten reasons time is so precious

1. You can make more money, but you can’t make more time.
2. You can store money to be used later, but time stops for no man (a bit like the tide).
3. You can borrow money to achieve an important goal, but you can’t beg, steal or borrow more time.
4. We all work with the same 24 hours, no ifs or buts and no way to inherit a tidy pile more.
5. Most resources can be bought, borrowed, sold or lent. Time cannot be traded, and so is the scarcest of all resources.
6. You can’t swap time for all the tea in China. Unless you have a plan. In which case time can be used to earn a lot of the tea in China, a bigger house or a faster car.
7. Writing a cheque won’t allow you to spend a sunny afternoon in the park with those you love, but using some of your precious time will.
8. No one ever laid on their death bed wishing they had spent more time in the office. But I suspect a few wished they had spent their time more wisely, doing the things that were important to them.
9. Time flies like the wind, and fruit flies like bananas.
10. Once a day is done, you cannot get it back again, whether it was well spent or frittered away unthinkingly. But tomorrow, said Scarlet, is another day.

Getting high priority tasks done

I know what my highest priority is, what I’m less clear about is why I’m not getting on and doing it. Well, I have some idea, none of them very worthy:

• It’s difficult
• I’m not guaranteed success
• The things I am doing instead are easier
• The things I am doing instead are more fun
• I’m tired

It takes mental discipline to always do the most important thing at any moment in time. Some days are easier than others. Today I am tried and have been distracted by several meetings and other work not directly related to my Highest Priority. My attention has slipped, focus has wandered, and I’m writing a blog post instead of Getting On.

Identifying and the one thing that should be getting your full attention is a good start, but it’s not good enough on its own. Others have given helpful advice about exactly this sort of problem:

• Chopping big tasks into smaller, achievable tasks
• Time boxing the difficult activity so you get something done
• Planning it

This is helpful and effective advice and now that I read that list I’m back onto the task in hand. My own personal favourite is to start my stop watch, which is exactly what I have done. So if you will excuse me, I have work to do … And don’t you have a high priority task you should be doing?

Making space for good ideas to grow

Over the weekend I stopped to talk to two gardeners thinning out a row of broad beans. As they threw strong and healthy broad bean plants into the bucket I said: “That’s too bad – throwing away those healthy young plants!” They agreed, but they worked at speed pulling out young plants and moving others so they were all the correct distance apart. I silently wondered if I would have been so disciplined if it had been my own garden. Behind them was a perfectly straight line of perfectly spaced healthy broad bean plants, all with enough room to grow into healthy specimens.

The processes and methods at this particular garden were influenced by one of Kew’s ex-Directors and it showed. I could see the discipline and attention to detail with my own eyes.

The business of business has more than once been compared to gardening or sowing and reaping. As spring is beginning to show its sunny face between the rain drops, it seems a fitting reminder that we need to do what needs to be done. Weeding, filing, sorting, choosing, and getting rid of things that will slow down growth, even though we find some things difficult or unpleasant.

Tom Peters talks of leaders only scheduling 50% of their time so they have space to think, reflect and make sure the important things are being done, rather than just the busy work. It’s the space between the broad beans that makes sure the good ideas have enough space to grow.

Keeping Energy Levels High

Looking back over a year of Getting to Excellent I have had a somewhat mixed reaction to my attempts to improve personal energy levels. I think there is a feeling in business that personal energy levels are not a business issue – providing you do your work then whether or not you have a hangover isn’t anyone else’s concern. And to some degree that may be true, but only to some degree.

Yet for an organisation to do well, so must each of its departments, and each individual within those department. And this is even more important in small businesses. So keeping energy levels high IS a performance management issue.

It has taken me three attempts to give up caffeine. In my usual blasé style, I thought it was going to be easy. I was wrong, oh, so wrong. It’s been difficult, but I'm almost there. In 12 days’ time (yes, I’m counting) I will have gone 100 days without caffeinated beverages. The desire for a cup of tea is now pretty much gone, and the benefits of better sleep and fewer headaches are definitely worth the price. So with an admittedly small test sample of precisely one, I’d say it takes at least 70 days to form a new habit: much, much longer than I had guessed and longer than some other articles suggest.

My return to the gym was less successful. 2009 has been a busy year and I can’t honestly say that exercise is a habit yet. But I’m convinced that this will pay big dividends on the energy front. Getting back in the gym, however, has been massively instructive in managing performance. I’ve written before about the importance of seeing how far I’ve run or cycled, or calories burnt, in keeping motivation levels high. I don’t believe work is any different. Measurement is a great tool in helping and encouraging better performance.

Of course there are other areas to consider in improving energy levels, such as reducing alcohol (I don’t drink much but then it doesn’t really agree with me) and eating better (and eating less).

At the beginning of this post I said I’d had mixed reactions to these initiatives. That would be something of an understatement. Whilst there has been a big interest in my attempts to give up caffeine on the internet, family and friends have been less convinced. One other person has gone cold turkey and given up caffeine completely (and is happier for it) but on the whole everyone else I know has been mystified. But I guess everyone reacts to things differently.

There are clearly different levels of managing performance: personal, departmental and company-wide. However, at a personal level, keeping energy levels high is something that can be measured and managed: and pays dividends for doing so. Keeping off caffeine, getting more exercise and improving diet are all, therefore, on my resolution list for next year. Just so as you know.

Measurement is fundamental to performance

I was faced with a task today where I had no immediate way of measuring my progress. Not being able to clearly see my way through a job is frustrating and does not encourage me to perform at my best. It got me thinking about how important it is to be able to see how we are doing vis-a-vis expectations.

It would be a little like driving a car without a speedometer or the ability to measure distance. “Are we there yet?” would be met with “Oh, I think so, a bit further maybe. We will recognise it when we see it!”

We are so used to everything being measured – from the miles that we drive to the hours that we work – that we barely give it a second thought. But the frustration in getting to Birmingham when we don’t know how fast we are going, how far away it is, or how far we have travelled would be significant. Imagine not knowing how much money is in your bank account, or what time your favourite television programme was on. The hit and miss fiasco that would be the weekly budget, or trying to guess when to tune in would be farcical.

Yet how many jobs at work do we tackle without measuring them? Quite a few. How many could be improved through some form of measurement? I would suggest, quite a few.

“The odds of hitting the target go up enormously when you aim at it” is attributed to Mal Pancost. I’m guess he was taking as read that we know how far away the target is.

Caffeine-free and happy

I know I promised not to mention the 100-day caffeine-free challenge (saga?) again, but it’s is just too long to go without an update. I’ve now been caffeine-free for 50 days. At least, I’m not drinking tea or coffee; I do have the occasional piece of chocolate.

50 days is the longest I’ve managed so far (30 and 24 days being the two previous attempts) but having failed twice there is not a lot that could force a cup of tea down my throat right now. That’s not to say I don’t have the occasional yearning for a cuppa, I do, but after the last failed attempt I had to make a decision – go back to drinking tea or stay caffeine free. I opted for caffeine-free because I believe it gives me more energy, fewer headaches and better sleep. Not inconsequential benefits in exchange for drinking herb teas or Roibush.

I came to the conclusion that I would need a little help if I were to make 100 days without a caffeinated beverage, so I bought the much praised book “Caffeine Blues” by Stephen Cherniske. If you are also trying to live without tea leaves or coffee beans I would highly recommend it. It is slightly evangelical in parts, but well researched and convincing. The list of problems associated with caffeine, including stress, depression, poor sleep, plus many others, is long and worrying. Yet in talking to friends about caffeine it seems many people would sooner put up with various ailments than do anything about it. Or maybe they think that a substance so widely accepted by society cannot be harmful. An interesting idea ...

So another 50 days to go, including the Christmas and New Year holidays which I’m guessing will be the most difficult. The strangest thing about this challenge has been that I’m always tempted when in a relaxed social setting, rather than at work. My workday habit of peppermint tea is now established, and I think my temperament is more even for taking caffeine out of the working day. It’s the out of work days that cause me the most trouble, the days when I’m having such a nice time that a cup of green tea would just go down a treat. Not dissimilar to having a glass of wine when relaxing with friends.

I’ve been struck by the interest in living a caffeine-free life. It seems many people are looking at ways to improve their health or perform better. I’d be really interested in others’ experiences, either through comments or by email.

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