Steve Prentice's Blog, page 6

How a Warehouse Teach Us Control Over Our Schedule

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One of the most important principles that I teach to my audiences is to use the first 10-15 minutes of your day to plan the rest of the day. Book it as a recurring appointment that happens before any other business. Even after you have physically arrived at your workplace, even if you work from home, the day should not begin until you have reviewed and updated your project plan.

There is an all-too-human tendency for people to expect you to be available the moment they see you, even if you haven’t sat down yet. Not only should you be able to find time to take off your coat and get a coffee, but those first ten to fifteen minutes must also be defended as “not-yet-open-for-business” time. Think, once again, of the chef at a restaurant, or the owner of a store. There is much to be done before opening the doors to paying customers.

Reserving time in this way might seem tricky when you first start doing it, because people are used to talking with you the moment they see you, and you are likely used to getting started on the first of your many tasks. It is essential to condition your people as well as yourself to understand your new ways and to learn what’s in it for them to play along. Just because you haven’t been doing it a certain way in the past doesn’t mean you can’t start a new practice now. It’s all in how you communicate it.

Identify your fixed appointments and be brutally realistic about their durations and other items like travel time. Although meetings and discussions should always be kept as short and effective as possible, some things will always take longer than we would like, and time must be reserved for this.
Next, convert your To Do’s into appointments. Some To Do’s occupy a list on the edge of your calendar; others come disguised as emails, which request your action and attention. Any email that needs more than a couple of minutes of your time to respond to, either because it needs a lot of writing, or because it is requesting action on your part – is no longer an email. It deserves to be promoted into an appointment and assigned to your calendar. Because these tasks lack a specific start or end time, it is too easy to acknowledge their existence yet still overlook their duration – a fatal mistake, because, even the smallest of them will eat more of your time than you’d expect. Move them off the To-do list and directly onto your calendar as appointments,
Next, schedule time for lunch. Nutrition and refreshment are essential but too often overlooks elements for productivity and success. Reserve a block of time for lunch. An hour is idea, but anything down to 15 minutes would do, providing it gives you enough time to eat – away from your work. Defend this small block of time. It is sacrosanct.
Finally, ensure that some space on your daily calendar is left open for those unplanned events, whether they present themselves as crises or opportunities. This is a direct application of the 80/20 rule. A calendar should never be booked one hundred percent full, since this creates more problems than it solves.

Do you think it is impossible to insist on leaving some time in the day unassigned? That’s because as human beings we see most things in black and white concepts. The vagueness of the unknown is uncomfortable and we feel it should be replaced with an absolute. So to help justify the existence of spaces in your calendar, think about warehouses. A warehouse is a space whose success is based on having a certain portion of its volume as nothing but empty space. In order for fork-lift trucks or people to place items on shelves and retrieve them again, there has to be space – aisles and between shelving units and even vertical space above each shelf. If this 20 percent of the internal warehouse space was reassigned to the storage of more items, the total capacity of the warehouse would increase, but its functionality and practicality would be substantially reduced, since nothing could move.

Taking the time to structure your day in this way sets it on a positive, realistic course. It liberates your mind from having to make logistical decisions on the spot, and also gives you a great working stance to handle crises and the even unexpected events. Yes, it takes 15 minutes of your day to do this, but it means that the rest of your working day remains under your control.

This is an excerpt from my book, Cool Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time. If you would like a copy, hop on over to my Books page. If you would like a workshop at your location, or if you would like to attend a live webcast, check out the details at my company, Bristall.com. If you would like me to come and speak to your group, contact details are available on my Speaker page. Either way, you will win back time and money. It’s just practical common sense.

What A Parking Lot Can Teach Us About Time Management

Think how many times you have set out somewhere, perhaps to a shopping mall or downtown, only to find your plans delayed while you circle the block or cruise the parking lot looking for a space. It takes the momentum out of your trip, at least for a short while, yet parking is something we usually don’t think about until we actually need to do it. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a series of permanent, personal parking spaces at all of our regular destinations to just slide into whenever we want? This would allow time to be spent on tasks rather than on travel.

In the context of your busy workday, that’s what you can do when you schedule your regular day-to-day events, and actually put them into your calendar, turning them into reserved, repeating activities. Most people schedule only the unique activities, such as a specific meeting or a dental appointment, and that’s where the problems start. Suppose a colleague messages you and says, “We need to meet next Tuesday. What does your day look like?” (Or worse, he simply looks at your calendar online, and books the meeting on your behalf.) The odds are that currently, your schedule for next Tuesday, shows only show the unique items, leaving the rest of the day misleadingly empty.

However, if you have scheduled your predictable and expectable activities as daily reserved events, Tuesday’s calendar will clearly show a block of time already reserved for the realistic work of the day.

This reserved time will not take up 100 percent of the day. There will still be time available to meet with your colleague. However the power of the reserved activity helps ensure that even those days you haven’t thought much about yet are already well prepared for the work that’s to come.

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The image above shows just how much or how little time is really available to you after accounting for the predictable and expectable events. It doesn’t mean that all your phone calls will happen between 8:00 and 9:00 every day – the blocks here are to show the amount of time required in total. Nor does this graphic mean you’re only free to meet with your colleague between 3:30 and 5:00. The component activities can be moved around to suit your needs. But by making these elements tangible, you develop a better understanding of what your day already entails, and secondly, such clear imagery allows you to question whether your time is being used most efficiently – or whether some refinement is required.

If you use online scheduling applications to schedule your day, then set each predictable activity as a recurring activity. But even if you use a paper day planner, you can mark off these recurring spaces activities with a pencil.

Remember, the phrase “time management” has two words in it, and the second one is management. This blocking system goes a long way towards effective management.

Reserved: What a Restaurant Table Can Teach Us About Time Management

Picture this: You walk into a restaurant. The sign says, “Please seat yourselves.” So you enter and look around. Two tables are empty. One has a “Reserved” sign on it. Which one do you choose?

The choice is obvious: the one that does not have a “Reserved” sign on it. That tiny little sign had the power to divert you away from the table it was guarding. That’s power!

Now, picture your working week: it’s pretty much guaranteed that today, tomorrow, and into the foreseeable future, you will have emails, phone calls and meetings to attend to. These can be considered predictable tasks, because we know they will occur each day. These tasks are like the other restaurant customers. They walk in and sit themselves down on your calendar, wherever they find a place.

But there’s another category of tasks, the unplanned tasks, that come at you from left field, unannounced, to derail your nice, neat schedule. These events are the reason most time management approaches fail. It’s reasonably easy to plan for what you know is coming, but what about what you can’t foresee?

These unplanned events can take many forms, depending on your line of work, but examples could include:

Your manager or colleague drops an additional task onto your desk
A much-needed team member calls in sick
An unhappy customer shows up, loudly demanding satisfaction
A defective product is returned
A weather related event closes business for the day
The CEO pays a visit.

I propose that these events can and should be planned regardless, using hindsight as your lens upon the future.   They are activities that have happened before, and as unwelcome as they may be, they will likely happen again. Though you can’t predict when, the event will happen, your experience and wisdom will give good insight into playing the odds.

Here’s an example: weather. No matter where you live, there is always some sort of weather event that threatens to disrupt things once in a while. It could be a blizzard or an ice storm, a tornado, a flood or a weather-related power outage. Now no one can truly predict when one of these is going to happen, but your past experience of living and working in your area of the country is already sufficient enough to say, ” the odds of having a weather event in the next four months, one that calls for a day away from normal work, are pretty good. You might be able to anticipate at least three big snowfalls happening over the period of January to March for example. If, in your experience, these three events have each caused a day’s delay in the past, then it means that your calendar should reflect this, by scheduling them now.

So how do you schedule a storm? You don’t. But what you do instead is to reserve the time in advance. The period January to March includes 64 weekdays. But if three of these days have a good chance of being eclipsed by weather, you now only have 61 days to get your work done.

By entering your “anticipated storm hours” into your calendar, you make them real. They speak for themselves. This makes it easier to more accurately calculate how many hours you actually, realistically have, for all those other expectable activities. If the storm never comes, there’s always something else you can do with those hours. But if it does, you will be in a better position to manage your workload.

Don’t forget, weather is not the only unplanned event in your basket. Think of all the surprise events that have happened to you in weeks and months past. It usually becomes pretty evident that every day there will be something that comes along that forces you to put everything else aside to deal with it. If that’s the case, then the math is easy: reserve an hour every day for the crisis to come. Make it a recurring activity. Every day, 12 noon: crisis of the day.

It doesn’t mean the unplanned event will happen at 12:00, but it does mean that the hour needed has been reserved for it. This tangible reservation fends off other activities and meeting requests, just like that “Reserved” sign does at a restaurant table

A crisis is not so much an unexpected event as an irregular and unwelcome one. By identifying them, planning for them and reserving time for them, you are not adding more to your plate. Quite the opposite: you are taking control, by replacing random events with predictable ones, making reservations and guiding other people around them rather than allowing everything to become a time-wasting blur.

Mastering Email and Remembering Names: A Matter of Conscious Choice

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Many studies have been done over the years to observe how our brains react when interrupted by stimuli such as incoming emails, texts and phone calls. In short, the nutrients that are distributed around the brain to fuel the thought process are all summoned instantly to the amygdala for preparation for fight-or-flight. We live in a body design that is over 50,000 years old. Although on a surface level we might not find an actual email genuinely threatening, on a physiological level the stimulus represents an unknown, and as such all resources are forced to “drop what they are doing” and go immediately to the fight-or-flight center. It’s much like an emergency evacuation of a building.

Once the email is read and dealt with, the crisis is considered to be over and the nutrients are allowed to return to work. But with the crisis abated, they return to their “work zones” in due time, taking between five and ten minutes to get there.

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As illustrated in the graph above, even for an email that takes three minutes to answer –it takes many minutes to return to the level of concentration we had prior to the interruption. This means that most people – you, me and our co-workers – are all working at a diminished level of focus and capacity during this time. And this happens over and over again throughout the entire day. In fact, the act of answering emails, texts and interruptions as they happen pretty much guarantees a full day of sub-par performance. After all, the fuel your brain needs to do its work is spending most of its time away from where it needs to be.

The solution is very straightforward. Tasks should only be addressed in a conscious manner, not a reactive one. When you choose consciously to answer emails, especially a group of them at once, let’s say at 10:30 a.m. rather than the instant they arrive, then you move into the email-responding situation without instinctive urgency. The nutrients in your brain are not taken by surprise and they are not sent scurrying along to the amygdala. Instead, you take on the task by coolly, choice.

It’s similar to the problem that happens when people forget names moments after having been introduced to someone. This happens because at the very moment of shaking hands, we do not need a conscious mechanism for collecting and storing the data, so the name we have just heard vanishes off into space. However, a seasoned “people greeter”, someone whose job it is to meet a lot of people and talk to them – a campaigning politician, for example, or a really good sales rep or executive can easily work a room, remembering up to thirty names simply through conscious memorization and a little word association. They choose to memorize. They are not being taken by surprise. It’s all a matter of conscious choice.

An example. I am introduced to Wendy. As I shake hands with her, I notice she has long hair, swept back into a ponytail. I think of hair being swept back on a windy day. The words “windy” and “wendy” have a similar sound. An association. I am also introduced to Martin, whose eyebrows resemble those of director Martin Scorsese. That’s an easy association. These will allow you to use the most valuable word in any conversation: a person’s own name.

Now, back to the email problem.

“Yes, but I need to answer my emails the moment they come in.”

This is a standard pushback to the idea of returning emails at scheduled times. “The world doesn’t work like that,” people say, “emails are part of my job.  If people have to wait around until I decide to respond to my emails, nothing will get done.”  Another response is, “I feel better clearing my inbox. It de-stresses me to get rid of the emails as they come in.”

I can agree with all of these statements. If your job is so tied to quick emails replies that to delay responding would cause harm, then respond! If replying to messages makes you feel better, then by all means, reply, because feeling good, feeling in control, is a key element of the Cool-Time philosophy. In short, if you prefer to answer your emails the moment they come in, then do so. But remember the focus-loss that is described immediately above still happens.

If you choose to answer email on an ad-hoc basis, I recommend you calculate the expected duration of a task, and add the expected time needed to deal with the volume of email to that task, and realistically plan that as an event.

For example, if you have a report that should take an hour to create, and you can expect to have to spend an additional thirty minutes replying to messages, you would be wise to block off ninety minutes for this task to get it done, as this will factor in the time required to step away and deal with emails.

The danger lies in believing you can get a one-hour task done in one hour if you still allow yourself time to deal with interruptions.

This is an excerpt from my book, Cool Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time. If you would like a copy, hop on over to my Books page. If you would like me to come and speak to your group, contact details are available on my Speaker page. Either way, you will win back time and money. It’s just practical common sense.

Budget Your Time Like a Restaurant Orders Its Fish

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When it comes to managing time, it is essential to set a budget. It starts by taking inventory, and for that, let’s have a quick look inside your favorite restaurant.

How does a restaurant chef know how much food to buy per week? How much meat and fish? How many pounds of vegetables? With experience and review, s/he can observe the eating habits and traffic patterns of customers, and can expect, with 90 percent accuracy, that certain times will be busier than others – Friday lunchtimes or Sunday dinners, for example. The chef can buy supplies accordingly and then actually influence the customers’ meal choices by creating a pleasing menu around that inventory. The restaurant business does not allow for lost revenue from wasted food, so an effective future is effectively created, based on reading the stories of the past.

If you have been at your current job for more than five days, you already have a good sense of the types of tasks that you can expect to face in any given day. These might include:

Scheduled meetings
Preparing your store, department or office to open for business
Phone-calls
Email and texting
Office interaction and chat
Focused self-directed work
Administration
Travel
Dealing face-to-face with customers/managers/employees
Giving presentations

It’s up to you to identify and quantify these predictable tasks that are specific to your job or business.

But what do you really know about your predictable tasks? If someone were to ask you how many meetings you actually attend in a typical week, or how many phone-calls or emails you deal with, you would probably shrug your shoulders and say, “It depends on the day.”

But if you were pressed harder for an answer, what would it be? Two meetings a day? Four? Six? How many phone-calls? Two, twenty or 200?” How many emails? How many texts? Maybe then you could come up with a reasonable number.

Next, how long does each of these tasks take? How long is the average meeting? How long is the average phone-call? How long do you spend reading and responding to each email? Perhaps Mondays are different from Fridays, in terms of what you have to do, and certainly one phone-call or email will differ from the next. But the point is, these are the things that fill up our days in a candid, uncontrolled manner; and “candid” is one thing that should be avoided, the “candid zone” is where awareness of time quickly disappears.

When you take the time to proactively quantify how much time your predictable tasks will take you on a given Monday, a given Tuesday, based on your past experience, you can predict with reasonable certainty how many hours per day must be set aside for them in the future. You know there will be phone calls, email and meetings next Monday, so why not reserve and defend the time for them now?

For example: if you generally spend two hours a day returning emails, then set up a recurring activity in your calendar – a two-hour block, specifically reserved for emails. It doesn’t mean you will deal with them all in a single contiguous block, but it dos mean the time for them has been reserved – budgeted for – and that is a vital component of time management. Budget for the predictable tasks in a realistic and tangible way.

You are then able to deal with people and tasks in a more proactive way, exactly like a restaurant handles its customers. By knowing what you have in stock, you can influence the expectations of your colleagues just like a restaurant influences the choices of its patrons. It’s all about knowing what you have in your hands – how much time you have available to accept new requests, and when you need to defer others to later times or dates.

Time management is about being proactive. Inventory knowledge gives you something to stand on while you do this.

This is an excerpt from my book, Cool Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time. If you would like a copy, hop on over to my Books page. If you would like me to come and speak to your group, contact details are available on my Speaker page. Either way, you will win back time and money. It’s just practical common sense.

 

The Time Management-Project Management Connection

A wedding is “project management with cake at the end. The best type, in my opinion. Even if you’ve never formally studied project management, your time spent attending weddings – yours or someone else’s – counts as practical experience.

These are public events that involve fixed budgets, fixed timelines, inexperience, lots of pressure, lots of advice and an overwhelming desire to elope. That’s why couples often hire professional wedding planners, and that’s also why wedding planners often provide guidebooks, with titles such as What To Do When Planning Your Wedding. It’s Project Management for the uninitiated.

Project management has been around as a formalized school of thought and study since the 1950s. It emphasizes the importance of planning, communication, performance, and review. It starts with a higher-level perspective of a project, and then breaks it down to the smallest reasonable components. Project management forces you to visualize a project from start to end. It allows you to plan for contingencies and revisions, and replaces traditional “seat-of-the-pants” approach with an organized, accountable agenda.

The Project Management Institute (http://www.pmi.org) is an authority on project management, and publishes a work known as the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). The intent of the PMBOK is to assist project managers everywhere, regardless of their experience, by providing a standard and a logical plan for the successful completion of projects.

The PMBOK identifies five phases in the life of a typical project:

Initiation: The project is conceived and assessed as viable or not; ideas are formulated; and the expected results and the timeline are first considered.
Planning: A significant amount of time should be spent here. In this phase, every detail of the project is accounted for, including possible failures, contingencies, estimated times for completion of each part, and budget and resource estimates.
Execution: The project gets underway, people start to work on their assigned tasks, and momentum begins.
Control: The work of the project is performed, while the project manager oversees and updates the plan and communicates progress and changes to all involved.
Closure: Once the project is completed the teams are broken up, final accounting is done, and things are cleaned up and put away.

The project is summarized and guided by a project plan, a document that lays out tasks and their respective timelines throughout the project’s life. Far from being a static document, the project plan remains flexible, a living, breathing thing that must adapt to change while still ensuring the project moves ahead.

Although no project manager has a crystal ball to predict how things will pan out in the future, s/he can look back into the past, through research, analysis and the use of experts and mentors to deduce, within reason, what to expect.

In short, project management makes everything as clear as possible and envisions all aspects of the project before they happen. It does not necessarily make a project effortless, but its principles and rules ensure that work and resources are properly guided.

This is what time management is really all about. It comes down to two words, the same words that define successful project management: Planning and Communication.

This is an excerpt from my book, Cool Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time. If you would like a copy, hop on over to my Books page. If you would like me to come and speak to your group, contact details are available on my Speaker page. Either way, you will win back time and money. It’s just practical common sense.

If you are interested, we have a newsletter –  a real brief monthly one – that discusses issues around productivity and explains how my keynotes can help. Sign up through Constant Contact here.

Prioritization

Thanks for checking out the landing page for my YouTube video on prioritization.

Click here to download an excerpt from my book, which delivers some specific how-to’s on prioritizing.

If you like what you see here, do any or all of the following:

Join my mailing list. We only send it out when we have a new post to announce. (Sign-up form is below). When you sign up for our mailing list we will send you a copy of our Cool-Time Action Workbook – a highly practical collection of time-saving tools and techniques.
Buy a copy of the book, Cool-Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time, available here .
Keep me in mind when you have an upcoming corporate event. My keynote is filled with really useful time management and productivity tips, and you know what? It’s funny, too! Go to my homepage for more info.

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The Bucket of Time

A bucket is a container that can hold a fixed amount of water. Once the bucket is filled to the brim, you can try to pour more water in, but an equal amount will have to come back out. It just cannot hold any more. Let this bucket represent a fixed volume of time. We each have access to twenty-four hours in each day, a container of sorts; a vessel for the efforts of our lives. We get a new one each day, but we can’t borrow any volume from previous days’ buckets, nor can we ask for repeats or advances. These twenty-four-hour days come and go, regularly and unfailingly. The day is fixed in length. It is the primary working tool of our existence.

Many people start off their days with the best intentions, planning what they will do and in which order, yet things quickly start to unravel as urgencies of all sorts start to occur. The day’s schedule, which was probably already full of planned tasks, now starts to overflow. People get stressed, and they work through lunch and stay late to try to get back on top of things. They expand and distort their working day to counter the overflow. They wish for more hours in a day, or for time to freeze, just until they’re caught up. They’re on the quest for more time: that metaphorical bigger bucket. The problem is that even with a bigger bucket, they’ll still end up working twice as hard to move half as much water.

The trick to time management, just like the trick to dealing with a flooded basement, is in learning how to use your bucket rather than trying to find a bigger one. Effective time management means using the right strategy, not making more work hours available or working twice as fast or twice as hard. Effective time managers do not feel an obsessive need to fill every moment with productive work – quite the opposite, they envision and enact a rational plan which includes space for the expected, the unexpected, and the opportunities, so that in the end, every moment can be used properly and profitably.

They balance priorities, and they manage the needs of their colleagues. They recognize and accept that the in-box will never be empty. They go home at the end of the day knowing that they have done good work, and that they will do more tomorrow.

They understand that control makes the difference. It paves the way for influence, productivity and satisfaction.

This is an excerpt from my book, Cool Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time. If you would like a copy, hop on over to my Books page. If you would like me to come and speak to your group, contact details are available on my Speaker page. Either way, you will win back time and money. It’s just practical common sense.

If you are interested, we have a newsletter –  a real brief monthly one – that discusses issues around productivity and explains how my keynotes can help. Sign up through Constant Contact here.

What does Time Management Have in Common with Football?

Humans are social creatures by nature, so we tend to invite and enjoy conversation, distraction, and mental stimulation: the joke-of-the-day-email from a friend, the water-cooler chat, social media. These things provide a few moments of leisure, but they do come with a price, for after they have passed, the work still remains to be done, and we are then forced to stay late, take work home, or make other sacrifices to catch up.

Most of us are trained in a skill and then join the workforce. We continue to learn though training and professional development courses, as well as practical experience, hopefully building a stable career and putting food on the table. However, another, more sinister type of learning also happens. While we integrate ourselves into the corporate culture of the company, we start to adopt the habits and norms of our peers, including many latent, long-established time inefficiencies are passed on through osmosis.

Consequently, it takes us by surprise when we learn for the first time that most people “work” for about one-third of the hours that they spend “at work,” meaning they actually will get only 3 hours of measurable work done in an eight- or nine-hour day.  Though this at first seems to be an affront to our ambitions, it doesn’t actually refer to a lack of dedication or drive. The average business day is littered with productivity roadblocks such as meetings, email, and drop-in visitors, conflicts and staff issues, technology problems and crises, all of which, though they may be considered as part of the work for which we are being paid, occur in irregular and unpredictable ways, breaking up the momentum of work and stretching tasks further and further along our calendar. The difference between how much we think we’ve done and how much work we have actually achieved is surprising.

But three hours? That’s a small fraction of a day to be counted as productive work in the purest sense of the word. It’s like taking a stopwatch to a football game. Over the course of a four-hour game, between the downs, the line changes and the time-outs, the ball is actually only in play for about twenty minutes – a very small segment of the game’s entire span.

During the course of a workday, these things happen:

25 percent of people’s time is spent doing actual work;
15 percent of the day is spent responding to email and voicemail;
15 percent of the day is spent on the phone;
20 percent of the day is spent in meetings and conversations;
25 percent of the day is spent preparing for those meetings or dealing with the follow-up.

The fact that such a relatively small amount of the workday is spent doing actual planned work is often overlooked until the time comes that someone is called upon to make an estimate on the delivery date of a project. In an attempt to please a potential new client, it is easy for you or your boss or your sales rep to say, “We can have that to you by Thursday.” In fact, if you had nothing else to do, and could work on this client’s needs exclusively for eight uninterrupted hours a day, you probably could have it ready for Thursday. But that’s being way too optimistic, and that’s where the problems happen. We have to be realistic, and even a little bit pessimistic. We don’t know what other crises might happen between now and Thursday, but we can count on a few simple truths:

Things always take longer than you think, and a lot longer than you hope.
If someone asks you to do something and includes the word “just”, as in “can you just…” you’re already in trouble.
There will never be a perfect time to get it done.

Time management is a two-word term, and the second word is “management.” We need to exert proactivity and  influence over people and activities if any progress is to happen. The good news is, this is both possible and quite easy.

This is an excerpt from my book, Cool Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time. If you would like a copy, hop on over to my Books page. If you would like me to come and speak to your group, contact details are available on my Speaker page. Either way, you will win back time and money. It’s just practical common sense.

If you are interested, we have a newsletter –  a real brief monthly one – that discusses issues around productivity and explains how my keynotes can help. Sign up through Constant Contact here.

Do You Need More Sleep?

How much sleep do you actually need? The answer is, it varies. Some studies suggest that the average North American adult needs between 8 and 10 hours of sleep per night. But it really depends on the individual. Some need a lot, some just need less.

An easier test is this: if you need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning, that means you are not waking up naturally, which means your sleep cycle isn’t in tune with your day. If you wake up Monday morning having had one hour of sleep less than you need, then you are in sleep deficit. If the same thing happens Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, by the time you get to Friday, you’re short five hours of sleep. Then, by trying to compensate by sleeping in on Saturday morning, you throw your rhythm even further off. (The best solution is to get up at the same time every day, and go to bed at the same time every night.)

Sleep deficit is another example of the gulf between how we perceive our actions and abilities within time, and what is actually going on. We are fighting battles with ourselves, physically, chemically, emotionally and intellectually, every second of the day.

By the way, there is a better solution to sleep deficit than merely going to bed earlier, and that’s to introduce higher quality sleep more quickly, through the proper use of downtime, including less usage of laptops, tablets and phones in late evening hours, since these give off too much stimulating light. There are some low light settings on more recent operating systems, but in general, staring at a light source cannot help but reverse the sleep-inducing effects of melatonin.

Bottom line, sleep is a matter of quality over quantity. The important thing to remember is  that the stage is set long before your head hits the pillow. The evening hours are crucial for establishing the right chemical balance for great sleep to work its magic.

This is an excerpt from my book, Cool Time: A Hands-On Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time. If you would like a copy, hop on over to my Books page. If you would like me to come and speak to your group, contact details are available on my Speaker page. Either way, you will win back time and money. It’s just practical common sense.

If you are interested, we have a newsletter –  a real brief monthly one – that discusses issues around productivity and explains how my keynotes can help. Sign up through Constant Contact here.