Chapter 24 Making the Best of Your Day

In your quest to keep pace with all that’s thrown your way, it’s a good bet that you’re frequently preoccupied. You don’t enjoy lunch because you’re worried about what needs to be done in the afternoon. You don’t enjoy the afternoon because you’re thinking about how you have to pick up your child, get across town to attend a meeting, and then get back. You don’t enjoy the evening because it goes by too fast. You don’t enjoy the morning because you’re always in a rush, concerned about getting to work on time. Perhaps that’s the old you because the first 23 chapters have actually sunk in. I hope so.

Real Time: A Primer

How would your life be if you could tackle problems and challenges as they arise? What would it feel like to engage in conceptual thinking whenever you wanted or needed to? What would you feel like if you had a sense of control and ease about each day? The short answer: You would be living in real time.

From Start to Finish

A program planner at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, carries a task to completion instead of leaving it for later (when it might be one of a growing pile of tasks, requiring additional effort). He finds that even if it doesn’t “feel good,” sticking with the task at hand is one of the most effective ways of staying in real time and getting things off his desk, be it fielding a phone call, returning correspondence, or working on a budget.

An executive with the North Carolina Travel Association finds that one of her core strategies for effectiveness is to take phone calls when they come in (as often as possible) rather than letting them pile up. In essence, she uses the technique of completion to focus on the task at hand, pause, answer the phone, handle the call, and resume work. She’s honed the ability to switch quickly from one task to another—and each is the one task she’s engaged in at the time.

By taking phone calls as they come in, she can interact with the caller to resolve the issue, often within the duration of the call. “When you let the number of return calls you have to make build up beyond a certain level,” she says, “you ensure that you won’t get back to all the callers, and you’re going to procrastinate when it comes to calling many of them.”

She also finds it useful to deal with mail and papers that come across her desk as they arrive, but she concedes that this isn’t always possible.

You may know people who live in real time, or who at least live out significant chunks of their lives in real time. Who are these people? If you know someone who stays in shape, who has the time to take a phone call, and who actually knows each of his or her children’s friends by name, you’ve got a clue. The person who volunteers for and takes an active role in community organizations is probably living in real time.

The Big Twelve

Going for completion, handling phone calls as they come in, and finishing the task at hand are worthwhile achievements—and these elements of life are within your reach. Examine the following 12 components of living in real time, with the realization that each of these are within your grasp.

1. Leave home in the morning with grace and ease. As you know from Chapter 11, “Filing: Your Simple Salvation,” you can manage the details beforehand. Take care of as many things as possible the night before so that in the morning you have only to get bodies out the door. No need for a mad rush; you’ve got everything ready to go.
2. Focus on the important issues facing your organization, your department or division, and your job or career. As you learned in Chapter 6, “Supporting Your Priorities for Fun and Profit,” you have to pay homage to the issues that you identify as important in your life, and you must have the strength to ignore the also-rans. Magically, when you take care of the important things, the others fall into place.
3. Handle and deal with the day’s mail upon arrival, keep piles from forming on your desk, and handle phone calls within 24 hours. If you practice the techniques discussed in Chapter 12, “Neat and Uncomplicated Tools to Manage Your Time,” and Chapter 13, “Are You a Slave to Your Beeper?”, your skills will be enhanced in all these areas. No need to be inundated by the mail; no piles accumulate on your desk; there’s no snarl of phone calls to get back to.
4. Enjoy a leisurely lunch. You know the importance of completing tasks so that when you go to lunch, you’re at lunch. You get to chew slowly and carefully. You give up reading the newspaper and focus on the food in your mouth. Old sensations may return. You actually enjoy your lunch, digest your food better, do better back on the job, and have a vastly improved gastrointestinal outlook. Can you beat it?

   One manager with American Express in Phoenix insists on having lunch away from his desk. By getting away from the office, he is able to recharge his batteries. He feels that when you stay at your desk too long, every task competing for your attention, whether big and small, seems too urgent. By getting away at lunch time, he is able to stay focused on the big picture. He can return to the office with newfound energy.

5. Depart from the workplace at normal closing hours, and feel good about what you accomplish each day. This is straight from Chapter 1, “I Know I Can Finish Most of This (If I Stay Late)”; leaving the workday on time and feeling complete is the single most important step you can take toward permanently winning back your time. Ask yourself, “What do I need to accomplish by the end of the day to feel good about leaving on time?” You’ll hardly ever leave defeated or in a bad mood.
6. Have sufficient and up-to-date health, life, disability, and automobile insurance coverage. If you want to live in real time, this is part of the overall picture. Following the discussion of priorities in Chapter 5, getting adequate insurance to protect you and your loved ones is bound to support your overall priorities.
7. File your annual (and any quarterly) income taxes on time. For one recent tax year, the IRS reported that more than 40 percent of taxpayers filed for extensions; they did not need to send in their completed tax returns until August 15 or, in some cases, October 15. You, on the other hand (once you’ve decided to live in real time), recognize that taxes are a necessary evil and will always be levied. You set up a tax log at the start of each year with room for each legitimate deduction, where you can file receipts and documentation. Perhaps you buy software such as Turbo Tax or Quicken that helps you complete your tax returns on a timely basis.
8. Take time to be with friends and relatives. People, not things, count most in this life. By remembering your priorities and supporting goals, and by becoming adept at making decisions, you gain the power to carve out time in your schedule to ensure that you don’t short-change the people who are central in your life.
9. Stay in shape and at your desired weight. When you observe the bodies of most individuals, you can see the results of a losing tug-of-war with gravity. Body parts seem to be unduly influenced by gravity (such as drooping), but this doesn’t need to be the case. Health and fitness experts say that working out for as little as 30 minutes a day four times a week can keep you comfortably fit. As I observed in my book, Breathing Space: Living and Working at a Comfortable Pace in a Sped-Up Society, if you’re too busy to stay in shape, you’re too busy!
10. Make time for hobbies. On the way to losing your time, did you abandon enjoyable activities that were a part of what made you who you are? I thought so. Revisit that stamp collection, garden, hiking club, or whatever you let slide. Living in real time means enjoying your most rewarding hobbies and pastimes regularly.
11. Participate monthly in a worthy cause. As you learn in Chapter 9, “Volunteering a Little Less—and Liking It,” it’s not possible to give your time and attention to all worthy causes—or even to many. Your life is finite, regardless of how long you live. When you pick the one or two that matter most to you and take action, you feel good about yourself and about how you’re spending your time.

    Some factors that increase the probability of your paying homage to these causes include: not having to travel too far to participate, enjoying your coparticipants, and getting a psychological boost (an internal reward) and recognition for your efforts (external rewards) when you participate.

12. Drop back at any time, take a long deep breath, collect your thoughts, and renew your spirit—the focus of the remaining chapters.

Ready, Set, Actualize

It’s one thing to have lists of all the items you’re going to do, but lists alone are useless unless you take action.

Several of the ways to live in real time discussed in the preceding section may appeal to you. Suppose you wanted to actualize #9, staying in shape and at your desired weight. How would you actually succeed?

From Chapter 5, “Okay, So What Do You Want?” and Chapter 6, you learn that any goal you set needs to be specific and time-related. One of the first things you might do is commit to working out regularly and determine what you’ll weigh by a certain date. From Chapter 17, “Decision Making: Step it Up and Go!”, you learn that you don’t need to surround yourself with reams of data and analysis before taking action. Although some information may be worthwhile, your intuition is up and running. Use it, too.

Plan your changes gradually. In the first week, you could decide that you’ll no longer eat in your car. In the next few weeks, you’ll stop eating when watching television. Thereafter, you might substitute skim milk for whole milk, stop putting butter on your potato, and so forth.

After you pick one of the 12 measures of living in real time (or some other measure that’s important to you), create a 6-, 8-, or 10-step action plan. Based on the measure you choose and the particular circumstances of your life, your plan will be different from someone else’s. The keys to making your plan work are to follow the goal-reinforcement techniques discussed in Chapter 6, some of which are briefly summarized here:

• Seek others with goals similar to yours.
• Post reinforcing statements and reminders in view.
• Record affirming statements on cassette.
• Determine any cash outlays in advance.
• Take bite-size action steps.
• Have someone waiting to hear of your progress.
• Envision yourself succeeding.
• Plot your plan on the calendar, starting from the end date.
• Build in some flexibility.