Procrastination Buster

There are many ways to beat procrastination, and I have dealt with quite a few in my books and on this blog. Here’s one which I don’t think I have written about before.

One way to get yourself moving on a task you don’t want to do is to use it as an avoidance activity for a task you are trying to avoid even more!

So for instance let’s see what happens if we have a hard task to do and several easy tasks. Our task list will look like this:

Hard Task
Easy Task 1
Easy Task 2
Easy Task 3

If we only have time to complete three out of the four tasks, there’s no prizes for guessing which task will get left undone!

But what happens if our task list looks like this?

Incredibly Hard Task
Extremely Hard Task
Very Hard Task
Hard Task

Which task is going to get done first? Yes, suddenly the Hard Task seems relatively easy and becomes the most attractive. The difficulty of a task is relative to the difficulty of the other tasks one has to do.

We can take advantage of this to process our to do list. The simplest technique is to start at the top of the list and do either the first item or the next item. We are presenting ourselves with two items, and chosing one. One will appear to be easier relative to the other, so we will do that one. Once we’ve done that item, we move on to the next item and compare it in the same way with the following item. Again, we make a choice between the two items and do the one we prefer. We carry on in the same way to the end of the list.

Once we’ve reached the end of the list we go through it again. This time of course the items are the ones we rejected the first time so they are more difficult than on the first pass. However we continue to compare one item with the next item, and do the easier. We are constantly doing the easier or more attractive of two items.

The mental effect of doing it this way is that we fool ourselves into thinking that we are always doing the easy item. They may in absolute terms be getting more difficult, but relatively they are the easy ones.

This technique is designed for use with an open list to which you are adding new items as you go along. There is of course no need to use it with a closed list because you can simply do the easiest items first anyway.

What It Takes to Be a Successful Coach

I wrote this article several years ago about coaching. However most of what I said applies to other businesses too, and bears repeating.

During the time I have been a coach, I have been regularly astonished by two things. The first is how little some quite well-known coaches are earning after years of being a coach. The second is how quickly some other people start earning large sums of money at coaching.

I have noticed that it is frequently possible to identify the people who are going to “fly” the second they come onto the scene, well before they start being successful.

So here is a list of things I think these people have in common. Not all of them of course will have all these qualities in equal measure, and I am sure there are other factors which I have omitted.

* They see coaching as a business, and take a business attitude to it.

* They are quite clear about what they want to achieve, and work to long-term (3-5 years) rather than short-term goals.

* They know it takes time and effort to build a business, and they start putting that time and effort in straightaway.

* They adequately fund their business.

* They are confident in their own abilities, particularly their business abilities.

* They concentrate more on improving their business than on improving their coaching (though obviously the two go hand-in-hand; it is a matter of emphasis).

* They see marketing as their number one priority.

* They find ways very early on of distinguishing themselves from the common herd.

* And without any exception I can think of, they are excellent public speakers.

It all goes back to what I’ve written before: our profession is coaching; our business is selling coaching services.

Dieting and Health

An article Advocacy for Whom? on Sandy Szwarc’s blog Junkfood Science has given me furiously to think. An excerpt:

… the strongest evidence for more than half a century is that voluntary weight loss, regardless of the method, is associated with increased rates of premature deaths, heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and cancers — by as much as several hundred percent, as the National Institutes of Health found in 1992 and the medical literature continues to support. The other problems that have been documented include the physiological effects of restrictive eating, dieting and weight loss, such as eating disorders, diminished mental acuity and work productivity, loss of concentration, nutritional shortages, reduced bone mass, cardiac arrhythmias, long-term exacerbation of high blood pressure and long-term weight gain.

The medically-documented consequences of inadequate calories, protein and deficiencies in nutrients, especially being seen among older people, include delayed wound healing, increased risks of infection, damaged heart and intestinal functions, longer hospital stays and higher rates of complications and higher mortality rates, depression, apathy, functional decline, loss of muscle strength, falls and increased fractures.

No one dies of fat, but they do from weight stigma. And they do die from bariatric surgeries, which bring objectively documented risks of dying far and above those even associated with the most “morbid obesity.”

The whole article is well worth reading.

New Technology

Do you have trouble keeping up with new technology?

Never fear, it’s been the same all through history:

How to Solve Problems

Here’s a relatively simple method of gaining insight into problems that face us. Often the reason we can’t solve a problem is that we don’t concentrate on it long enough to look at it from enough different angles or give our brains time to process our ideas subconsciously.

Step One

Take a sheet of paper and write across the top “Questions I could ask myself about this problem include…..”

Then write down as quickly as possible between six and twelve different ways of finishing that sentence. Don’t think too much about what you write — the aim here is quantity not quality.

To take an example (completely fictitious of course!), I have a problem keeping my desk tidy. So I might write:

Questions I could ask myself about this problem….

• why is this problem happening?
• why does it matter?
• how could I overcome it?
• what problems does it cause?
• who could help me overcome it?
• what benefit am I getting out of it?
• why is it so difficult to be tidy?
• and so on…..

Put the sheet of paper away and go through Step One again the following day on a fresh sheet of paper without looking at the first sheet. You will probably find that you can find another six or more endings without duplicating anything you wrote the day before.

Step Two

Take both sheets of paper and extract from them the four or five questions that you feel are most helpful, relevant or useful. Then rewrite them as sentences for completion. So for example I might end up with the following list:

• Reasons this problem is happening might include….
• This problem matters because…..
• One way of overcoming this would be…..
• The benefits I get out of being untidy include….

Then do a similar exercise to Step One but this time use each of the sentences you have just written. Again aim to write between six and twelve endings to each sentence. Then put your sheet of paper away for 24 hours and do the exercise again. You will probably find that your insights have developed overnight.

You can do this for several days running if you have the time and the problem is not too pressing.

Step Three

Examine all the ideas you have written out and decide which ones you are going to put into effect.

Absorb Information Like Never Before

Have you ever had the experience of reading a book, listening to a presentation or watching a TV programme and discovering at the end that you could hardly remember any of the points made? If someone had asked you to summarise what had been said, you wouldn’t have known where to start.

Well, if that has happened to you it’s nothing to be surprised about … it’s a common enough experience. It’s due to the fact that our brains are excellent filters of incoming information and only let through what is of interest to us. It has to be that way or we would be overwhelmed with information. But it causes a problem when the filter isn’t set quite right and filters out material that we really do need.

So say for example that we have a textbook to read for an exam. How do we set our filter so that the information goes in, rather than getting ejected because our brain thinks it’s dull or uninteresting?

The answer is to ask ourselves questions about it. Before starting to read the textbook, spend a moment or two completing the sentence “Questions I could ask myself about this material include…. ”

Then take the 4 or 5 best questions you have come up with and jot down some answers to them off the top of your head. Don’t worry about whether the answers make sense or not… the important thing is to get your brain engaging with the subject. Only then start reading the text.

Once you have finished reading, you can go through the same procedure quickly again. That will help to fix the material in your mind.

In this way you can engage with the material both before and after you read it. If it’s a really complicated document, like the textbook in my example, you could repeat this procedure before each chapter or section.

There are many other ways that you can use this method…. before a client interview, before taking a test drive on a new car, before visiting a famous tourist site and so on ….. use your imagination!

Hard Thinking

There is probably no activity which is more needed and which more easily gets shunted out of the way by other activities than thinking. I used to come across client after client who has made themselves so busy that they did’t have time to think. And often the reason that they were so busy was precisely that they don’t give themselves time to think. Because, if they had, they would have thought more carefully about the consequences of each new activity they took on.

If you are the owner of your own business, then thinking is absolutely essential. You cannot afford to get so immersed in the day to day running of your business that you don’t take time to think about the strategic questions such as where you are going and what aspects of your business you should be concentrating on. If you are an executive, you are paid to do many things but the most important one is thinking. The same applies if you are an engineer or a technician. And if you are an administrator then the efficiency of the systems you run will reflect the quality of thought that has gone into them.

The truth is that there is hardly an issue in the world which won’t start to yield to hard, disciplined, focused thought. That is how we conquered diseases, put men on the moon, invented modern communications and countless other aspects of our world today. Unfortunately the same quality of thought that went into the development of these things often hasn’t gone into how we make use of them.

On a smaller scale there is hardly an issue in your life and work which won’t start to improve if you begin to put hard, disciplined, focused thought into it. The trouble is that what thinking we do do is often more like daydreaming. Real thinking needs to be undertaken as a purposeful activity. So instead of drifting off into a “wouldn’t it be nice/terrible if….” fantasy, you allot a specific period of time to work out the answers to such questions as what direction your business should be going over the next few years, or how to improve the invoicing system, or what activities you can drop in order to allow you to spend more time with your children. Clear questions produce good answers.

There are many and varied techniques for thinking. But the fact that you do it at all is more important than precisely how you do it. For example, one of the reasons why writing a checklist is so useful is that it forces you to spend a little bit of time thinking about what you are going to do before you do it. It also reinforces the message that even the simplest actions repay being thought about.

One of the most fruitful things you can do in your life is to schedule some uninterrupted thinking time, preferably every day. Earl Nightingale, the co-founder of Nightingale-Conant, used to recommend spending a whole hour alone with a writing pad first thing every morning. It certainly paid dividends in his own life, and on the occasions I have done the same I have been amazed at how fruitful my thinking has become. But an hour a day is probably unrealistic for most of us. So how about half an hour? or even fifteen minutes?

Whether you decide to do this or something similar is up to you. But ask yourself the question “If my life is not the way I want it to be, how much thought have I actually put into the way I live?”

What You Don't Want

I’ve often said that one of the best ways to find out what you really want is to start with what you don’t want. I’d like to explore this theme a little further in this posting.

There is something about asking for what we want that attracts a lot of negativity in our present-day culture. Many of us remember childhood sayings like “Those that ask don’t get”, or we remember that we were made to feel selfish when we expressed our wants. So it is not too surprising perhaps that for many people it is incredibly difficult to come to a satisfactory answer to the question “What do you really want?” When we do succeed in answering the question clearly and without reservation it has the effect of bringing a much greater focus to our energy.

However the effect of this childhood and cultural conditioning is that most of us find it much easier to identify what we don’t want than what we do want. The secret is to take what we don’t want and then turn it into the positive opposite.

So, to take an example, at work you might find yourself saying: “I am always getting interrupted when I am trying to concentrate on my work.” And sometimes we can go on saying that for years without doing anything about it!

The first step is to identify what you don’t want. This is pretty obvious: “I don’t want to be constantly interrupted when I am trying to concentrate on my work.” However note that this is a much more powerful statement than “I am always getting interrupted.” Once you have identified it as something you don’t want, as opposed to something you are merely complaining about, there is a much greater likelihood of your doing something about it.

Step two is to identify the positive opposite. What is the positive opposite for you of being constantly interrupted? Note that I said “for you” — we are not looking for the exact grammatical opposite but what it would mean for you. So you might say “to have a uninterrupted couple of hours every day during which I can really concentrate on my work.”

Compare the effect that each of the following statements is likely to have:

“I’m always getting interrupted when I’m trying to concentrate on my work”

“I don’t want to be constantly interrupted when I am trying to concentrate on my work.”

“I want an uninterrupted couple of hours every day during which I can really concentrate on my work”.

Which statement is most likely to result in your being able to concentrate on your work without interruptions?

Changing the Past?

I’ve spend quite a bit of time over the years talking about the importance of making decisions, and how to keep to them. And today I want to return to the subject.

One of the problems most of us face is that we are so busy dealing with everyday decisions that we never take the time to make the strategic decisions that are really going to make a difference. Well here’s a little exercise in two parts to look at those decisions. Set aside a few minutes to do it.

** First Part **

Think back to what you were doing five years ago in 2002 and imagine that you had the power to go back and make all the decisions that you didn’t make then. What would you chose to change?

What you may realise is that the decisions you were making five years ago (or failing to make) have had a profound effect on the way you live now. They might have been decisions to sort out a relationship, or to change jobs, or to have a medical checkup, or to lose weight, or to give up smoking, or to learn a new skill, or to get fit. With any of these, if you had put them into effect five years ago you would now be reaping the benefits. How might yourlife be different now?

** Second Part **

Imagine that you’re five years in the future in 2012 and you are looking back doing the same exercise. What are the decisions that you wished you had made in 2007?

Well, this time you CAN go back and make those decisions… you can make them right now!

Positive Thinking or What?

We are often told about the benefits of positive thinking but I have to admit I have always been a little bit sceptical on the subject. When I tell myself that I am incredibly successful, intelligent, attractive, etc. there’s always a little voice inside of me going “Oh, yeah?”

The fact is that we always know subconsciously when we are trying to fool ourselves, and the danger is that all we succeed in doing is hypeing ourselves up in preparation for an inevitable fall.

It’s much better to build on what we have achieved and to reinforce the successes that we really have had. However bad our day, however much we may have behaved like a loser, there are always some things that we have done well. So rather than dwell on the failures let’s seek out and reinforce our successes.

Here’s an exercise to help us do just that:

Every evening sit down and draw up a list of the things we have done well during the day. It doesn’t matter how small or big they are. Just make a list. Get between 6 and 12 items. Then take each item in turn and write it in general terms. So if one of your items was “I gave a good client presentation today”, write down “I give great client presentations”. Then repeat it to yourself.

The difference between this and positive thinking is that you are not trying to persuade yourself of something you don’t really believe is true. Instead you are reinforcing something you have just proved is true!

Take the Brakes Off!

There are all sorts of reasons why the thought of success is frightening. We may be afraid of being taken beyond our comfort zones or of getting out of our depth. We may expect the reward for our hard work in doing a difficult job will be even harder work at an even more difficult job. We may believe that to be successful will mean our friends and family will be jealous and won’t like us any more. And so on.

Of course some of these reasons are perfectly valid. If we are willing to face up to them and acknowledge them, then we are able to act appropriately.

The problem comes when we don’t face up to these reasons and fail to acknowledge them. Then they continue to affect us subconsciously and we wonder why we never seem to be able to live up to what we believe should be our real potential.

What often happens is that we are forging forward with the brakes still firmly on!

The more I explore the subjects of time management and personal organisation the more convinced I become that most of our problems in these fields are simply ways we have devised of braking our performance, of limiting ourselves.

Imagine that you are your Unconscious Mind and your mission is to invent ways of keeping your performance within safe limits. What sort of things would you come up with? Here are just a few suggestions:

• Take on too many responsibilities
• Avoid setting up efficient systems
• Never discuss your workload with your boss
• Make sure your attention is continually distracted throughout the day
• Don’t delegate
• Don’t follow up
• Reduce your mental efficiency by not taking breaks
• Reduce your mental efficiency by not taking exercise
• Never do anything immediately.
• Spend lots of time daydreaming but don’t take any action to turn your daydreams into reality.
• Spend lots of time worrying but don’t take any action to address what you are worrying about
• And, at all costs, avoid purposeful focused thinking like the plague.

Exercise

Spend a bit of time having a look at the brakes you have constructed on your own success. There are probably quite a few of them. They may be in the list above or they may be completely different. Our unconscious minds are extremely inventive!

The good news is that once you have acknowledged that you are deliberately (though unconsciously) putting the brakes on, you can deliberately (and consciously) choose to take the brakes off. This is best done one brake at at time. Ask yourself “What is the biggest brake I am putting on my performance at the moment?” and go all out to take it off.

In praise of doing nothing

Last week I decided to write a posting on the subject of doing nothing, but succeeded in living my subject so well that the posting didn’t appear at all!

As a time management “expert” I find that a large proportion of people who come to me for advice want to know how to DO more things or DO them better or DO them more efficiently. While to me it’s often totally obvious that what they really need to learn is how to do LESS things or, even better, how to do NOTHING. They are so busy cramming more and more things into their lives that the very idea of doing nothing would never enter their heads.

So let’s look at some of the advantages of doing nothing:

• It’s cheap — it doesn’t cost anything at all to do nothing.
  
• In fact it’s better than cheap. You will be much more productive if you build some time for doing nothing into your life.
  
• Doing nothing is an excellent way of re-connecting with yourself.
  
• Doing nothing with someone you love is great.
  
• Doing nothing means you let things happen at their own pace rather than force them.
  
• Deliberately doing nothing is often the best choice when you are uncertain how to proceed.
  
• Deliberately doing nothing allows you to get to what I call the “point of power” — that moment when the time is right and you just gotta do it — the point where your action just seems to happen by itself.
  
• Doing nothing allows you to experience BEING.

Exercise

In the next few days, try building some time for doing nothing into your life. A whole day spent deliberately doing nothing can be a wonderfully re-charging experience. But even ten minutes here and there can make a real difference.

Of course the only time you can really literally do nothing at all is when you are dead. You will always be doing something, even if it is only breathing. But the important thing about doing nothing in the sense in which I am using the expression is that you are not trying to achieve anything. The best activities for doing nothing are things like going for a stroll in the open air, chatting with a friend or loved one, reading a novel, doing a bit of gardening, meditating, looking at a beautiful view, that sort of thing. Above all they should be things that you are engaging in for their own sake, not because they lead somewhere else.

What Feelings Are You Creating Right Now?

Imagine you come across a traffic jam when you are already running late for an appointment. How do you react? If you are like most people, you will go “Oh, no!” and sit there fuming and cursing the traffic. As a result when you do finally get through the hold-up and arrive at your appointment you are hot and flustered and hardly capable of giving a good impression.

There is an alternative way to react which is to sit there calmly and just accept the situation. OK, so you may be a few minutes late, but at least you will be cool, calm and collected when you do arrive and can get down to business straight away.

Very often it’s not the problem that is the problem, but our reaction to it.

When I broke my hip a few years ago and found that I was going to be on crutches for over a month, I could have regarded it as a disaster. Certainly I had to struggle with my feelings quite a bit at first, but I knew that it would only be a disaster if I made it into a disaster. So rather than focus on what I couldn’t do, I put my entire focus into what I could do. The result was that I had one of the most creative and successful times of my working life.

One of the most useful tools I discovered to keep my attitude right was the question “What feelings am I creating right now?” It made me aware whenever I started to create a disaster scenario, which incidentally included an entire alternative universe of the things I could have been doing if I hadn’t had the accident!

Why not ask yourself this question this very moment as you are reading this blog posting? “What feelings am I creating right now?” Are you interested and inspired or bored and distracted? Some people reading this will be one thing, others another. This posting is exactly the same newsletter for all of you. How you react to it is your own creation.

Feelings are important. They are what distinguish us from robots or computers. How else would we know what to do? Without feelings there would be no way of telling what is valuable to us or not. A computer has no feelings. It couldn’t care less whether it’s word-processing, signing on to the web, adding figures or running a game. Can you imagine your computer complaining because you use it to play too many games or getting upset because you don’t spend enough time with it? No, if there’s going to be any complaining it will come from one of the humans in your life!

So the question “What feelings am I creating right now?” helps us to identify which feelings are useful to us and which aren’t. The process of observation in itself helps us to dissociate from harmful feelings and make them more manageable. The question also points us towards accepting responsibility for our feelings. We run them – they don’t run us!

Think back to a time recently when you got upset about something. Imagine yourself back in the situation and ask yourself the question “What feelings am I creating right now?” You may become aware for the first time that it wasn’t the situation that was upsetting you. It was you who was upsetting yourself over the situation. You could have reacted in a different way. And if you had you would probably have been able to deal with the situation more constructively.

New Search Box

Have a try with the new search box (at the top of the left-hand margin). It’s a new facility introduced by Squarespace, who host this blog.

Because this is an internal Squarespace facility, it means that the contents of the blog and the rest of the site can be indexed as soon as they are published. This means that searches are always completely up-to-date and also very fast. This simply can’t be matched by the Google search box which I was using before.

"Who Am I?"

When we are facing a challenge or have a goal that we intend to accomplish, we are used to asking ourselves the questions: “What do I want to achieve?” and “How can I do that?”. But there is one question that we rarely ask ourselves, and that is “Who do I need to become in order to achieve this?”

So often we think that by changing our circumstances we can change ourselves,but the truth is the other way round: if we change ourselves the circumstances will follow. Otherwise we may succeed in changing the circumstances, only to find that we taken our old self with us.

Whenever you catch yourself saying “if only….” then it is a pretty good indicator that you are blaming the circumstances rather than working on yourself. It doesn’t matter what it is:

“If only I’d had a decent education”
“If only my boss appreciated my work”
“If only I was married/single”
“If only I had known this when I was younger”
“If only I could get lucky”

Let’s take as an example that you have a desire to set up your own company. Ask yourself the question “Who would I need to be to achieve this?”

List the qualities you think you would need, for example: persistence, well-organized, persuasive, etc. etc.

Now act as though you were that person. Use the power of “I am” statements to re-educate yourself about your own qualities. “I am persistent”. “I am well-organized”, “I am persuasive”.

Consequences

One of my favourite movies is Groundhog Day with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. If you’ve seen it you’ll remember that it’s about a cynical tv reporter who is sent to cover an annual small-town Groundhog Day ceremony and finds himself reliving his day over and over again. After hundreds of different variations on how his day turns out, Bill Murray’s character becomes a better person, wins Andie MacDowell’s heart and is released from the cycle.

The great message I got from the movie was the difference even our smallest actions make. It’s rather unfashionable these days to think that our actions have consequences. But the truth is that there is no such thing as an action without consequences. Even doing nothing has consequences, often quite dire ones!

It is an excellent idea to get into the habit of thinking about the consequences of our actions. And to realise that most of the things that we like and dislike in our lives are the consequences of our previous actions… or lack of them. Of course there are vast numbers of things that happen to us every day that are out of our control, but it’s our reaction to them that makes all the difference.

So let’s take a few examples. If you are in debt and have money troubles, it’s the consequence of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little actions in which you have spent more than you had available. If you are overweight and unfit, again it is the consequence of a long series of decisions to eat too much and to take too little exercise. And eventually this chain may lead to a complete breakdown of your health.

So you might like to try this exercise. Tomorrow spend some time consciously looking at your actions and asking yourself: “What would be the long-term consequences of doing this?”. So for instance if you are tempted to skip your daily exercise session, ask yourself what the consequence of taking your exercise would be: feeling more alive during the day, a sense of achievement, establishing a good habit, making yourself healthier, stronger and more resilient.

What on the other hand would be the consequences of not taking your exercise? Feeling guilty and lethargic, a sense of failure, getting fatter, weaker and more pathetic in every way!

Faced with those two visions, which are you going to go for?

How to get where you want to be

Let’s take an example of a set of goals which someone might draft for themselves for a three to five year time horizon:

1. To set up a training institute for self-development courses.

2. To recruit and train associates for duplicating the business.

3. To purchase a suitable property in a historic building.

4. To apply the 80/20 principle to clients to increase their profitability by 300%.

5. To improve working systems so that personal efficiency in increased by 60%.

6. To design and implement a health and physical fitness regime with the intention of increasing effectiveness and life-span.

These goals are ambitious… achievable. BUT…………

……………. are they BORING or WHAT??

Contrast those goals with this verbal picture:

“I am working in my office in my castle which has a magnificent panoramic view over a bay with yellow sand and a blue sea. It is a warm sunny climate and the light has a wonderful luminous quality about it. My office is a large airy room with a stone floor and walls with tapestries hanging on them. There is a sense of spaciousness, calm and purposefulness — it feels like the hub of the universe. It is a beautiful place. I have twenty clients who are paying me a total of $1 million a year, with a waiting list of the rich and famous who want me as their adviser. A little further down the hill is my
highly profitable training institute, where people are being trained to take my methods into the world. It is run for me by a team of enthusiastic trainers. I live a completely integrated life and achieve everything I set out to do with the greatest economy and creative power. I have great fun doing this and love my work and my life as a whole. I am changing the lives of thousands and am a major influence in the world. I am in total health and look and feel younger than I did ten years previously — and am much fitter than I was then.”

Both the goals and the picture say much the same thing, but which would YOUR mind get enthused by? If you are like most people, there’s no contest. The picture wins every time.

Why? Because all the goals are seen as part of an undivided IMAGE and not separate unrelated items on a list. And because that whole is described in terms of how it will FEEL when you have it.

Exercise:

Select a time horizon of three to five years, and then describe what you would like your life to be like then. Describe it as a snapshot. And, as in the example above, include all the elements that you want to be present. Make sure that you only describe what you DO want, not what you DON’T want. And describe your feelings about it so that it is so REAL you can almost reach out and touch it. Then put your draft away in a drawer.

Bring it out a few days later and see how you feel about what you wrote. Rewrite anything you want to and put it away again. Do this at regular intervals so that you sharpen up your vision and make it something you are really happy to be aiming for.

The Menu of Life

There’s a big myth about the modern age which is that we all have to work much harder than we ever did before. We hear about the frantic pace of the modern workplace, etc. etc. Frankly it’s a load of hooey — as any description of the working conditions of ordinary people more than seventy or so years ago will tell you. I still have the letters my grandmother wrote home to my great-grandmother in England, when she was out in Canada during the First World War. My grandparents were farming out on the Alberta plains on land recently opened up by the Canadian Pacific Railway. With four small children in a wood cabin in the middle of the prairie, she just worked solidly from the time she got up in the morning (about 4 or 5) till the time she went to bed at night (about 11 or 12) seven days a week with no holidays. And my grandfather did the same, out on the prairie in all weathers.

So where did this myth come from that we are all overworked these days as a result of the pace of modern life? Well, it’s certainly true that many of us spend our time rushing around constantly busy. But rush and busyness don’t necessarily equal productive work (or play).

One of the very real differences between life today and life in olden times is that we have far more choice. My grandparents had very little choice about how they spent their days. Everything they did was necessary if they were going to survive — there were no distractions like computer games or tv or the internet. They couldn’t just even get in a car and go off to the cinema. No car, no cinema. Life for them, and for most working people, was like the fixed menu in a restaurant. If you were lucky you might get one or two choices but for the most part you ate what you were given and got on with it.

These days life for most of us is like being presented with an enormous restaurant menu with hundreds of choices. Most of them sound mouthwatering and making up our minds is really difficult.

In a real restaurant when we are presented with a huge menu like this we know that, however much we dither, we have got to make up our minds what we are going to have. Usually we will choose a starter, a main course and a dessert.

However when we are presented with the menu of life, instead of selecting a starter, a main course and dessert from all the hundreds of choices, we behave as if we had to eat the whole menu!

So it’s not surprising that we end up rushed off our feet. We commit ourselves to so many things that there is no possibility that we can do all of them. Unlike my grandparents, who had to work incredibly long and hard hours, our rushing around is a self-inflicted injury.

The next time you find yourself complaining how busy you are, think about the restaurant menu and ask yourself how many courses you are trying to cram into your current meal. Are you trying to have five starters, ten main courses and six desserts? No wonder you are having difficulty cramming it all in!

So make a start on cutting your commitments back to a make a meal that you stand some chance of being able to digest. And remember — when you have finished one meal, you can always come back and have another!

If you could just do one thing...

As I have often written, one of the most fundamental principles of good time management is to aim to do a few things well, rather than lots of things badly.

This however raises the question of how to select those few things out of the multitude of different choices that we are all faced with these days.

Here is a technique which can help you with this selection process. You can apply it to any time period, ranging from “What do I want to achieve in the rest of my life?” down to “What do I want to achieve in the next five minutes?”

Let’s take the example of a year. The technique is simply to ask yourself the question “If I could only achieve one thing by this time next year, what would it be?” Really think about the answer to this. If you have several contenders then imagine yourself in a year’s time and ask yourself which would give you most satisfaction to look back on.

Once you have got the answer, then ask yourself “If I could achieve one other thing this year, what would it be?” Keep asking yourself this question until you have about five items on it on your list. The exact number is up to you of course, but it is essential that you do not put down more items than you would have time to do properly. So you now have a list of essential goals for the coming year that you should actually have time to do!

Keep this list where you can see it, and firmly resist all attempts by yourself or others to add commitments to the list. Next year of course you can make a new list!

Exactly the same technique can be used to set yourself clear goals for the coming week. Just ask yourself the question “If I could only achieve one thing this week, what would it be?” and then repeat the process as before. Resist the temptation to add more items than you would definitely have time to do.

And again you can use it for your goals for the day. You might prefer to use the word “do” rather than “achieve”. So the question would be “If I could only do one thing today, what would it be?”. And make up your list by repeating the process in the same way.

A variation on this which is very effective is not to write up a list for the whole day at once, but to keep asking the question as you go along in order to decide what to do next. So part of your day might go something like this:

Q. If I could only do one thing today, what would it be?

A. Get the finished proposal to the clients. [Take action to do this]

Q. If I could only do one more thing today, what would it be?

A. Ring John back before he goes on holiday. [Do that]

[and so on]

The "What's Better?" List

Many people who have read my book How To Make Your Dreams Come True have written to say how powerful they have found the “What’s Better?” technique which is mentioned in the book.

So for those of you who haven’t read the book yet (and for those who have and would like a bit more about it), I thought I’d say a few words about the technique here.

The idea is quite simple. At the end of each day you spend a few moments sitting down and compiling a list of everything that’s been better about the day. Not, note, what’s been good about the day, but what has been better about the day.

It’s entirely up to you to decide what you mean by the word “better” — don’t get hung up on trying to find a precise definition. Anything that strikes you as better in any sense of the word can go on the list. Also don’t get hung up on the question “better than what?”. Better than anything you like is the answer. It might be better than yesterday; it might be better than ever; it might be better than the last time you tried; better than the worst you could imagine; better than the best you could imagine — whatever!

The point of the exercise is that it gets your mind off your problems and onto the growth points in your life. It’s a well-known fact that what we focus on tends to increase. So if you focus on problems, your mind will oblige by providing plenty more problems for you to deal with. What is the average to do list but a list of problems? — clear email backlog, sort out client records, fix broken lamp, trace missing payment, etc, etc. Give yourself a list of problems, and how do you feel? Depressed, that’s how!

And have you ever noticed that for every item you cross off a to do list you add another two? So you’ve not only got a depressing list of problems to deal with, it’s one that’s growing twice as fast as you are actioning it — no wonder that so often we feel that we are caught on a treadmill that’s moving faster than we can keep up.

On the other hand, if you tell your mind to look out for what’s better, it will oblige by creating more things that are better. So you have a increasing list of things that are getting better and better. And that’s not depressing — it’s exhilarating!

It’s great to finish the day in this way by writing a list of everything you can think of that’s better. But another use of the technique (which you can use at the same time) is to monitor specific projects. So say for instance that you have a project to reorganise your office. You’ve been putting it off and in the meantime the office has got more and more disorganised.

Each day you must write down at least one thing about your office that is better. You may have quite a struggle some days but there is always something that is better — even if it’s something minute like “that paperclip is now in the right place.” Ignore anything that’s got worse, just concentrate on the things that are better. What you will probably find is that your mind starts to create things that are better. And before you know it your office will be immaculately organised. Try it and see!