In This Chapter

Now that you know a thing or two about composing, maintaining, and implementing to-do lists, let’s focus on immediate measures for getting on the golden path to accomplishing shorter-term tasks, particularly those things you want to complete today, this hour, or right now!

The two most common mistakes that people make on the path to accomplishing short-term tasks are over-preparing and at the same time, paradoxically, underestimating what will be necessary to succeed.

Over-preparation has stopped many would-be get-it-done enthusiasts right in their Bass Weejuns. Consider the sales professional who makes few sales calls per week, and as a result closes even fewer sales because he or she gets stuck in the semi-perpetual state of over-preparation.

The over-prepared professional means to do well. His anxiety level, however, may prompt him to over-complicate one sub-task after another en route to actually calling on the client. This is the person who, on the day he is finally ready to make a sales call, is bound to blow it. Why? He’s soooo ready, that he has more information than he’ll ever be able to succinctly present in the time allotted for the appointment.

If you can, forsake the crutches that seemingly aid but often impede your progress. The crutch that most often impedes most individuals is information. Too often, many people want to have the broad swath of information, data, figures, statistics, you name it, all assembled before launching a task.

More data is not always the answer, especially in a society where we’re deluged with data. Enough data exists to lead to all answers, which clearly gets in the way of choosing. Forsaking crutches simply means you will not allow extraneous factors to impede your progress. If you have five magazine articles that support your argument, having an additional four or five articles is not going to make that much of a difference.

You don’t want to fall into the trap of rounding up resources that, in retrospect, will prove to be only marginally helpful and unnecessarily draw from the time you expend on the task at hand. These wretched souls, the type who tend to over-prepare, either truly believe or have deluded themselves into believing that all the crutches that they’ve assembled will somehow accelerate their progress once they actually launch into a task. Too late, they find that they’ve allocated their time and energy in the wrong places.

The other most common mistake on the path to getting things done is to underestimate what will be required to succeed. The antidotes to this pitfall are to sum all costs, and marshal one’s resources. Each antidote will be explained in the sections that follow.

Forsaking crutches is not a contradiction to the summing of all costs. On any project or task, big or small, it pays to total up what it will cost in terms of time, energy, dollars, or other resources. The paradox faced by otherwise popular professionals is that they often underestimate the time that it will take to complete a task—even short-term tasks. This is the person who is perpetually racing the clock. His to-do list grows longer and longer because he is inappropriately optimistic about how much he can accomplish in a day, an hour, or other short time span.

Understandably, in the information-based society engulfing us, it can be difficult to estimate how much time it will take to complete a particular task, especially in those cases where we’re undertaking a task for the first time. You may ask yourself:

You can make a strong case that a large proportion of the tasks you face on any given day are “first-time” type tasks, and the time to complete them in is not abundantly clear at the outset. That’s why it’s useful to establish benchmarks , set time limits, and use fudge factors.

Suppose you have to read a team member’s eight-page report. From past experience, you’ve found that your reading time is roughly three minutes per page. This task may not be so different from reading other reports. For effectiveness and efficiency, you’ll be reading slowly and carefully, line by line.

Hence for an eight-page report, with a benchmark of three minutes per page, you can figure that you’ll need about 24 minutes. With an occasional interruption, a rough spot that may slow you down, or other unforeseen factors, it may be better to make it 28 minutes.

Suppose you have no benchmark for a report of this length or of this nature. How else could you approach the task without underestimating what it would take to get it done? Set a time limit!

You could give yourself 15, 30, or 45 minutes to handle this report. In the case where you’ve given yourself 15 minutes and you notice, with about 3 minutes to go, you’re still on page 5, you have a good indication that you underestimated the time.

You now re-compute and see that 25 or 30 minutes might be more realistic. You may not have the extra time to devote to the report right now, but at least you have useful information. Alternatively, you could greatly increase your reading speed for the last 3 pages and still finish within 15 minutes, recognizing that you may need to review the last 3 pages again at some other time.

Suppose you picked 30 minutes as a time limit to review a report, the likes of which you haven’t tackled before. In this case, you may finish after 24 minutes or 28 minutes with 2 to 6 minutes to spare. Is that so bad? Actually, that’s a nice state of affairs.

Suppose you allocated 45 minutes, and you finish after 28 minutes? “Oh my goodness, what am I going to do with the extra 17 minutes?” Have there been any days in the past 10 years where you couldn’t use 17 minutes to accomplish other small things?

Maybe 17 minutes from now you have a meeting, you have to make a phone call, or something else has been scheduled. Those 17 minutes represent prime time in which you could handle smaller things that have accumulated, prepare for what’s next, or simply take a mental or physical break.

Thus, the last of your strategies in summing the cost of completing the task, and in this case we’re focusing on how much time the task will cost, is to apply a fudge factor to curb your optimistic estimate.

Many otherwise competent career professionals seem to perpetually underestimate the time it will take to complete certain tasks. There’s a practical solution that will help alleviate this problem. If you initially estimate that a task will take, say 24 minutes, automatically increase your estimate by 50 percent. In other words, allocate 36 minutes for a task you initially estimate to require 24 minutes. Allocate 90 minutes for a task you initially estimate will take 60 minutes, and so on.

If you’re like many others, despite its effectiveness, in time you’ll forget about the fudge factor. In the blink of an eye, you’ll revert to making estimates that are at or under any previous benchmark, that don’t represent appropriate time limits, and don’t encompass a fudge factor. In short, you’ll be underestimating too many of the tasks you handle in a given day, and hence your day will seem like an endless struggle.

As you learned in Chapter 11, feeling good about your accomplishments, maintaining your buoyancy, and sustaining yourself workday after workday are as essential as anything on the road to getting things done.

The notion of summing all costs actually extends to all dollar outlays, and includes the energy you might expend on a project, staff resources, equipment, etc.

All of this leads us to the second major approach to avoiding common mistakes: marshaling your resources.

Consider the activities you undertake when you move to a new town. You obtain local phone books and other directories. You find a doctor, a dentist, and other health-care providers. You call utility companies to make sure your services are running the first day you move in. You get to know which stores carry the kinds of goods you desire. You meet people at work, around the neighborhood, and around town.

Soon, you develop a network of resources that enable you to get domestic things done, like eat dinner, have a well-functioning car, have a dental checkup, and so on.

At work, when you assume a new post, you arrive at a desk that is, hopefully, clean and clear. Soon enough, you’ll fill it up with supplies, files, directories, and personal items. You align your office, cubicle, or workspace with those things that help keep you productive, and ideally, balanced and happy.

The road to accomplishing both short- and long-term tasks works much the same way. You surround yourself with that which will be useful in the clutch. For short-term tasks in particular, it makes sense to have adequate supplies. If you’re writing with pen and paper, the old-fashioned way, then you need to have those ready. If you’re making conference calls, then the equipment, numbers, pass codes, and such resources need to be in place.

If you’re tackling first-time tasks, those of which you have little or no experience, marshaling your resources takes on an added level of importance. What mentors and gurus can you contact to give you a crucial bit of advice, the right file path, or key phone number on your way to accomplishing something right now?

As a useful task before tackling the next short-term project, flesh out the resources you’ll need to successfully handle a short-term task. List what you might need in terms of equipment, supplies, staff help, guidance, money, and time. The more involved the short-term task is, i.e., a half-day or day-long task, the more valuable this exercise becomes.

For any given short-term task, variables such as equipment, supplies, staff help, guidance, money, and time may or may not be significant. Making notes about those that will be significant will serve you well.

The exercise itself takes no more than a minute or two and costs nothing. The added measure of using insight and perspective is invaluable.

Much of the hesitation that occurs before the start of a short-term task is due to erroneous assumptions. For example, if you have to compose a letter or brief report, you might be hung up on starting with that perfect opening sentence or that powerful opening paragraph. Yet, launching into the letter or report is not contingent on nailing the opening part from the outset.

It’s often to your advantage to simply start writing and later go back and determine what sentence or paragraph makes for the best lead. Likewise for other tasks you face.

If it helps, allow yourself to take a small step to get started. This might represent simply opening up a file folder, making a phone call, arranging a meeting, or finding a website. The strange and wondrous thing about the human brain is that it likes to continue progressing on the same path it is already on.

One minute of activity in pursuit of a task helps lead to the next minute and the next. Almost independent of how you get started, for most short-term tasks, the fact that you did get started clears a major hurdle on the path to completion.

Develop a skill that is becoming rare among professionals today—practice the art of doing one thing at a time and become immersed in that task. When you put all your energy and concentration into one task, great things will result. Fight the tendency to multitask. It seems easy enough, but the practice of doing one thing at a time, today, rubs against the grain of society, which delivers the message that you need to do many things at once to be more productive.

Even for tasks that take five minutes or less, you can achieve great productivity by immersing yourself in the pursuit. The impetus and even pure joy of getting one thing done, and done well, can carry you to the next task and the next and the next.

Giving your total attention to the task at hand yields wondrous benefits that may not otherwise be achievable. Step away from your online connection. Switch your phone to voice mail. Close your door. Focus your efforts and reap the rewards!

Much of human behavioral psychology can be explained by the simple phrase “Behavior that is rewarded is repeated.” This is true even when you reward yourself for your own behavior. To accomplish things right here, right now, identify in advance a “reward” that you’ll bestow upon yourself for completing a desired task.

The reward may be as simple as making a phone call. It might be taking a stroll around the block. It could be checking e-mail, having a cup of herbal tea, totaling up your earnings for the last quarter, or any other small, favorable event.

If you’re facing an unpleasant task, it makes sense to follow that up with something you enjoy doing, instead of the other way around.

High-speed online connections, such as cable, DSL, or T1 lines, guarantee a virtual smorgasbord of infinite and never-ending temptations. With a couple key strokes and mouse clicks, you can be whisked away on your screen to any one of multimillions of websites.

While previous generations of career professionals faced temptations and distractions, nothing from yesteryear rivals the power, lure, and availability of the Internet. It’s always there, it’s always on, and meanwhile, you’ve got tasks to accomplish.

If you are subject to temptations—and who isn’t—find a way to include them in your rewards system. Rather than entirely succumbing to such distractions, you get to enjoy them periodically throughout the day in small measures not detrimental to your productivity or long-term career prospects. To do otherwise is to flirt with disaster.

Thereafter, you go from hour to hour, day to day, week to week, without getting the small things done and having them build up, each one looming larger than they actually are, while impeding your progress on longer-term projects and tasks.

Even if you maintain a super to-do list with a large, long-term portion, you’ll still find it a challenge to maintain vigilance on long-term tasks. Moreover, in many respects, accomplishing long-term tasks requires a different approach, execution, and set of behaviors than accomplishing tasks of a shorter-term nature. Chapters 13 and 14 will help you with larger, longer-term challenges.

The Least You Need to Know