Slowing Down the Racing Clock

Time Management

Slowing Down the Racing Clock
by Jeff Davidson



Time often seems to race by, and we often feel we can't catch up. This article gives suggestions for making time slow down by shaking up your routine.

Are you living in real time or are you trying to catch up on time? Sometimes, in the quest to catch up with today, shaking up some of your time-honored routines can help. For example:

1. Get up one hour earlier. Twenty-five years ago, the concept of late night (11:00 p.m.) news was unknown. People went to bed at 9:30 or 10:00. Once people began staying up for the late news, the networks began running late night talk shows. As a result, the entire population is staying up later than the previous generation.

Why not go to bed earlier, and wake up an hour earlier? In that extra hour, you can watch the sun rise, meditate, do some exercises, or go to work before traffic gets bad. The activities you undertake in that early hour can affect your perspective on the whole day. To get a fresh perspective, shake up your routine and get up earlier!

2. Work on the porch of your house instead of in the office. When you change your venue and the scenery, you open up new vistas. Alternatively, work under a tree or at a pool during nice weather. Being outdoors opens up a way of viewing things that you cannot get in the office. When working in a natural, tranquil setting, you'll gain peace of mind in your otherwise hectic work routine. Do this for some of your tasks (especially tasks that require conceptualization or creative thinking), and you'll be more productive than ever before.

Begin to identify the places in your life that are welcome retreats to go and work whether they be a library, or even simply sitting in your car in a shopping center parking lot. When you change where you're working, you can benefit quickly.

3. If possible, don't get your mail until Friday. Postpone tearing through all your mail. Most things are not so urgent that you need to attend to them each day. We often tend to place an unnecessary immediacy upon our lives.

4. If possible, hold all calls for two days. Think of it as if you were on vacation and unable to be reached for a couple of days. You don't have to respond immediately to every call. When you hold your calls for a few hours--or a day--you open up time to get things done in a way that is impossible when you are preoccupied with answering calls. Work surveys show that the primary disrupter and time-waster of the workday is the telephone. Of course, you don't want to be totally inaccessible all of the time, but you can coach those who may call you.

Leave a message on your answering system or with your receptionist, for example, saying that you'll be inaccessible for two days, or until 3:00, or whenever. In this way, you are directing them politely and professionally in a manner that benefits both you and your callers; you will gain a brief respite and they will know when to reach you.

5. Drop the unproductive 80 percent of your activities. The Pareto Principle (the "80/20" rule) states that 80 percent of your activities contribute to only 20 percent of your results. The remaining 20 percent of your activities contribute to the other 80 percent of your results. Take a hardware store for example: about 20 percent of its stock accounts for 80 percent of the revenues; the remaining 80 percent of the stock accounts for only 20 percent of the revenues.

The key to successful retailing is identifying the 20 percent producing the bulk of the revenues. A smart store manager knows to place that 20 percent where it is most accessible, and to put the rest where, though it can be reached, it is out of the immediate way. Identify which activities in your work (and personal life) support you, and are bringing you the best results. Have the strength to abandon those activities that are not benefitting you--get rid of that unproductive 80 percent.

6. Ask For Input - Have you ever gone to lunch with a colleague and begun discussing ways to approach your work more effectively? After a few minutes, you both are deep into the conversation, coming up with all sorts of great ideas. However, when the waiter comes to take your order or bring your check, what happens? The conversation dies down.

When you both go back to work, those ideas are often forgotten or put on a back burner. If you consciously schedule a meeting for the sole purpose of letting the creative sparks fly, you'll grab control of your time, and have some of the most productive sessions you've ever had.

I meet with a mentor once a month in his dining room. At a cleared table, we sit across from each other, each with a tape recorder, discussing problems and issues that face us and ways we can overcome them. We both keep a copy of the tape, take it home, and make notes on it. We capture those ideas instead of letting them die.

When you come in contact with other people, you're exposed to whole new worlds--their worlds. When you interact with another person, you get the benefit of his/her information, in addition to your own.

Always be on the lookout for other ways to shake up your routine for the insights and breakthroughs that may result--every day and every moment holds great potential.

"Slowing Down" Time

You may be thinking, "Yeah, if each minute holds so much potential, how come they still race by so fast?" Most of what you experience each day, in terms of the passage of time, is based on your perception. You can slow down time if you choose. How? Whenever you feel you're racing the clock or trying to tackle too much at once, try this exercise:

Close your eyes for a minute and imagine a pleasant scene. You might be surrounded in trees or with a loved one. It could be something from childhood. Let the emotions of that place and time predominate. Get into it! Give yourself more than a New York minute for the visualization to take hold. Then, open your eyes and return to what you're doing. Whatever you're working on is never quite so bad and whatever pace you were working at is never quite so feverish.

One effective method for catching up with today is periodically deleting three items from your "to do list" without doing them at all. Before you shriek, consider that much of what makes your list is arbitrary. In most cases, eliminating three items won't impact your career or life, except for freeing up a little time for yourself in the present.

Reflect

Imagine you're flying on an airplane. You have a window seat, and it's a clear day. As you gaze down to the ground below, what do you see? Life passing by. Cars the size of ants. Miniature baseball diamonds. Rivers the size of streams. There's something about being at great heights that enables you reflect on your life. The same phenomenon can take place from the top of a mountain or skyscraper.

As often as possible when things seem to be racing by too fast, get to higher ground for a clear perspective. If you're among the lucky, perhaps you regularly allocate time for reflection or meditation. If you don't, no matter. There's other ways to make it all "slow down." After the workday, listen to relaxing music with headphones, and close your eyes. A half hour of your favorite music with no disturbances (and your eyes closed) can seem almost endless. When you re-emerge, the rest of the day takes on a different tenor.

Change Your Medium

I have long used water to reduce stress. For eleven years, I lived in a high-rise condominium in Falls Church, Virginia, complete with its own 25 meter pool. No matter how hard I worked during the day, even if I did a 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. stint, at 6:05 p.m. I was in the pool. After 30 minutes of laps, I had swum out many of the stresses and strains of the day.

Now that I live in North Carolina, more rural by comparison, I have Eastwood Lake. Here I can swim for a half-mile in one direction and rarely encounter anyone else. Find the swimming hole nearest you!

Rely On The Animal Kingdom

If you have a dog or cat and do not consider it a drain on your time, here's a little something about Rover or Mittens that you may not have known. In recent years, as reported by U.S. News & World Report, scientists have found proof for what was only once suspected: that contact with animals has specific and measurable effects on both your body and mind. The mere presence of animals can increase a sick person's chances of survival, and has been shown to lower heart rate, calm disturbed children and induce incommunicative people to initiate conversation!

The exact mechanisms that animals exert to affect your health and well-being are still largely mysterious. Scientists suspect that animal companionship is beneficial because, unlike human interaction (!), it is uncomplicated. Animals are nonjudgmental, accepting and attentive; they don't talk back, criticize, or give orders. Animals have a unique capacity to draw people out.

Even if you only have goldfish, sometimes simply staring at them in their silent world can help deaden your traveling pace.

Sidebar: IDEAS FOR CATCHING UP WITH TODAY -- "TENS C'S"

1. Constantly read your list of priorities and goals.

2. Challenge and defeat your own ritual behavior.

3. Consider the outcome of not handling something.

4. Convincingly, but politely, say no.

5. Call rather than visit.

6. Clear your desk of all but the task at hand.

7. Clear your files of everything that can be recycled.

8. Cancel something you scheduled in your appointment book.

9. Choose from what you already have.

Choose to get a good night's sleep every night.

Sidebar: IDEAS FOR CATCHING UP WITH THIS WEEK -- 10 TIPS

1. Telecommute at least once a week.

2. Consume only information which affects or interests you, not what you think you must know.

3. One day each week, don't read anything.

4. Get dressed each morning quietly, without radio or TV.

5. Do something fun once a week on the way home from work.

6. Select news shows that astutely cover issues for more than 45 seconds.

7. Regard each piece of paper entering your "personal kingdom" as a likely traitor.

8. Begin thinking about your next vacation.

9. Make a lunch date with a friend, not a co-worker or client.

Pause for ten separate minutes throughout the day, each day.

Allow yourself to take breaks. When you consider all of the ways you add unnecessary pressures to your day, you begin to see many ways to catch up with today, or at least with this week.


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Jeff Davidson, MBA, CMC, is a popular conference speaker and author of 28 books, including Breathing Space (Feb 2000). For books, videos, cassettes, or presentations, visit http://www.BreathingSpace.com, FAX (919) 932-9982, or call (919) 932-1996.