How to get started when you really don't want to...

I’ve been meaning to write this post for ages but something else always seemed to crop up. First, I had to tidy my desk – you know how difficult it is to write with an untidy desk. Then I noticed there were some old documents I needed to delete from my folders, which then meant that I needed to organise the remaining documents. By that time, some emails had arrived and when I’d sorted those it was time to put some washing on. While I was in the kitchen, I thought I’d make myself a cup of coffee but I found I was out of coffee so I had to go to the shop…

You know the story. There’s a task that you need to do – you may even want to do it. It’s been sitting there for a while now but you never quite seem to get around to it. Consciously or subconsciously, you keep putting it off. But why? And how do you overcome that procrastination?

Not all procrastination is bad but it becomes an unhelpful habit when it starts to put you under pressure or means you risk missing important deadlines. If you find yourself doing this, the key thing is to ask yourself why you’re procrastinating. Is it a difficult or unpleasant task? Do you lack the skills, knowledge or confidence to do it?

If you procrastinate a lot, keep a note each time it happens and look for themes. Some common reasons why people procrastinate are a desire for perfection or a need to know everything before they start a task or a fear of failure. Understanding why you’re putting something off is a key step in spotting future tasks over which you might procrastinate; understanding the beliefs that lead you to procrastinate is the first step to changing those beliefs.

In the short term, here are some quick fixes that will help you to get going:

• If you can, try doing the hardest or least desirable part of the task first – after that, the rest will seem easy.
• Break the task down into sub tasks – the more the merrier. You’re more likely to do smaller, quicker tasks and it’s the old joke about eating an elephant: one piece at a time.
• Get a little egg timer and set it for around ten minutes – don’t check too closely, otherwise you’ll be tempted to clock-watch. Then start the task you’ve been putting off but promise yourself you’ll only do it until the alarm goes off. When it does, you have permission to go and do something more fun – or, if you feel like it, you can reset the alarm and keep on with the task.
• Reward yourself; promise yourself that when you’ve done the task you’ll go for a walk, or eat a bar of chocolate or book a flight to Hong Kong – then follow through.
• Hold yourself accountable – or, better still, find someone else to hold you accountable. Tell someone you trust that you’re going to do the task by a particular deadline and ask them to check up on you. With luck, they’ll not only check that you’ve done it when the deadline arrives, they’ll check that you’re working on it in advance of the deadline.

Finally, something that always works for me is to get those unpleasant or unattractive tasks out of the way first thing in the morning. I know I’m at my best in the morning and, if I do it first thing, it’s not hanging over me for the rest of the day.

The inspiredblog is taking a short break next week but we’ll be back on 11 February, picking up on our series about time management and bringing you the secrets of work/life balance. Now – stop reading this and get on with whatever it is you’ve been putting off!

Engaging

Those of you who are regular readers will know that we here at inspired have been working on an Employee Engagement workshop over the last six months or so. We ran our first batch of workshops last year and they were very well received - there's a new round beginning soon and you can find details here. If you know someone who might be interested, please do forward the link on.

As well as the MacLeod Report, on which the "Engaging for Success" workshop was based, the CIPD have recently conducted their own survey into employee engagement and you can download it here. I was particularly struck by their assertion that "the extent to which employees find meaning in their work has a substantial impact on how they feel about their working life in general. Employees who believe that their work is important and that they can make a difference have much more positive perceptions about their work and their work environment."

I've talked about this a number of times, in particular in this post, and it's great to have it reconfirmed. I feel strongly about the subject and it almost feels like there's some momentum building. Perhaps this will be the year when employers move away from the old-fashioned industrial-age model of management and begin to truly engage with their workers.

A sticky situation

You find me in a grumpy mood this week. I had planned to post a piece on weekly planning but my eye was caught by a joint paper from Toronto and Chicago Universities, reported in the Economist. It seems that researchers at the universities worked with the managers of an electronics factory in China, to explore the ways in which bonus schemes might be made more effective. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you’ll know that I’ve had a couple of things to say in the past on the way in which managers and leaders attempt to motivate their teams. It’s a particular interest of mine and what I read did nothing to improve my mood on the subject.

You can find the whole of the report from the Economist here but let me quote a couple of lines which, I feel, sum up the tone of the article and – if we assume the Economist to be reporting faithfully – the paper itself: “the fear of loss was a better motivator than the prospect of gain... Carrots... may work better if they can somehow be made to look like sticks.”

Let’s ignore the fact that this research paper is, in essence, a bulletin from the school of the bleedin’ obvious. Researchers find that workers are afraid of losing money they’ve been promised; who could have guessed it? Without wishing to be too political, let’s also overlook the fact that this research took place in China – not a haven of best management practice or the freedom of workers to withhold their labour and search for other employment. Instead, think for a moment about what this paper means and what it suggests. Are we honestly saying, as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, that it is acceptable working practice to threaten people in order to “motivate” them? At a time when workplace stress is increasing (and, interestingly, Chinese workers are the most stressed of all), do we really want to work in environments where that kind of management practice is even considered, never mind actually practiced?

I believe that, fundamentally, people come to work in order to do a good job. I believe that people will do a better job if they know their work has meaning. I believe that one of the roles of managers/leaders is to create the circumstances within which workers can do a good job and then, essentially, get out of the way. It always depresses me when I find there are still managers who think that threats, fear, bullying and intimidation are effective ways of “motivating” workers: the fact that this academic report adds a spurious veneer of legitimacy to that viewpoint just makes me angry.

How does it feel?

A few years ago, I went through a period of feeling particularly fed up. Not depressed, as such, but what Alan Partridge would described as “clinically fed up”. So I decided to try an experiment that I’d seen somewhere on my travels across the internet.

Each night, when I went to bed, I would pause and think of three good things that had happened to me that day. They didn’t have to be major things – anything that I had enjoyed or which made me feel good, I wrote them down in a little book. It wasn’t a very invasive exercise and only took a minute, literally, each day.

At first, I found it difficult to think of three things – the third one (and sometimes the second one) would feel forced or not significant enough. I’d think of a bag of crisps I’d enjoyed at lunch, or a joke someone had told me and it felt like I was almost making stuff up just to get to three items. However, I persevered and eventually the three things would come to me quite easily.

But then it started to get difficult again. Only this time, instead of struggling to get to three things, I was struggling to keep the list down to three. I started to find that I was sorting and sifting the things that had happened to me, rejecting some of them as not being good enough to make the top three things for that day.

It taught me a valuable lesson. The good things didn’t start happening to me just because I decided to keep a list of them – they were happening all the time but I just wasn’t paying attention to them. Keeping that diary refocused my attention on the good things, rather than the bad things, and brought me out of a low period in my life.

Today, apparently, is “Blue Monday” – you can find more details here. How many people will pay attention to the random bad things that happen to them today simply because they’ve been told that today is the most depressing day of the year? Rather than just accepting that today is going to be a bad day, perhaps today might be a good day to pay particular attention to the good things that happen…

The crucial one percent

I ended last week’s blog by teasing you with The Most Important Question You’ll Ever Ask Yourself and I’ll come back to it in a minute, I promise. But first, I want to make it clear that if you’re serious about getting more done this year, you’re going to need to adopt the discipline of regular planning.

Discipline sometimes has a bad reputation but it’s discipline that allows us to do… well, pretty much anything. You won’t have the freedom to play a musical instrument unless you had the discipline to practice. You won’t have the freedom to compete as an athlete unless you had the discipline to train. You won’t have the freedom to achieve your goals if you don’t have the discipline to plan them out. This means planning each week and each day and it’s daily planning that we’re looking at now.

It will only take you five minutes, at most - that’s taking less than 1% of your day to ensure that the other 99% is well spent. It involves checking your Master Task List, deciding which of those tasks you can reasonably expect to do today, and then transferring them from your Master Task List to your To Do list.

The length of your To Do list depends on your answer to The Most Important Question You’ll Ever Ask Yourself, which is, how long do I want to work today. It’s a simple but powerful question and if the answer, every day, is “about 30 minutes”, do yourself a favour and get another job! Most people find they have enough work to keep themselves going 24 hours a day – you don’t want to work that long, so asking this question determines the number of hours you have available to spend on tasks. From that number, you subtract any meetings or travelling that you have to do. Whatever number is left, halve it and then that lower number is the number of hours' worth of tasks that you put on your To Do List.

Why halve the number? It’s common sense, really: the unexpected happens every day and we need to build flexibility into our plan to accommodate it. The primary reason why people fail at planning is they fill every available minute and don’t take account of what Donald Rumsfeld called “the known unknowns” – the stuff we know will happen, we just don’t know when: the emails, phone calls, chats with colleagues, trips to the loo and so on that stop us actually working.

Trying to plan each day from your Master Task List without a To Do list can be overwhelming; faced with an endless list of tasks that never seems to shrink, it’s easy to get discouraged. Using a shorter To Do list will give you a sense of perspective and progress and using some common sense ensures you won’t get overloaded. But how do you ensure that you’re staying on track? For that, you’ll have to come back next week when we look at weekly planning.

Procrastinating pleasure

Interesting piece here from the New York Times on the tendency of some people to procrastinate over things that are pleasurable. It just goes to show that balance is important in all things!

To do, doing, done...

Following my previous post, the snow over the last week has prevented me from leaving the house very often and I’ve been able to devote a bit of time to looking at the “how” part of managing your time. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll develop this further and provide you with some useful tips for organising yourself in the New Year, as well as helping you overcome common time management pitfalls.

Whatever system you use – Blackberry, iPhone, Filofax, DayPlanner or any of the hundreds of other, similar, systems – it should do four things for you. It should tell you where you need to be (a calendar); who you need to be there with (a contacts list); what you need to do when you’re there (a task list) and remind you what you did afterwards (a place to keep notes). Those four things don’t all have to be in the same place; for instance, I keep my calendar, contacts and task list on my Blackberry, because I find it convenient and it’s portable, which is important given the amount of travelling I do. However, taking notes on the Blackberry is inconvenient, so I use a Moleskine journal for that.

You could have four separate places for those four things – whatever works best for you. The important thing, however, is to only have one place for each of them. For instance, one place for notes, one place for appointments and so on. It often happens that people try to keep multiple calendars going – one for work, one for home, one on the fridge door for the kids and so on. I’m not saying that can’t work – clearly it does for some people – but it involves an awful lot of duplication and immediately invites the possibility that you’ll update one calendar and forget to update the others. Almost inevitably, things fall through the “cracks” between the calendars. If you haven’t already noticed this, I’m a simple man and I like to keep things simple so my advice is to have one place and one place only.

There is an exception to this, however, and that’s your task list. So often, people only run one, ever-increasing task list – it gets longer and longer every day as they add new tasks to it. Stress comes from work you haven’t done, not work you have, and using one task list constantly reminds you that each time tick anything off, there’s still far more to be done. So, when it comes to tasks, one of the smartest things you can do to help improve your productivity is to keep two lists. While this might sound counter-intuitive, it will work in your favour and dramatically increase both your feeling of productivity and your actual productivity.

The first list is your Master Task List: this is the “dumping ground” for all of the things you need to do. Something occurs to you, someone asks you to do something – add it to your Master Task List. This Master Task List can be as long as you like, although I recommend that you review it on a monthly basis. The second, smaller, list is your “To Do” list. You prepare this every day (don’t worry, it’ll only take you a couple of minutes) and it is a sub-set of your Master Task List. Your To Do list should contain only the things you can reasonably expect to do that day, no more and no less. The length of that list is determined by the most important, most life-changing question you will ever ask yourself – and I’ll tell you what that question is next week.

Happy New Year

I don’t want to start 2010 on a depressing note but I wonder how many people have already failed their new year’s resolutions? If they have, they’re in good company – according to a recent report, around 80% of people won’t succeed in keeping their resolutions. If you’ve set yourself some goals or resolutions for 2010, I’d like to offer some practical advice on goal setting and, more importantly, goal achievement.

Whatever it is you’re trying to do, you’ll need three basic things to succeed. Firstly, of course, you need to know what you’re trying to do. This is where all that “SMART” stuff comes in handy – you need to make the goal specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timed. The more you can phrase your goal using these guidelines, the clearer the goal is likely to be and clarity helps you both achieve and monitor achievement.

Secondly, you need to know how to do it. There are simple things you can do that dramatically increase your chances of success: breaking the goal down into smaller, interim, steps; telling other people what you’re trying to achieve; keeping a record of your progress. All these things will help keep you going, as will understanding that you will sometimes slip back into your old habits. It’s important not to beat yourself up for this; keep visualising the positive results that come from achieving your goal or keeping your resolution.

Often, we know what to do and we think we know how to do it although sometimes how we go about achieving our goals sabotages our attempts. That’s certainly the thrust of the research I quoted earlier. But those of you who have children – or who have ever been children – will recognise that there is a third, crucial element. You can know very clearly what to do; you can understand explicitly how to do it but if you don’t want to do it then nothing will happen.

I start my time management workshops off by asking people to list all the things they know about time management. They list the stuff you’d expect: keep lists, prioritise, say no, focus on important not urgent and so on. So I asked every group, “If you did these things, would they help you manage your time?” – they would all say yes. Then I would ask, “Do you do these things?” and they would all say no. Ultimately, they didn't do them because they didn't really want to.

People often talk about not being sufficiently motivated to do things and it’s true that motivation is important. But all too often, lack of motivation is just a code for a lack of discipline. Sometimes, the things we want to achieve are hard – they involve sacrifice or hard work. It’s at those times, the times when you don’t feel like it, when discipline – mind over mattress – is what you need. But ultimately, whatever goal you set for yourself, whatever your resolution, it has to be something that you actually want to achieve. Don’t set a goal because you think you should achieve it – spend your time, energy and effort achieving something you actually want.

Have a very happy, prosperous and peaceful New Year.