Steve Prentice's Blog, page 7

Time Management Tools: Coffee and Chocolate and Snacks! Oh My!

When people talk about time management tools, we often think about schedules and planners. But what about food? Food is a significant time management tool since it is the fuel for your bosy and mind, and consequently has huge impact on the ability to focus, prioritize and influence others.

Take Chocolate, for Example

Chocolate is a staple of the late-afternoon doldrums. It is high in fat and sugar, which allows the body to quickly convert it into glucose and dissolve it into the bloodstream. It also contains the stimulants caffeine and theobromine, as well as phenylethylamine, which react with dopamine to release endorphins from the pleasure center of the brain: the same endorphins that are released during times of emotional pleasure. This is why so many cultures equate chocolate with sex (think Valentine’s Day). Some even say that chocolate is better.

Recent studies have shown dark chocolate to be good for you -check out WebMD here or just Google it yourself.

Strike While the Coffee is Hot

The best time to communicate important information to people is between 9:00 and 10:30. That’s when the combined influences of light, caffeine and the activity of traveling to work yield the greatest alertness for all involved. Coffee and other caffeinated drinks deliver adrenaline into the bloodstream, which is why people see it it as a pick-me-up. It tends to wear off quickly, though, which is also why coffee breaks are often scheduled for mid-morning.

Sadly, though our love of coffee is more akin to an addiction. Caffeine is a psychoactive drug, an alkaloid, similar to cocaine, but not as severe. A great comparison article can be found here. It is quite painful for most people to wean themselves off coffee entirely, and for those of us who choose not to, its effects largely cap out at a certain time. Caffeine is not infinite in its energy producing powers.

However, it is a good idea to schedule your meetings for 9:00 sharp, and get your most important concepts out on the table within the first 30 minutes.  Schedule your most important work of the day for between 9:00 and 10:30 to capitalize on its short-term effects.

Snacks

Snack regularly and often – on good foods, not candy or chips. Avoid getting hungry. Eating when you are hungry leads to overeating. Because the human body was designed to eat tougher, coarser foods, it takes twenty minutes for the stomach to tell the brain that it has received enough. In an age when unprocessed foods had to be eaten slowly, this time delay was perfect. But in today’s world of high-calorie, high-fat, easy-to-chew processed food, it becomes extremely easy to ingest too much before the stomach gets the chance to say “stop!” Additionally, fast-food restaurant chains have made it their business to exploit the hunger urge through packaging, flavoring and pricing. A better route is to graze – that’s the term the nutritionists use – on healthy snacks throughout the day so that you don’t actually feel hunger, which will help you make smaller, wiser, healthier food choices at lunchtime.

This will also help reduce the impact of the mind-afternoon doldrums, by not overtaxing the digestive system.

Our desire for sugar and fats is a self-preservation instinct, sustained for thousands of years by the fact that we had to work a lot harder to find food of any sort while not becoming food for something else, and so caloric intake and expenditure pretty much balanced out. Fat became the storehouse for future famine situations. Our ancient bodies still react in the same way, only now food (for most of us) is abundant, and the highly refined sugars and flours that comprise fast meals require so little energy to process that it is easy for the body to convert it to fat. There’s nothing else it needs it for.

Remember, though, that donuts and other sweet snacks provide only a quick sugar high full of “empty calories,” which do nothing to support your metabolism over the long-term. In fact, that sugar-high can within minutes to a sugar hangover, bringing on feelings of sluggishness and fatigue.

Eating healthy does not have to mean being boring. More and more, the food courts and restaurants that surround us provide healthy offerings that are reasonably priced and very satisfying. They sell good, light meals and snacks, just when your body needs them, providing energy for the afternoon and helping to counteract that mid-afternoon trough.

Successful defense and use of time can only happen on a happy stomach. After all, food is fuel. You can’t manage your time without managing your physical self. Most people would never consider pouring a cupful of sugar into their car’s gas tank but they don’t think anything of doing the same to themselves.

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.

 

Ransomware’s Great Lessons

My article on ransomware is available to read at CloudTweaks here.

When is Your Best Time of Day? You Only Have One.

As if workload and email weren’t enough, we humans have another impediment to efficiency, our built-in daily downward spiral. Our metabolic peaks and valleys slowly creep lower as the day goes on. For most people, whether they want to admit it or not, mornings are the period of highest energy and alertness, and it goes downhill from there.

This line represents the typical metabolic roller-coaster of blood sugar and energy levels for eight out of ten people. We spend our days on a downward trek towards sleep. However adequate regular nutrition and balance can help level out the peaks and troughs quite significantly.

Biologically, we are a light-loving species. Our minds and metabolisms react to the changes in light as night turns to day by releasing stimulant hormones such as serotonin (a sleep inhibitor), and cortisol (a stress hormone) into the bloodstream to counteract the effects of melatonin which is introduced in the evenings to help us fall asleep.

This daily rhythm is called circadian, from the Latin words circa (around) and dian (day). Nature attuned our hunter-gatherer ancestors to be alert first thing in the morning (when food would be more plentiful) and also to be sleepy at night (using darkness as protection from predators and motionlessness as protection from injury.)

Most people on the planet, and therefore, the majority of people you interact with will follow this circadian rhythm, with the best time for productive, cerebral activities being 9:00-10:30, and afternoons best suited for less challenging tasks.

Your specific metabolism may vary from this. It is essential to know yourself, rather than immediately assume you fit into a demographic. The key point is to identify your best time of day, assign your most valuable tasks to this period, and firmly defend it against interruptions of all types.

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.

Time Management and the Fear of the Unknown

As living beings, our desire for self-preservation translates into a fear of the unknown. For example, our senses sharpen if we walk through a dark forest or down a deserted street at night. But the fear of the unknown strikes in other ways, too. Many people choose to use email or send text messages in place of having a live conversation because they have no idea how long a conversation might last. It’s an unknown, and on a basic level, that scares them.

Many time consuming practices are rooted within the fear of the unknown:

The need to check for messages regularly speaks to a fear of offending the sender, the fear of missing out, the fear of being left out of the loop, and even the fear or silence and boredom, all of which are connected to the unknown.
The fear of delegation is based on not knowing whether another individual can perform a task to a satisfactory level.
Procrastination is the act of irrationally putting off a disliked task out of the fear of taking it on.
The fear of change is rampant in workplaces and in society – humans are innately predisposed to stay with what they know, and as such change management is a philosophy unto itself.

The list goes on and on. Basically, if you fear something because you do not know enough about it, it is your duty to find out more about it.

One of the greatest tools for conquering the fear of the unknown is to put pen to paper (or to dry-erase board) and convert fears into words. This is a highly cathartic exercise, since writing is a comparatively slow and very physical action that works in a way that corresponds to our thought processes. IN other words, make ideas tangible.

Another great tool for conquering the fear of the unknown is to talk it out with a mentor. Having a mentor is one of the single greatest investments an individual can make. A mentor acts like a sounding board, someone with experience, who will not necessarily tell you what to do, but will tell you what s/he did, which can be a very valuable lesson.

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 Flooded Basement

It’s a nice day, so you decide to pay a visit to your neighbor. You knock on the door, but there’s no answer. Still, you can distinctly hear noise coming from within, a sloshing noise, which is kind of weird. So you venture around to the side of the house for a peek.

Squinting through an open basement window, you spy your neighbor, up to his knees in water. He is frantically trying to get rid of the flood by using a metal bucket, scooping up as much as he can, and then pitching it through the very window you are looking at him through.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“I’ve got all this water coming in,” he shouts back, “and I can’t see where it’s coming from.”

“Have you tried turning off your main water valve?” you ask.

“Yes,” he says, “no luck.”

“Have you tried calling Public Works? Maybe they can turn the water off for you,” you suggest.

“I’ve got no time for that, I’ve got to take care of the water first!” he shouts, and resumes bailing out his flooded basement.

This man is obviously doing the wrong thing. Rather than tackling the source of the problem, he is reacting, desperately trying to clear out the results of the overload. His mind and body have been consumed by a necessity that has overridden clear thought. He is consumed by the urgency of the moment. And all the while more and more water is coming in.

What would have been the cooler thing to do? Maybe pull out the cellphone and call Public Works first, or maybe even a plumber.

We have all been in this guy’s soaked shoes. Maybe not with actual water, but certainly with tasks and obligations, coming at us in an unending and sometimes unpredictable stream. But wait a minute. We’re all pretty smart people. Why does it feel so often that we’re trapped in this metaphorical basement, bailing frantically? The answer: Collectively, we simply have not evolved fast enough to keep up with the stresses of today’s world. We are reacting, which means we are not thinking things through. Is there a solution? Yes, but it involves putting the metal bucket down.

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

Bonsai and the Law of Sharp Edges

Bonsai is an ancient Japanese and Chinese art form in which trees are grown and nurtured inside low-sided pots. Their branches are shaped by way of wires that guide their growth and shape, and they are kept small through careful pruning of roots and branches, along with the most influential factor of all, the pot itself, which essentially tells the tree there is no more room for the roots to spread out.

Since the spreading roots of a tree have profound impact on its ultimate size and life, the bonsai pot stands as a real-world example of the Law of Sharp Edges, which states that delineation of an event allows for positive control of organic relationships.

In terms of time management strategy, a conversation works much better if both parties know how it is intended to last and what it will be about. Meetings and seminars work better when participants know when the breaks and wrap-up will be. Delays in subways and on planes are better managed when frustrated travelers are given some idea of when things will be fixed. Why? Because at the root of all of these situations is an unknown. People fear the unknown. It’s natural. So, as a tool of proactive time management and influence, if you give people a sharp-edged delineation of an event’s duration and content, they will be far more likely to play ball with you.

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.

Warning! There are Pickpockets!

Imagine yourself for a moment in the departure lounge of an airport. You are rushing to catch a connecting flight, half-jogging to the gate and pulling your wheeled carry-on bag behind you. A sign on the wall catches your eye. It says “Beware! There are pickpockets in this area.”

Now what is the action that you are most likely to do at this moment? If you are like 95% of the traveling public you will instinctively reach for your wallet, your purse or the breast pocket of your blazer – wherever you remember your money to be.

Bad move. That is precisely what a good pickpocket wants you to do. This is the reaction they are looking for. In fact the first priority for any ambitious pickpocket is to locate the nearest warning sign and stand near it, since this is where success happens.

Human beings are hard-wired to react, especially to dangerous or threatening stimuli. The threat of a pickpocket in the area immediately forces the unsuspecting passer-by, to touch the location where the money is stored, as an attempt to neutralize the threat by ensuring the money is still there. But by doing so, the passer-by is basically saying to the pickpocket, “hey, thief, my money is here, OK?”

The reaction gives away precisely what the pickpocket wants: the correct location of the goods.

In this situation, the unsuspecting traveler reacts as all living creatures do. Alerted to danger, instinct takes over. The pickpocket on the other hand, is pro-acting, anticipating the turn of events and setting a trap. The thief is actually writing the history of the next few minutes even before they happen. The thief anticipates the reaction of all but the coolest of airport travelers and communicates and influential message by way of the warning sign itself. A perfect trap.

In the working world, much of the problem we have with managing time come from this same reality – the one that says we must react. When emails come in, we feel compelled to read them. When someone interrupts, we feel obliged to respond. When a meeting planner books a meeting we feel obliged to go, even if it messes up the entire afternoon. Reaction makes us follow the calendar’s commands. Worst of all, when that email comes in that says “Your bank account has been frozen”, you click quickly on the link to see what’s wrong, only to let an army of malware directly into your company’s network.

A cool mind allows for proactive thinking to replace blind reaction. Planning and communicating puts you back in control of all events, even those that have not happened yet.

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.

Time Management: 50,000 years overdue for an upgrade

The reason why time management problems happen is very basic and very ancient. We, as human beings, exist in a body type that hasn’t changed much in terms of design in the last 50,000 years. Our mind, nervous system, and stomach still react as they did when the ability to make fire was big news. Though our collective knowledge has progressed enough to invent computers and nuclear power, our inner workings have not kept pace. We react every time an email or text arrives, because it’s a new stimulus, just like a noise in the bushes.

This has exact parallels with the growing obesity trend seen worldwide: our innate autonomic urge to store energy as fat in case of future famine has not evolved to cope with the abundance of overly refined fast food, combined with sedentary jobs and labor-saving devices. It’s an ancient body trying to keep up in a new ecosystem.

Thus to handle time management problems today – in the information age, the age of sensory overload, we must enter a new stage in our human evolution. We need a system that approaches things from the inside out: that is, by looking at what makes human beings tick, both as individuals, and as part of a community. Only then can prioritization, work-life balance, productivity and the other productivity grails become achievable. The solutions to our time management problems have to do with human relationships.

 

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.

Time Management is Really People Management

Quick! Look over there!

Try saying these words, with some urgency, to a dog. Then point to the horizon. The odds are he’ll look at the end of your finger in the hopes that there’s food on it. Or he might jump around excitedly, knowing he is supposed to be doing something, but not sure as to what that might be. He would certainly not think to follow the direction of your pointing finger, and could not begin to understand that there might be a reward for looking in that direction. For him, his sole interest in the pointing finger is the possibility that you might give him food. Once he sees that there is none, the finger holds no more attraction.

The solutions offered by traditional time management courses and books are very much like that: there’s a message there, and some real solutions, but they point to distant concepts and ignore immediate motivations. They place too much emphasis on agendas, prioritization, activity logs and filing systems, and although these things do have a place in the overall plan, they are just tools, to be employed later, after we have dealt with the primary time management problem: people.

No agenda system will work if the people who assign you the tasks aren’t part of the solution.

No agenda system, day planner or mantra of any kind is going to work if the people who assign you the tasks and add to the pressure aren’t central to the solution. It’s like trying to organize a collection of feathers on a windy day. There’s no point in organizing and prioritizing things if we can’t do something about outside influences. And that means managing, influencing, and dealing with people.

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 Benefits of Working in Cool-Time

Cool-Time refers to the art and the science of never breaking a sweat, either mentally or physically, as you go about your day. Cool-Time is the end result of the state of mind and attitude brought about by the techniques in this book. There is an amazing sense of comfort and progress that happens when you feel in control.

Working, traveling and communicating in Cool-Time ensures that the highest, most useful faculties of your mind are present and ready. Stress, anger, confusion and frustration can be controlled by proper planning, anticipation of contingencies, timelines and constraints, and acknowledging where you are and where you should be.

Why is this so important? Quite simply, it’s an edge. Most people just try to get by. You see them running for buses, stuck in traffic, stuck in meetings and stuck in their jobs. No room for movement or improvement in any of these areas. You see them eating their lunch at their desks, afraid to take a moment for themselves lest their job or career be put in jeopardy.

These busy people. You see these people texting at the dinner table or while walking down the street. You see them buying headache and stomach remedies to counteract what the stress is doing to them. You see them counting down the days to Friday when they supposedly can get some rest.

These people – your colleagues, clients, competitors, family members, and probably you yourself, are living lives the wrong way round, so that stress, anger, helplessness and overload are front and center on the personal playing field, while clear thought and calm sit it out on the sidelines.

This is no way to exist, and it’s certainly no way to get ahead. Stress pushes away the ladder of success, leaving its key components undisturbed and out of reach. You, however, have the power to change that, by living in Cool-Time.

Yes, you will still have to deal with crises, managers, deadlines and delays. But it is the manner in which you handle them that will be different. Your calm, competent air will be admired. Some will even see it as charisma or leadership. Your mannerisms and mindset, now supremely able to ride the chaos and confusion of the day, will become obvious to others, with a brighter sparkle in your eyes, with body language and posture that conveys confidence and ability, with a voice that delivers credibility and authority, and with decisions, ideas  and actions that demonstrate excellence.

Planning creates a sense of control, which creates real control. That is what working in Cool-Time is all about.

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.