How to know what time it is when you don’t even know where you are.

Following up on the previous post on efficiency, I just want to point one other item out. I travel a lot. I mean a LOT. At one point, it was cheaper and easier just to fly around the world for 4 weeks straight than to return home between trips. I have to say, this is one area that the 4HWW doesn’t have quite figured out. How can you get to four hours a week when the plane flight itself (for business, mind you) is 12 hours long? Go figure.

One of the tools that I use while I’m traveling is the website at Weather and time. It’s often that I don’t know what time it is in my own city, but to know what it is when you are traveling is tough. Even more important is to know the time difference so that when you set up a call, with say, India, you realize that it’s 10 and a HALF hours ahead of the East Coast of the US. That’s right — it’s off by a half-hour increment. Some countries adjust their time zone up by 45 or 15 minute increments. Who came up with that?

Anyways, the website I mentioned above allows you to check not only the time and date, but also the weather in the some of the most important cities of the world. They have a particular fixation with Spain, and you can see all the time and date in all Spanish cities. But even better, when you get that information, you can print it so it appears on just one page. Slip it into your itinerary, and off you go.

Just make sure to miss the monsoon season in Mumbai. It ain’t pretty for us east coast US folks. Any other good tools or tips for the world traveler (or even for those that spend their time talking on the phone to other time zones)?

Quick bit on Microsourcing (yes, still a tease)

It’s been a short while since my last post, but let me tell you why: I’m still trying to figure out how to make Microsourcing work. The key idea with microsourcing is that you should break up any outsourcing task into small chunks that can quickly be outsourced, easily measured for results, and then paid in smaller increments. This should alleviate any of the problems traditionally associated with outsourcing: poor communicaton, poor control, and lack of visibility. But, that said, it’s hard to know just how small a task should be. So, I’m still working on that.

Get efficient. Do Online Printing.

But more to the point, I want to discuss what has recently been a bit of a god-send to us four-hour-a-weekers: online printing. What is online printing? To us 4HWWers, it’s a way of outsourcing your printing needs to a third party at a cost and complexity much lower than you can do on your own or with a local print shop. Online print shops, like PsPrint give small shops and small businesses (or the muse that you are creating) a way of delivering high-quality print products (such as business cards, brochures, flyers, posters, booklets, catalogs, CDs, and even things like calendars) with short-turn around times, online convenience, and very competitive prices.

I’ve worked with many local print shops, and while I always love the small guy, the truth of the matter is that they really can’t compete. I’ve been very frustrated by the large “print shop” chains that are even worse than Wal-mart equivalents since they are higher price, poor quality, worse service, and fewer offerings than the online print shops can offer. In truth, no traditional printer or local copy shop can really match the breadth, capability, price, and quality than online print shops can offer.

Here’s how I use them: need to quickly put together a booklet or flyer for an online product or print offering? Want to quickly put together some sales sheets for that muse you are working on? Need some business cards to create your in-person identity? Quickly put together a sketch, or even better, use the online design tools provided by these online printers to create custom print products in minutes. Many of these online printers offer customizable templates. Some even go an extra step and will handle mailing and deliver logistics for you as well, including providing mailing lists and custom mailing services.

Why am I saying this now? I’m still surprised at how little is mentioned about the power of the Internet not only for delivering online goods, but also for printing and distrbution of real-world items. Online print shops really provide a way of getting your ideas and concepts to market quickly…. and more importantly, keeping you to your four day a week goal.

I got a good comment yesterday from Jennifer @ LifeMuncher in response to yesterday’s post on more effective time management. Rather than reply as a comment (and leave it buried for everyone to find), I though it would make a good follow up post.

The question simply was: “What were some concrete examples of things that you’ve eliminated to get from 60+ hours to 20?”. The answer, in my case, pretty basic, but perhaps has to do with my specific work style, activities and business. But, here’s the details.

A case of Time ADHD

After I did my Time Audit, I found that my default work pattern / behavior was to work on tasks as they rose to the top of my pile or my “top of mind”. Basically, I was constantly putting out fires and shifting from one task to another. Ironically, by dealing with tasks this way, nothing ever got done. I spent more time just trying to get into one task and getting situated to be able to perform the work than actually doing the work. It was like a Work Buffet… all the work laid out in front of me like 400 food items at a buffet, with no specific time set up for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. I would just graze all day on work items until they got done, but at the end of the day, I would realize, “wow, did I really eat that much??”

Same goes for that style of work management. If you just deal with work items as a bunch of stuff and “graze” from one activity to another, you’ll realize at the end of the day that very little got done and, “wow, did I really waste that much time??”

So, when I finished my Time Audit, I realized that I easily wasted at least 20 hours in the week (that’s 4-5 hours a day) starting tasks that never got finished. If I can just focus on one task at a time and work on it until completion, then I have a chance of making that happen.

Forced Prioritization

Once I forced myself to put tasks on a spreadsheet, declare how long I think they should take, and then force myself to complete them within that time (or realize that I underestimated the time allotment), then things started to take shape. The first realization was that I had to prioritize tasks. Focus on the important, urgent tasks that had to get done. And then get them done in the most time-efficient manner. But, wait, did I really have to get that task done myself? I found that about 20-30% of my tasks I shouldn’t be doing at all. Whether it’s handling some customer situation or posting something online or writing up some document, if I had to put it in my spreadsheet and assign some time allotment, I got an opportunity to rethink things. Maybe I’ll give them to one of my work colleagues. Or maybe I’ll just not do it at all and see what happens. Or perhaps I’ll combine it with some other task and hope that it suffices.

Furthermore, being a perfectionist in this scenario does not help at all. The important thing is to get things done. Yes, things have to be done satisfactorily (in the eyes of the beholder), but that does not mean perfectly. The difference between Getting Things Done and Getting Things Done Perfectly is huge. The combination of Forced Prioritization, Getting things Off the Stack, and Focusing on Getting Things Done (Good Enough) really squeezed another 10 hours out of the week.

Distractions Be Gone

So, where did the remaining 10 hours of time gain come from? Because I switched so much from task to task, I found myself getting easily distracted. And not always by work activities. Sometimes personal things would get on top of my pile, or I’d be distracted by some website or thing going on in the world that I wanted to find out more about. By forcing me to the interruption free when I completed my tasks, the distractions were gone. Ironically, this meant that I had more time to pay attention to those things. Who’d a thunk it?

Time Gain and Weight Loss

Perhaps my time gain is a result of how inefficient and ineffective my existing usage of time was. Because I was so ineffective, perhaps any move to efficiency would have resulted in significant time gain. Think of it like weight loss. If you aren’t exercising and eating crap all day, then simply getting your ass out of the chair and moving and stop eating those Twinkies (not that I do that!) will result in significant weight loss. At some point, the weight loss will plateau and then you’ll have to address the underlying things that cause weight gain. But until then, doing anything will shed those extra wasteful pounds.

So, think of time gain like weight loss. Perhaps you have some extra time loss “fat” that comes from being inefficient, juggling things around, constantly focusing on what’s in front of you instead of what needs to get done, trying to do everything (perfectly) instead of trying to only do the important things as well as needs to be done. If you are as inefficient as I was, that will get you at least a 50% time gain.

However, if you are already quite efficient (lean and mean) and have somehow managed to pack your day with efficient use of time, perhaps your mileage may vary. In fact, I’m sure it will. Now that I’m down to 20 hours a week, it’s going to take a much harder effort to get down farther. I’ve reached my time gain plateau, or at least, I can make incremental improvements, but none of which will be as effective as my first. I’ll share with you all how I can break through the second time gain glass ceiling.

What are your experiences?

First, I optimized the Time Audit spreadsheet. Thanks to Hilarycat for some good contributions. I’ve attached it below:

Time Tracking Spreadsheet 1.1

Big Changes:

• I tried to use Brick’s Life Management Matrix(“Essential & Unforgetable”), but it simply did not work for me. I found that focusing each task on a Dreamline tasks, or if not, realizing that the task does not contribute to dreamline activity, was sufficient to realize that goal. However, Covey’s quadrants were still very helpful. Indeed, one should organize one’s day to do Important, Urgent tasks first (without distraction) and then move to Important, Not-Urgent tasks as quickly as possible skipping unimportant, non-urgent tasks and outsourcing or automating unimportant, urgent tasks
• Metrics and measurement. Simply recording tasks doesn’t accomplish the task of the time audit. What’s required is to look at trends. One week is probably enough to see beginning of trends, but probably it takes two weeks to really and fully see the trends. So, I have now another worksheet in the spreadsheet that tracks the ongoing tasks and allows you to pinpoint the time wasters and your 80/20 important tasks
• After listening to the wonderful YouTube videos shown on Brick’s Life Sutra blog, I realized that tasks should not only be listed, but you need to determine WHY you are doing those tasks and what happens if you don’t do that. If you can’t answer those questions, then don’t do them!
• Also, I added some columns to evaluate whether the task was an 80/20 task (that is, it occupied 20% of the time, but had 80% of the results), as well as added “Trim” to the set of next steps. This means that I should do this task if it appears again, but focus on reducing the time allocation.

The first thing to realize is that there’s three parts to effecitve Time Auditing:

• Determining the tasks to be accomplished and planned time allotment
• Faithfully recording actual execution time and noting any interruptions.
• Recording the history of all such tasks for later analysis

It’s really the second bullet that we’re after for this audit. Spending time on time recording is just a means to an end, so it should be done as effectively and efficiently as possible. But simply recording time is not enough. One has to first have a plan for how that time will be spent, and then, an audit of how the actuals vs. the planned result. Think of it like a budget. First, plan your budget, then measure your spending, then determine the variances, using that to determine how to alter your actual spending or the planned budget.

So, what were the lessons learned? In my case:

• Time auditing really doesn’t take that much time. I spend 4 minutes in the morning setting my list of tasks and defining when I would like to accomplish them. I then spend less than 20 seconds after each task indicating how much it actually took and then moving it to the Cumulative Time spreadsheet.
• I spend too much time task switching. Focus, focus, focus on one task and one task only and do it to completion without being interrupted. Which leads me to…
• Too many interruptions! Phone, email, and high-urgency task seem to be time distractors. When something is urgent, switching from one task to another simply invites more urgent tasks, distracting you from big-picture tasks.
• I must have ADD, because I can’t seem to be able to effectively focus on something without something else popping into my head demanding my attention or I get mentally exhausted and need a break. I think the 10-2*5 approach might work to combat that. Take tasks 10 minutes at a time. Then, take a 2 minute break at the end of each period, repeating 5 times and then taking a longer break afterwards. I use an egg timer now to time my tasks. We’ll see if this helps.
• Eat the frog! There’s always a task (or two or three) that seem to appear on the to-do list, but never get done. Why? Because they keep being postponed. The only way to counteract that is to do those tasks FIRST. That’s called “eating the frog” because when confronted with a bunch of things to eat, one of which is a frog, that just keeps getting put off. But if you eat the frog first, everything else can only be that much better. So eat the frog!
• Be more specific with your tasks! A vague task never seems to get done or even be done at all. Be specific to the point of micromanagement. If you want to make sales, don’t just have a task called “Make Sales” cause it will never get done and always appear. Instead, you should have a task called “Email the first 50 contacts on A spreadsheet and pitch B service”. Then, this can get done. Indeed, “Make Sales” is not a task, but a category. The more specific activity is the task in this category.
• Keep your email clean!!! Shoot for the Zero Inbox. You should not use your inbox as a to-do list. You should keep it clean at the end of the day since that will indicate tasks accomplished. If you need a task to be done, move the email to a to-do inbox, but then list the to-do in your daily tasks for that day or the next. Don’t create more frogs! This does force you to read and respond to email in batches. But you already know that if you read the Four-Hour Work Week.

Hilarycat had some other differences of thought on this spreadsheet, as follows:

Your Task and my Account are not actually the same. Account is what account you’re working on (literally). “The Jefferson account” vs. “Send out promos.” One’s a verb, the other’s a proper noun You can easily aggregate what you did for a given Account if you’re listing Account… and that way draw conclusions like “Wow, the Jefferson account is a huge time sink and makes little money – I should quit working with them” that you can’t do with entries like “send out promos” or “register domain name.”

Likewise, your Category is not the same as my Functions. Yours are vague – Core Business, Personal, Muse… Mine are highly specific business functions – Marketing, Coding, Writing, Research, Communications. Again… how does it serve you to analyze time spent on Core Business vs. Muse when you’re really trying to figure out what you can eliminate and outsource? Whereas if you’re tracking by function, you can realize, “Oh, I spend 4 hours a day writing emails… I guess it really is time to implement Tim’s communications obstacle course.”

I’m going to try to transition now from my do-it-yourself spreadsheet to the Personal Time Manager utility suggested by Brick and Hilarycat. If I can get the auditing part done without interfering with planning (you still have to define your daily to-do list), then I think this can work. I’ll get back to you with my results on that shortly.