Work-management doesn't work
Time and work (action) are, in one essential regard,
opposites. Here are the laws of time-work physics:
1) Time is finite. We only live so long and, while we’re
alive, we’re allotted only 24 hours in every day.
2) Work—or action--is infinite. Work, whether good or bad,
always generates more work, expanding to fill the time available.
Given these physical laws, it should be obvious that action
is unmanageable; that only time can be managed. Yet people regularly sabotage
themselves by trying to manage action. "First I’ll catch up with my day
job, then I’ll take time for my dream," or, "First, I’ll get my
family in good shape, then I’ll find time for dreams."
Don’t get me wrong. Action is what we’re trying to find time
for. Writers write. Craftsmen make tables or boats or flower arrangements.
Actors and models go for auditions and interviews. Salespeople make sales
calls--the more calls they make, the more sales. Dreamers take treks to exotic
places. Shakespeare's observation, that "action is eloquence," is not
only creatively productive; it’s the best way to stay sane. Even one phone call
a day in the service of your dreams, means, if you take two days off each week,
200 calls per year. That’s definitely progress toward the mountaintop. Success
comes inevitably on the heels of constant action, as the ancient Greek poet
Hesiod pointed out in his almanac: "If you put a little upon a little,
soon it will become a lot."
My mentor Tom Bergin (Sterling Professor of Romance
Languages and Master of Timothy Dwight College at Yale) was the author of
fifty-nine books by the time he retired and eighty-three by the time he died.
Yet he described himself as a "plodder." He just kept plodding away,
in the vein of Hesiod. Tom and I exchanged hundreds of letters from the time I
left Yale to the time he died. He taught me the relentless equation between
consistent, minor actions and ultimate productivity. One day, by way of
complaining about having no time to do any serious work because of all the
trivial errands and duties he had to attend to, he sent me a quotation from
Emerson: "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind."
Against the accelerating incoming bombardment of the things
of contemporary life, action happens only when we steal time to make it happen.
Yet schedules, to-do lists, self-revising agendas are constantly being tested
and found insufficient. They work for a while, then become ineffective. Without
recognizing this reality, through the Mind’s Eye’s awareness, each time this
happens it may send us into a tailspin that moves us further from success. Life
delights in creeping in to sabotage our dreams if only to make sure we’re
serious about them. One of my clients, after six months of working together to change
her habits to become more productive, told me I was the "Ulysses S. Grant
of time management." She told me that Grant wired Lincoln: "I plan to
hammer it out on this line if it takes all summer"--and that his telegram
was read along the way before it was handed to the beleaguered President. The
jealous snoops told Lincoln, "You know, we have reports that General Grant
drinks a considerable amount of whiskey." "Is that right?"
Lincoln replied. "Find out what brand he drinks and send a case of it to
each of my Generals."
The human nature of time
Archimedes: Give me a lever and I can move the world.
Atchity: Time is the Dreamer’s lever.
All you need to make your dreams come true is time. Using
time as your most faithful collaborator begins with understanding its
interactive characteristics and protean shapes. You’ll begin noticing that time
behaves differently under different circumstances. When you’re concentrating,
your awareness of time seems to disappear because you’ve taken yourself out of
the Accountant’s time and are dealing with the Visionary whose experience is
timeless. When you're away from your quest, you become very conscious of time
because your Visionary is clamoring in his cage to be released from the
constraints of logical time.
"You've got my full attention": compartments of
time, time and energy, rotation, kinds of time, and linkage
Time-effectiveness is a direct function of attention span.
When you’re concentrating, giving the activity you’re involved with your full
attention, you produce excellent results. When your attention span wavers and
fades, the results diminish. Until you recognize that attention span dictates
effectiveness, you’re likely to waste a great deal of time.
The key to avoiding this situation is assessing how long
your attention span is for each activity you engage in--and then doing your
best to engage in that activity in appropriate compartments (allotments of time
that you’ve found to be most productive). Since my particular career is
multivalent, I pursue what I call a "rotation method” of moving among
activities that support my producing, managing, writing, brand-launching,
speaking, and managing my next quest. I
love all these activities, but not when I do them exclusively--each one having
its own high ratio of crazy-making aspects that diminishes automatically when
that activity is juxtaposed with the others.
Except during a crisis in one of the four areas, at which
point all other activities stand aside until the crisis is resolved, I find it
stimulating to spend an hour working on production-related matters, then
spending the next hour on calls that manage various client projects in
development. I’ve also learned that it’s a waste of time to try to control
things that only time can accomplish--such as making a phone call, then waiting
next to the phone for a response to it; or staring at the toaster waiting for
the toast to pop up. The only time you have anything approaching direct control
of anything is when the ball is in your court. During that moment I focus on
getting the ball out of my court into someone else’s court so that I’ve done what
I need to do to make the game continue. Success is all about what you do while
you’re waiting.
Rotating from one activity to another ensures that the
outreach begun in Activity A will be "taking its time" while you’re
engaged in Activities B, C, and D. When the phone rings from the A call, you
interrupt D to deal with it--and it’s generally a pleasant interruption,
knowing that one facet of your career is vying with another for your attention.
An hour is probably an average attention span compartment for
work. But the length of the particular compartments (remember that
"compartments" are allotments of time given to a particular work
activity) changes from time to time as your attention span for that activity
evolves. During the original drafting of this book, for example, I spent two
hours a day writing, whereas before I began the draft my attention span allowed
me to spend only an hour or less a day thinking about the book and gathering my
notes for it.
There’s no magical formula for determining attention span;
it changes as you and your circumstances change. Yet once determined, attention
span is the mastering rod between the serpents, the compartment of time where
past and future meet in a present that feeds from the first and nourishes the
latter.
Obviously attention span is related to your energy level at
different times of day, and with regard to different activities. Activities
that drain you should not be scheduled one after the other, but should
alternate with activities that create energy for you.
Energy and attention span will also be different depending
on whether you’re at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a
particular objective. Your attention span is most in danger of sabotaging you
in the middle, where it’s easy to confuse your fatigue from the hard work of
plodding forward with some sort of psychological upset caused by the process
you’re engaged in. Usually that situation can be resolved by shortening the
allotments of time you’re devoting to the present objective; or changing the
activities around which you’re scheduling this objective’s compartments.
When a particular compartment is nearing its end, use the
last few minutes of it (when the Accountant comes back online to remind you
that the time is "almost up") to jot down what you’re going to do the
next time you revisit this compartment. This automatically puts your Visionary
and Accountant into a percolation mode in which they bat things back and forth
"in the back of your mind" while you¹re busy working in the next activity’s
compartment.
Next: Where does the time go?
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