CHAPTER 7
Say ‘NO’ for now
So far, we have said almost nothing about timing. But when you do something can matter a lot, so this chapter is about when to say ‘YES, now’ and when to say ‘NO, not now’. It is also about how to use the time constructively, when you put things off and procrastinate with a purpose.
Time-critical and time-charmed activities
The term ‘time management’ is a misnomer: you cannot manage time. It isn’t possible. All that you can do is manage how you use the time you have available to you (I give you many, many, strategies and tools in one of my earlier books, Brilliant Time Management).
With some activities, you have no discretion about how you use your time – you must do them now. If you don’t, you will either not be able to get them done or, if you do, their value will be diminished. These are ‘time-critical’ activities. Others are more generous or forgiving to you – you can do them when you choose. And often, if you choose well, you can make it easier or more effective to do them, or you can do them better, by virtue of when you chose to do them. These are ‘time-charmed’ activities.
Time-critical activities
Some activities dictate when they need to get done. When you are faced with an imminent deadline or a crisis, you have to act now. If you don’t, all will be lost. Interruptions are also time-critical: you have deal with them when they occur. In all of these cases, events choose the timing.
Some things that are not time-critical in themselves create time-critical activities once you start them. Baking a cake is not time-critical, but when you put a cake in the oven, then taking it out becomes a time-critical task. On a larger scale, once your child is old enough to go to nursery or school, collecting them at the end of the day is time-critical.
Some would say a ringing phone is time-critical. ‘Answer me now’, it says. However, the advent of answerphones and voicemail made phone conversations a time-charmed activity. You can always call back.
Time-critical activities rob you of some of your control and are thus potentially stress-inducing. Because you have no choice about when you do them, you must exert control in other ways.
Choice Number 1: Say ‘NO’ to it
The first question to ask yourself is whether to do it at all. If it is a guilt-directed activity, then your best option is to make a Noble Objection and decline to do it.
Choice Number 2: Cut it down in size
If you don’t ditch it, ask yourself how much time you need to invest in it. If it is an urgent call or a vital meeting, can you conduct it quickly, focusing only on the one issue that makes it time-critical? If it is a report your boss needs in 45 minutes, how can you cut out some unnecessary components while preserving the essential content for the decision at hand?
Choice Number 3: Give it away
Maybe there is someone else who could do it equally well – or even better than you could. Is there someone to whom you could delegate the activity, who has more time available, has more to learn by doing it, or who could find better ways to do it? If there is, it’s time to go and talk with them.
Choice Number 4: Say ‘YES’ and get on with it
The reality of work is that many of your responsibilities will be time-critical. And these are your jobs, and they need to be done in full. So recognise that you will, of course, be faced by time-critical requirements that you can’t evade in any way. You said ‘yes’ to them when you chose your job and signed your contract, so stop whingeing and get on with them. Plan your days so that you have time for them. But don’t just say ‘yes’, say ‘YES, now’.
Time-charmed activities
Time-charmed activities are wonderful – you are completely in control. You can do them when you choose and, often, by choosing well, you can do them better or more quickly, or more cheaply.
Often, things that appear time-critical today were time-charmed four weeks ago. But you failed to use the advantage that you had to choose your timing, so now the requirement has crept up on you and, whoosh, it’s time-critical.
However, it is equally a mistake to automatically tackle a time-charmed task as soon as you become aware of it. That is Gopher behaviour. Instead, when you get a time-charmed request or requirement, log it. You may use an electronic or computer-based organiser, a To Do list in your notebook or on a scrap of paper, or your memory. Whichever it is, save it until your next planning time, and decide when to do it. Your principal strategy for time-charmed activities is the next choice.
Choice Number 5: Schedule it
Scheduling is key to good management of how you use your time to do the things you must or choose to do. Once you have mastered the power of the Noble Objection, no other process will give you as much control of your time.
We will look at planning time and how to schedule time-charmed activities effectively in the next chapter, under ‘Planning for YES’.
For most of us, checking and dealing with e-mails is a time-charmed activity. If you accidentally turn it into a time-critical activity by leaving your e-mail program open or, worse, having it give you an alert on screen, whenever an e-mail arrives, you are giving people control over your time. Instead, open your e-mail program once or twice a day and work through your messages then. You will save a lot of time by not switching from one activity to another constantly throughout the day.
If an activity is both goal-orientated and time-charmed it demands only the best from you: high-quality, focused attention. There are two types of focused attention, which are explored below.
Type 1 focused attention: planned investment
These are scheduled activities for which you have set aside sufficient time to concentrate on doing them well.
Type 2 focused attention: serendipitous displacement
Displacement activities are things you do instead of something else you also ‘should’ be doing. However, if you take up a displacement activity that is important to you and therefore goal-directed, and the moment is right, you can be highly creative, intensely focused and make great progress. These are therefore moments of good fortune arising from a chance recognition that you can seize your opportunity – serendipity.
The definition of ‘serendipitous displacement’ is this:
‘Serendipitous displacement is doing something instead of what you ‘should’ be doing because, by good fortune, you realise there will not be a better time to tackle it.’
Special time
There are some times in your week that are particularly well suited to focused attention, whether Type 1 or Type 2. I call these moments ‘special time’. There are five types of special time.
- Golden hour: Most of us have a special time during the day when we are absolutely at our peak of energy and creativity, when work just flows easily. For me, it is the first (early) hour of the day after I’ve made a cup of tea. For you it may be the last.
- Prime time: Prime times are those slots in the day when you know your energy will be high, which you set aside for important or difficult work or other activities.
- Creative time: Some people are able to build the conditions they need for peak creativity. Choosing the right time and place for this is important. It may be while you are day-dreaming on the bus, sitting at a café enjoying a bun, or once you’ve stepped into your shower. Let your thoughts wander and listen to your insights.
- The next bend: Set aside an hour – or at least 30 minutes – in your working week to take yourself off quietly to think about what is coming around the next bend. What are you and your colleagues missing when your heads are buried in the time-critical priorities?
- Focus time: The gaps between activities – like the 15 minutes before a meeting you’ve arrived early for – are moments of pure freedom. You have nothing you must do, so you can choose one thing and focus on it totally. These can be very productive moments or, equally, very relaxing.
Time-expired activities
Have you ever been working your way through a backlog of work, or papers, or e-mails, and found a bunch of things for which it is too late? You can’t do anything now, they are time-expired. Time-expired activities are wonderful.
The time to do them is never, the strategy is simple:
Choice Number 6: Ditch it now
There will be no value from doing it; no purpose can be served. Nobody will benefit if you do it and, fabulously, there will be no consequences if you do nothing. So that’s what you should do: nothing.
Time-expired activities will feature in the first of our two approaches to saying ‘NO’ for now, ‘purposive procrastination’.
Purposive procrastination
We first met purposeless procrastination in Chapter 3, and tackled it fully in Chapter 5. It is easy to be seduced into thinking that procrastination is a ‘bad thing’, and it is, if it is purposeless. But not if it is purposive – that is, if you put something off with conscious intent.
The definition of ‘purposive procrastination’ is this:
‘Purposive procrastination is putting something off because there will be a better time to tackle it.’
Purposive means acting with intention and design and your intention with purposive procrastination is to choose the right moment. Choosing the right moment allows for scheduling to take account of, for example:
- efficiencies of doing several like-things together
- effectiveness of doing things when you are prepared, with the right skills, tools, materials, or information
- convenience of doing something when it suits you – because, perhaps, you have cleared something more pressing
- coordination with other activities that need to proceed or succeed it
- respect for the availability of other people who need or want to contribute.
These are all examples of ‘Choice Number 5: Schedule it’, which you could equally label ‘put it off until the time is right’.
There is one other, slightly devious reason for purposive procrastination. You know there are some tasks that, if you put them off, will become time-expired before you get around to doing them. There are many e-mails or requests for help we receive that, if we tackle them now – as if they were time-critical – would chew up our time and cause us angst. Yet, if we consign them to purposive procrastination, we will find that next time we give them our attention it is too late.
A lot of my ‘don’t know correspondence’ goes into this category. I trust my unconscious mind and my intuition to nag me if the seminar details at the bottom of the pile are interesting or important enough to say ‘YES’ to, but, while I am undecided, they can stay there. When I have a regular clear out, I’ll see the date and instantly re-file it in the little round filing cabinet on the floor under my desk.
Choice Number 7: Put it off until the problem goes away
A cowardly alternative to a Noble Objection? Perhaps, but maybe it is a way of consigning a decision to your unconscious mind – a chance to sleep on it for a while.
Purposeful procrastination
Purposeful procrastination is also a good thing, but it differs from purposive procrastination. Purposeful means to do something with a definite purpose in mind.
The definition of ‘purposeful procrastination’ is this:
‘Purposeful procrastination is putting something off so that you can do something else instead.’
Serendipitous displacement, which we encountered under time-charmed activities, is an example of purposeful procrastination. You spot an opportunity to do something, or the mood seizes you, or you get a flash of inspiration. In that moment, you know following that mood is the best possible use of your time, so you choose to say ‘YES’ to it and purposefully postpone what you were going to be doing.
Beware false serendipity: is that desire to follow your mood really a unique opportunity or is it just a burst of desire to do something other than your goal-directed activity? As we saw, there is nothing wrong with the hedonism of desire-directed activities, but is the desire really for something insubstantial or inappropriate? How much value does it really have? Is it desire or displacement? Serendipitous or merely slacking?
Purposeful procrastination can also be a planned strategy. You might choose to delay doing something to create time for something else that is more pressing. This is our final choice.
Choice Number 8: Put it off to make space for something else
Creating time for an alternative activity that is either more opportune, more pressing, or more critical is just good basic time management: it is prioritisation.
Yes/No in an instant
What dictates when you do something? If it is events and circumstances, then the activity is time-critical; if it is you, then it is time-charmed. And if it is too late, it is time-expired. You have eight choices for what to do when faced with a request or a requirement.
- Say ‘NO’ to it.
- Cut it down in size.
- Give it away.
- Say ‘YES’ and get on with it.
- Schedule it (put it off until the time is right).
- Ditch it now.
- Put it off until the problem goes away.
- Put it off to make space for something else.
| Yes/No: | Will you take control of your time-critical activities? |
| Yes/No: | Will you use purposive procrastination to control the timing of time-charmed activities? |
| Yes/No: | Will you use purposeful procrastination to seize real opportunities to make a difference? |
| Yes/No: | Are you ready to put together everything you have learned so far? |