Chapter 6 Supporting Your Priorities for Fun and Profit

Suppose you identify your priorities and establish some goals in support of them. What will it actually take to ensure that you stay on your chosen path? It’s easy to stray—you know it and I know it. If you had a nickel for every time you heard somebody decide to do something and then you watched them over time do little or nothing in support of the decision, well, by jove, you would probably be rich! You don’t want to join that club. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to reinforce your commitment to your newly established priorities, discover ways to recognize when you’ve derailed your progress toward achieving them, and learn one particularly useful way to make sure that your work priorities don’t undermine the ones you’ve set for your personal life.

Reinforcement’s the Key

Staying on track with your priorities means staying focused, of course. You can make it easier for yourself to keep that focus if you build some positive reinforcements into your day-to-day life. Here are some reinforcement techniques you can put to use in support of the priorities you’ve chosen:

1. Join others who have priorities and goals similar to yours—and who are supporting them. Perhaps there is a professional, civic, or social organization in your town that fits the bill.
2. Surround yourself with reinforcing statements, reminders, and self-stick notes so you don’t lose sight of what you have already deemed important.
3. Create a cassette tape of your priorities and supporting goals in the form of affirmations: “I choose to visit the health club four times per week for a minimum workout of 30 minutes.”
4. Prepare a budget to help determine exactly what it will cost to honor your priorities and the goals you’ve chosen to support them.
5. Develop rituals that support your quest. For example, if your goal is to lose 6 pounds by the end of June, begin taking the stairs instead of the elevator whenever you’re heading down for lunch or to your car at the end of the day.
6. Keep your action steps bite-size. There’s no value in choosing goals that are so difficult to achieve that you’re not honoring the associated priority at all.
7. Report to someone. Have some significant other serving as a coach or watchdog to ensure that you do what you said you were going to do. (Don’t be lulled into thinking that this ploy is only for the weak-willed. High achievers do this!)
8. Visualize the goal every day—while you’re waiting in a bank line, when you’re in the bathroom, when you’re stuck in traffic. Olympic athletes aboard a plane, en route to their next meet, can actually improve their performance once they land if they visualize their event during the plane ride.
9. Set up a series of small rewards so that you’re naturally reinforcing the behavior in which you’ve chosen to engage.
10. Contract with yourself. Author Dennis Hensley, Ph.D, based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, describes advancement by contract: “A contract takes precedence over everything else. For example, you make your monthly house payment rather than use the money for a vacation because you have to make that payment: The contract allows the bank to repossess your home if you do not fulfill your obligation.”

    He suggests carefully selecting three to five major goals (in support of your priorities) and then signing a contract that aids you in reaching them. “Once under contract, you would have to succeed by a selected date or else face the consequences of defaulting on the contract.” (It’s worth remembering that in the business world, people who default can be sued or go unpaid for the work done to date.) Make three copies of your contract (this chapter includes an example). Keep the original. Give one copy each to your spouse, a trusted coworker, and a friend.

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    SELF-INITIATED CONTRACT

    I, ____________________, agree to accomplish each of the following items

    on or before _____________ and hereby do formally contract myself to these

    purposes.

    These goals are challenging, but reasonable, and I accept them willingly.

    A.______________________

    B.______________________

    C.______________________

    Signature:______________________Date: _____________

     

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    Review your contract when you find yourself becoming distracted by small details or if you think you are not moving in the right direction.

11. Plot your campaign on the calendar. Start from the ending date (the deadline for completing your goal) and work back to the present, plotting the subtasks and activities you’ll need to undertake. Proceeding in reverse through the monthly calendar helps you establish realistic interim dates that reflect not only your available resources, but also vacations, holidays, weekends, other off-duty hours, and reasonable output levels. A sample Calendar Block appears below.

CALENDAR BLOCK BACK

Start with a major deadline, then work backward to set realistic interim dates for achieving what you want.

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 Chronos Says Give yourself flexibility; build in some downtime, vacation time, and so forth. Devise a realistic plan to accomplish your goal by the time you said you would.

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Whoa, Horse—Get Back on Course

If you’re like most people, then on more than one occasion (I’m being kind here) you’re bound to get off course. When you do, revisit the list just given and initiate a new strategy in place of—or, better yet, in addition to—the ones you’re using. Here are some warning signs that you’re not following the path you said you would:

• You’ve talked a good fight, and that’s all. You said this undertaking was important to you, but you haven’t scheduled any time on your calendar, budgeted any funds, or even thought about it.

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   Time Out! The drive to and from work can take a big chunk out of your day. Commuting is one of the worst time thieves. If you’re serious about winning back your time, you’ll consider moving closer to work. If that’s not an option, strongly consider telecommuting.

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• You’re late. You said that working out four times a week was important; by the third week, you’re making excuses to yourself about why you’re not.
• You’ve let piles of paper stack up. Although you’ve chosen only a handful of priorities, you find yourself still wading through stuff that’s nice, interesting, and not that important.
• Your goals missed the mark. Despite the toil, time, and thought you put into establishing your goals, it’s apparent they’re not supporting your priorities.

Is the Commute Killing You?

As you consider what it will take to pursue the goals that support your priorities, sometimes creative solutions will begin to appear. For example, imagine reducing the aggravation and wasted time of the fundamental act of getting to work as discussed in Chapter 2, “Time Flies Whether You’re Having Fun or Not.” For many people, it’s an arduous undertaking.

So let’s talk about telecommuting.

Stay in Touch by Bits and Bytes

As metro areas keep expanding, and as daily commuting becomes more trying, telecommuting is gaining popularity. At least 20 million people are doing some telecommuting these days. Telecommuters complete much of their work back in the traditional office.

The benefits to you include reduced commuting time; reduced personal cost for travel, clothing, and food; flexible working hours; more time for dependents; and potentially greater autonomy.

You can rack up significant time savings by telecommuting, as detailed in Table 6.1.

Table 6.1 How Commuting Adds Up to Lost Time

Believe it or not, the federal government is on your side when it comes to telecommuting! In 1990, the Clean Air Act mandated that all businesses employing more than 100 people in a single location reduce their employees’ commute time by 25 percent. Employers could encourage the use of public transportation, car-pooling, condensed work weeks, or telecommuting. The act has since been implemented, primarily in the states with the worst pollution.

Maybe you can sell your employers on this trend. The benefits to them include potentially higher productivity; reduced office or plant costs; the ability to accommodate physically challenged employees; and the ability to motivate new employees with an attractive stay-at-home-and-get-paid option.

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 Watch WordsTelecommuting is working outside the office (that is, away from your employer’s base of operations) and staying in touch with coworkers via electronics, such as a computer, a fax, a pager, and a phone. It can be done from your home, a hotel, a satellite office, or even your car.

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Stockbrokers, consultants, writers, and even top-level executives are finding that telecommuting enables them to maintain—even increase—their overall productivity. Jobs such as computer programming, translating, software engineering, sales, and system analysis are well suited for telecommuting. Other professions, such as word processing, book publishing, telemarketing, research, and architecture, also lend themselves to effective telecommuting.

Despite all the technological breakthroughs, telecommuting thus far has been employed only marginally. Some employees have been directed to telecommute; others have requested the option. Yet, in business and government, most employees don’t telecommute, even periodically.

Even on a limited basis, telecommuting can provide you with many benefits beyond the time saved by not commuting. These include cost-savings, as well as the freedom to focus on projects, initiate conceptual thinking, and exercise more control over your environment. Check it out!

Your To-Do List: Managing the Long-Term Versus Short-Term

Whether you telecommute or work in a traditional office five days a week—whether you’ve identified your priorities (and some well-chosen goals to support them) or are still stuck in old habits—it’s likely you face an age-old dilemma: staying on top of all the things you need or want to get done.

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 A Stitch In Time If you haven’t yet considered using the superlong to-do strategy, give it a try. Your first superlong list will probably fill two to five pages—it should be easy to move items up to the front as needed. You’ll have a clear idea of what you face all on one big roster, and you’ll keep your priorities sharp for years to come.

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People are always asking me about to-do lists. Do they need to maintain them? How can they go about fixing them? Everyone I know in the workaday world uses some kind of list as a tool for getting things done. I’m neither for nor opposed to any particular system you might use to stay efficient; judge by your results. (Chapter 12, “Neat and Uncomplicated Tools to Manage Your Time,” explores some time-management tools and technologies.) If you maintain some type of to-do list, you can use it to support your priorities—by lengthening it for strategic reasons, without overloading yourself. Read on.

Long Can Be Good

The primary dilemma you’re most likely to face is balancing short-term against long-term tasks and activities. Believe it or not, I maintain a 8- to 10-page to-do list! I have hundreds of things on my to-do list, arranged by major life priorities. How do I keep from going crazy? Most of what’s on the list are medium- to long-range activities.

The first page of my list represents only the short-term activities—those I’ve chosen to do now or this week. I draw continually from the 10-page list, moving items to the top as it becomes desirable (or necessary) to tackle them.

In essence, I maintain a dynamic to-do list; it contains everything on this earth I want to get done, but always with only one page I need to look at: the top page. Yes, I am forever updating the list and printing out new versions, but there are so many advantages that I wouldn’t think of doing it any other way.

My list is long, and it will stay long. I don’t worry about all the things on the list because I know I can get only so much done in a day, a week, and so forth. I also know I’ll review the entire list periodically, always moving items from, say, page 7 up to the front page. Thus any anxiety stays at a rather low level.

Sometimes it’s One Thing, Sometimes Another

I keep the list on my computer—this is handy because virtually all word-processing programs contain word-search capabilities. If I’m working on something during the day and it appears there will be a breakthrough in my ability to tackle something else that’s buried on page 8 or 9 of my list, I have only to search for a word or phrase, and I quickly come to the item. There is no need to dig through the hundreds of items on the list.

Maintaining a long to-do list helps me become more proficient in managing long-term or repeated tasks. If I’m working on a long-term project, I can continually draw from it those portions that can be handled in the short-term; I move them up to the front page. Likewise, if a task is a repeat or cyclical project—something I have to do every month or every year—I can choose a portion to get done and move into the short-term (up to the front page).

Making an End Run Around Your To-Do List

On occasion, you can short-circuit the to-do list and get stuff done without even entering it on your list. Here’s how it works. Most people who encounter information worth retaining make a note or add it to a list; it may stay there for days or months. To deal with it faster, remember that useful information usually involves calling or writing to someone else. Rather than adding it to your to-do list try a fast-action option:

• Pick up a pocket dictator and fire off a letter, or do the same with voice-recognition software.
• Dictate or type a message on your computer for immediate transmission by fax, e-mail, or Internet message.

I was talking to someone who enjoyed the Readers’ Digest section in which one editor reviews vocabulary words from books he’s read. Many years ago, I would have made a note about this (and dealt with it in about six months, with any luck). Instead, I grabbed my pocket dictator and dictated a letter to the editor on the spot, indicating some words I thought his readers might enjoy. In cases like this, my transcriber types the letter and sends it to me on a disk; I copy it onto my hard disk and then send it. When I switch to voice-recognition software, (see Chapter 12) I won’t need a typist. Either way, I bypass the to-do list.

Good Old Paper and Pencil

If you already suffer from too much technology, there’s a simple system that will keep you on top of the goals that support your priorities. It works surprisingly well: Simply go to your nearest office-supply store and buy one of those washable wall charts or an oversized set of monthly calendars in cardboard stock or paper. Mount your calendars on the wall and use magic markers, washable felt-tip pens, sticky-note pads, gold stars, red seals, or what have you to represent what you want to accomplish by when. This isn’t news to you if you work in an office where any number of people, vehicles, or goods need to be scheduled for optimum efficiency. On a personal basis, such calendar plotting works well; you’re the boss of the calendar. Moving self-stick notes around is a one-second maneuver. High-tech or low-tech, do what works.