While Fve encouraged you to list as many activities as you can without censoring or inhibiting the responses you put on pape do have one caution: Don't confuse goals with activities.
Remember, an activity is something that can be done. Your goal mi be to live a healthier life. The specific activities that might contribute to this end could be not eating dessert tonight, exercising three times this week, and giving up smoking for twentyfour hours.
Now you're ready to make your list Take three fresh sheets of paper and write one of the Agoals selected earlier at the top o each.
We're going to break your goals down into doable activities. Keeping in mind the above instructions, spend three minu making as long a list as possible of activities that could conceivably contribute toward achieving the first Agoal. Then spend three minutes each to list activities for the second and third Agoals.
Go back over the three fists of activities, spending a mininum of three minutes on each list, adding, deleting, consolidating, refining, and even inventing further activities. Identi as many activities as you can. Let's take the case of a high school sophomore who wants to be a professional baseball player. This is an Agoal for him. But h also wants to go to college, another Agoal. And he has a third Agoal that is more immediate: He wants to be the starting pitc on his varsity team.
The latter Agoal is most immediate. To accomplish it he'll keep in shape through the winter, running a m every day and throwing indoors in the gym three times a week so that hell be ready when spring comes. To make sure that h be accepted by the college of his choice let's say USC, which has always had great baseball teams , hell keep up his studies.
Preparing for an important math exam this week is an Aactivity. And, of course, putting forth his best effort in a championsh game is an Aactivity toward his Agoal of being a majorleague ballplayer. A classic example is the woman who wants to return to work. Her three children are now in school and she has some free tim She worked as a nurse before her marriage twelve years ago. To reach her Al goal of returning to work she has a number of Aactivities she can do: taking refresher courses to help her catch up on what's been happening, talking with other nurses abo recent developments, making sure that she's satisfied all the current requirements, seeing what openings are available and h they fit into her schedule.
Another good example is a person who is just graduating from college. His longterm goals include living a happy life and earn a comfortable income. But there's also the shorterterm goal of finding the right career.
And that comes down to finding a jo The Aactivities for now include deciding what occupational areas to look into, talking to people in various fields that interes him, preparing a resumd, writing letters, making a selection, and finally going to and scheduling interviews. One client I had felt he was wasting an enormous amount of time. He said, "I'm very unhappy in my job.
I'm an insurance salesman but I really feel I belong in public relations. I'm busy looking for a job every coffee break I get, and each lunchtime on the telephone calling people and telling them what I'm looking for.
In short, he was getting nowhere fast. To find a new job in a competitive field like public relations he might h to contact fifty people a month, at a minimum. He should continually be trying new people as the old people did not pay off This was his Aactivity.
Eliminate Low-Priority Tasks If you were conscientious in listing lots of possible Aactivities you should now have too many activities and not enough time f all of them.
The time has come for you to set priorities: to switch from being creative and imaginative to being practical and realistic. The way to start is by spotting and eliminating lowpriority items. For each activity on each list ask yourself: Am I committed to spending a minimum of five minutes or less if it can be completely finished in less time on this activity in the next seven days? If the answer is "no," draw a line through the activity You don't have to offer any particular reason for crossing an activity off your list.
You may not feel like doing it. It may depe on someone else who cannot help you in the next week. It may be too hard. Perhaps you're too busy this week. Leave only w you are committed to starting for five minutes and possibly finishing in the next seven days.
If you have eliminated almost everything from your list, go back, taking as much time as you need, and come up with at leas four items you consider meaningful and which you will put time into in the next week.
Don't be concerned about eliminating large or important items like getting a new job from your list. If you don't want to ta it now, draw a line right through the item so it doesn't clutter things up. You can consider it again next week.
After you've pruned all three Agoal activity lists, combine the results into one list. This list will contain perhaps a dozen or so activities that are important and that you are willing to put time into during the coming week. The next step is to set priorit Classify the most important activity as Al, the best use of your time. Other Aactivities should be numbered accordingly A2, A A4. With these priorities in mind, set deadlines for the various activities and schedule them into the next seven days.
If you to a night school class three evenings, that leaves only two weekday possibilities to have dinner out. Which day will it be? An you are going to start reading War and Peace, when will you start? Perhaps commuting on the train to work?
Make a note of s decisions on your list. Pick a Priority for Now How can you move closer to your lifetime goals? Each day provides a fresh opportunity. Select at least one Aactivity to work right away and do it. You now have the beginning of an action program for achieving your lifetime goals. Initially, when you select the Aactivity to work on each day, make it as short and as feasible as possible.
If the Aactivity you have selected seems too overwhelming, divide it into smaller segments, then begin with the easiest part, or the one that involves the least problems, or the one you value the most. Once you've singled out and defined this one task, you've given yourself a clear priority for the day. In the sixteen hours or so that you're awake each day, you can find a few minutes to work toward fulfilling an important lifetime goal.
How about start now? The Lifetime Goals chapter and this chapter are fundamental to good time management For quick review, here are the essen points: 1 List possible longterm goals; 2 set priorities for now and identify A-goals; 3 list possible activities for A-goals; 4 set priorities and identify A-activities for now; 5 schedule the A-activities; 6 do them as scheduled.
Presumably, you still want to do everything you did before wash the dishes, go to work, shop , but now you want to do even more the A-activities you identified in the previous chapter.
To find a way out of this dilemma put your lifetime goals in the background for a few minutes and start at the other end of t time scale. What do you have to do today? Obviously, you need time for essential activities such as eating and sleeping, and while the amount of time you allocate to th may be variable, there are minimums necessary for normal functioning.
Unless you are independently wealthy or have someo to support you, you will have to work to bring in money for food, clothing, and housing. This means dressing, grooming, commuting, and being on the job—all necessary and all time-consuming. Then you need time for routine tasks: getting out of bed in the morning, reading the morning paper, opening the mail, going weekly staff meetings, keeping your work area orderly, watching television, washing dishes, chauffeuring the children.
The routine tasks are determined by your position in an organization, family ties, civic responsibilities, social obligations, and the like. Essential activities and routine tasks are everyday motions that you don't normally think much about, and yet they fill up mu of your day. In fact, they can easily preempt your life! One secretary complained to roe that she never had time for special tasks that her boss wanted her to do and that she particularly enjoyed.
After our discussion she realized the trouble: She spent her whole day on routine duties the boss had asked her to do the day she was hired—answering the telephone, talcing dictation, doing the filing, showing people into the office, answering questions, maintaining the stationery inventories.
Her routine work load was so heavy that she wasn't able absorb fun assignments. This is often true of home makers, also. Recognize that you may be doing all you can by working very hard and conscientiously just to keep up with these routine tas if that is your choice. Today's tasks are also preordained to some extent by what is already in process: whatever got started yesterday, last week, last month.
It includes activities scheduled on a regular basis as well as commitments for which you have made special appointments.
A celebrated author who was an overnight success with his first book received many invitations in the year following his acclaim. Even though he would have loved to have a free day to spend with his family, or to begin work on a ne book, he was committed months in advance to speeches, lectures, and TV appearances. On any given day he couldn't decide sleep late or stay home and read a book. You too may find much of your time taken up by commitments made long ago. Unexpected interruptions and crises make still further— and often annoying—demands on your time.
You wake up to discover you left the headlights on last night and the battery is dead, so instead of getting into the office fifteen minutes early to cat up on some of your work, you find yourself arriving two hours late. You learn that Mr. Jones has called five times to complai that the gizmo you promised him yesterday still hasn't arrived, so you have to rush around like mad to expedite delivery.
Essential activities, routine tasks and previous commitments coupled with interruptions and crises, can wipe out anybody's dream of having a few minutes to pursue a lifetime goal. But they don't have to wipe it out It all depends on how well you recognize and deal with these inevitable timeconsumers and whether you are prepared to make time for yourself. I know o other way: To increase the likelihood of accomplishing important lifetime goals, you've got to plan your time each and every day.
The less time you feel you have to spare, the more important it is to plan your time carefully. Spend only ten minutes at the beginning or end of the day planning, and it will re your efforts many times over. Sometimes you will be so busy that you'll feel you really don't have time to plan.
But think about this: By failing to plan, you will free very little any time, and by failing to plan you will almost certainly fail to discriminate among ABC's.
Even if you are confining yourself doing A's, you still might not do the best A's. Yes, I mean it: Exactly because we lack time to plan, we shoul take time to plan. Planning is usually done best first thing in the morning or at the end of the day. There are many advantages to planning in th morning when you are fresh.
You gain momentum as you go along. Having just thought about what you have to do, you move easily to getting it done. With the day's priorities clearly in mind you are less likely to be sidetracked as you go along. The advantage of planning in the evening is that you know where you have come from and this perspective helps you select activities for tomorrow.
Also, if you have your day all set when you arrive the next morning, you don't have to debate what t do and consequently waste time. Another advantage is that your unconscious can work overnight on developing ideas so that you arrive at work all primed for action. The distinctly different benefits of morning and evening planning are both worth taking advantage of. So I suggest you plan i the morning as well as in the evening. Can you afford the time? I have had several clients keep careful track of how much time they spent on various activities duri the week.
They were conscientious people concerned about time and planning, more so than the average person. They were convinced of the importance of planning and committed to spending as much time as necessary on it. They found that all of their planning time came to less than four hours a week.
They concluded that it really doesn't take long to plan—considerabl less than an hour a day—but the results are substantial: more Al's get done, less trivia interferes. Planning kept them focused the important things. Some executives I know have made it a rule not to leave their offices until they have the next day's plan on their desks. A further extension would be to come in fifteen minutes early the next morning and sharpen up that plan.
Of course as interruptions and crises come up during the day, still further adjustments must be made. I do almost all my planning early in the morning. As hard as I try, I can't seem to average more than three and a half hours a week at it. I wake up around 5 A. Every morning as part of my planning effort, I look at my Lifetime Goals list and identify specific Aactivities I can do today to move ahead toward those lifetime goals. The rest of the time before breakfast I spend doing Aactivities.
Finishing this book one such activity and a lot of this work got done before my family got up. I recommend using Friday afternoon for reviewing the week, planning the following week's projects in a general way but tho you'll do on Monday in detail.
Use Monday morning for refining your plan and starting your Agoals of the week. But scheduling means more than just fitting into the hours availabl all the things you must do: meetings, appointments, deadlines.
It means also making time for what you want to do—your A's. In laying out a weekly schedule the key is to block out time for the A's that require a lot of time. Schedule largeenough block of time to build up momentum. Reserve particular days of the week say, Tuesday and Thursday mornings for major project Even if your day is fragmented by interruptions, you can still attempt to keep blocks of time intact for the highvalue A's.
To find more time for the A's, set aside a special Atime each day and firmly banish all Citems during this period. To create a block of time for A's to get done, start small and allocate, for example, fifteen minutes each day to use exclusively for Aitem You can gradually increase this time for the Aitems as you grow more comfortable with the idea of putting first things first.
When she was asked out that date, she looked on the calendar and found that she was "busy. I've read articles in management literature suggesting that the way to get hold of your time is to record what you do every minute 24 hours a day, hours a week. I emphatically disagree with this approach; not only is it timeconsuming and burdensome to keep track of all your time, but I'm convinced that if s a waste of time.
Suppose you feel the need to make a change in your eating habits. You already know intuitively that you ought to reduce the quantity of fried foods and add a litt more protein and a few fresh vegetables to help balance your diet. It would be a waste of time to keep track of every single hem you eat before deciding what to change. On the other hand, keeping a daily record of the fried foods and vegetables yo eat during a month can significantly help you decrease the fried foods and increase the vegetables.
You immediately gain th benefits of better health, and you're freed from the drudgery of spending a month keeping track of everything you eat Likew with time. I feel it's much better to watch your time selectively, keeping track of particular problem items which you feel ar consuming an inordinate amount of time.
In my experience, people who try to report everything find it so hopelessly complicated that they give up in despair within a couple of days without having made any changes. If you feel there's too much work time in your life and not enough family and personal time, start quitting when everybody else does andSstop working overtime; start scheduling more weekends with your family.
Too much golf and not enough civic activities? You don't need any complicated timeaccounting to get you to cut back on the golf. Too much housekeeping and not enough time for creative pursuits?
Let the dust accumulate for a day or two. You don't want to recordkeep but you do want to schedule your time, because you can find a great deal of time through care scheduling of whatever you really want to do. Remember: There is always enough time for the important things. The busiest people are able to find time for what they want to do, not because they have any more time than others but because they th in terms of "making" time by careful scheduling.
Trying to do the same thing at the same time each day both conserves and generates energy. It conserves energy by cutting down on indecision. You perform menial tasks by rote. It generates energy through habit—the habit of expecting to make ph calls, plan the meals, read the paper, attend a class, or go to a meeting—all at a particular time. Internal prime time is the time when you work best— morning, afternoon, or evening. External prime time is the best time to attend to other people—those you have to deal with in your jo your social life, and at home.
Internal prime time is the time when you concentrate best. I know early birds who never get a good idea after 7 A. If you had to pick the two hours of the day when you think most clearly, which would you pick? From 10 A. From 4 P.
The two hours that you select are probably y own internal prime time, but during the next two weeks you might check to see whether your concentration really is best during those hours. Try to save all your internal prime time for prime projects. Most business people pick the first couple of hours at work as their internal prime time, yet this is usually the time they read the newspaper, answer routine mail, get yesterday's unanswered telephone calls out of the way, and talk to colleagues and subordinates.
It's much better to save such routine tasks for nonprime hours. One housewife experienced a great spurt of energy after her husband and kids left the house. She rushed around madly maki beds, washing dishes, doing the laundry, picking up toys, so that by 11 she had gotten all of her housework out of the way.
T she collapsed until , when it was rime to pick up her children at school. Her intentions were excellent: She thought that she got all her repulsive chores out of the way she would have lots of free time for candlemaking, a parttime incomeproduci project she enjoyed doing. But she found she was too tired after her chores to do her owntime things.
Since she had the hou all straightened up by 11, she was also reluctant to take out all her equipment and spread it all over the place and make a m again. The result was that she felt she didn't have enough time for candlemaking. As an outsider I was quickly able to see tha she was making a basic scheduling mistake.
The simple change of reversing her candlemaking and housecleaning activities netted her two hours of prime time for her candlemaking project. The chemical research analyst who spent the afternoon skimming through professional publications for recent developments his field and completing routine administrative forms was making the same mistake, but he did it in reverse.
He was a late starter, and really got going after lunch. When he switched his routine chores to the morning, he had the afternoon free to d the more creative part of his job. External prime time is when external resources usually people are most readily available for decisions, inquiries, and information.
It's the time when you can catch the boss for that needed decision before he leaves for a week's business trip. Salesmen recognize that their external prime time runs from 9 to 5—the hours when they meet face to face with their customers. So they schedule routine matters for before or after that period.
It's important to make sure in advance that you're going to be able to see the people you have to. The housewife will have to make appointments to see the dentist, the doctor, and her hairdresser. She knows when the stores she uses for shopping ope and close. She's in touch with other mothers about the scheduling of next week's car pool to get the kids to school.
The executive makes sure that when he places a phone call he has a high chance of finding that the person he needs on the other end is available. He has to know when his colleagues are free for consultation—and he should plan to take advantage o that time. Most people aren't very good at putting themselves into the other fellow's shoes, and therefore aren't very good at thinking i terms of another person's schedule.
Yet there are big dividends when you do so. One executive I know spends extended perio with his boss during the lunch hour because he knows the boss rarely goes out. They have a sandwich in the office without be interrupted, since everyone else is out to lunch. Another choice time to catch the boss might be just a shade after he comes in, as he is taking off his hat and coat and befor has a chance to get immersed in other things. For Effective Scheduling—Stay Loose Flexibility is needed to accommodate whatever situation may arise.
If you fill up every moment in advance with appointmen without any breaks except for lunch, you are bound to go home frustrated, nervous, and tense. The unexpected happenings need their time, too. Even with a light schedule in prospect, the mcorning mail, visitors, and telephone may put enough demands on your time to create an overload. Experience will tell you that although you may not able to anticipate specifics, there will be interruptions and distractions during the day that will take up your time.
You need some slack time to handle whatever unexpected crises and opportunities come your way during the day. Therefore, always reserve at least an hour a day of uncommitted time. Try to get absolute musts out of the way early in the day so you will feel less frantic about interruptions and distractions.
Rigidity in setting and following demanding schedules without variation creates the feeling of being regimented by the clock and living your whole life with a constant eye on the clock can be unpleasant.
A proper balance of scheduled and unschedule time carefully planned and then used well can help you get your life flowing more smoothly with fewer fits and starts. Others a so achievement-oriented that they feel guilty taking time out for anything that is not in some way related to their work.
Horror stories abound of men who work so hard that they hardly ever see their families and who end up with ulcers and hear trouble. One study several years ago of successful and unsuccessful executives indicated that many men who ultimately fail made their personal lives expendable to their jobs. My experience with clients has convinced me that when executives find themselves on a treadmill they tend to lose perspect of what's important.
They spend time unnecessarily on secondary matters and let many important ones go undone. This ofte tends to be cumulative. The more overtime they put in, the more exhausted—and the less efficient—they become.
The answ is not to spend more hours on the project but to work more effectively within the time allotted. I recall one architect who came to me suffering from too much work and not enough play.
He had only recently recovered fr a bleeding ulcer and again was working sixty hours a week. His complaint was that he never had time to see his wife and you children. I suggested that he take off at noon on Friday and, since summer was just beginning, take his family away to his favorite spot at Lake Tahoe. He rented a cabin, where he and his family spent each weekend during the summer. Not surprisingly, he fell in love again with his wife, got to know his children, and his health improved.
Since he knew that he couldn't make up for low productivity by long hours, he concentrated on getting the important things done in the time he ha He actually got more done than he ever had working sixty hours, even though he shaved more than fifteen hours off that tot As a bonus, he got some of his most creative ideas while he was relaxing at the lake, so his leisure time paid off handsomely he really lost by cutting back those fifteen hours was the detailed drafting that he compulsively had felt the need to do hims He delegated it to a draftsman.
Can you work effectively if you are too fatigued from excessive hours? Probably not. Maybe a better solution would be to qui early, take the afternoon and evening off, and come back the next day refreshed and physically able to work twice as hard. Get More Done by Doing Nothing I think you will find that if you arrange things so that you find time to relax and "do nothing," you will get more done and hav more fun doing it. One client, an aerospace engineer, didn't know how to "do nothing.
He had an outdooractivities schedule in which he switched from skiing and ice hockey to waterskiing and tennis. His girlfriend kept up with him in these activities, although she would have preferred just to sit by the fire and relax once in a while.
Like too many people, he felt the need to be doing something all the time—doing nothing seemed a waste of time. His "relaxing by the fire" consisted of playing chess, reading Scientific American, or playing bridge. Even his lovemaking was on a tight schedule. For an experiment I asked him to "waste" his time for five minutes during one of our sessions together.
What he ended up do was relaxing, sitting quietly and daydreaming. When he was finally able to admit that emotional reasons caused him to rejec relaxing as a waste of time, he began to look more critically at that assumption. Once he accepted the fact that relaxing wa good use of time, he became less compulsive about being busy and started enjoying each activity more.
Previously he had be so busy doing that he had no time to have fun at anything. He began to do less and have more fun. When I saw him about thr years later, he still had as busy a schedule as ever, but he was able to balance that activity with relaxing so that he came ba to work Monday morning not pooped out from a strenuous weekend, but refreshed.
In my opinion, nothing is a total waste of time, including doing nothing at times. Anything can be carried to extremes, of course, and I recall one client who needed to be pepped up from his indifference to any activity. He rediscovered his energy after we sat down with his unpaid bills and figured out how few days could go by before he'd find himself in serious trouble.
Sometimes the only way to get more leisure time is to reduce arbitrarily the demands of the job. If your attempts to get mo relaxation don't succeed, you may have to make some basic changes in your work situation. A credit manager for a men'sclothing store struggled overtime for two years. He never could get his boss to let him have an assistant to take over so of the details.
He finally decided it was hopeless and found a job with another firm where he didn't have to work eighty hour week, and had more time to spend with his family. His solution was more successful: When the bo saw that the work wasn't getting done, he let the chief accountant hire more help. The credit manager would have been a lo happier if he had similarly confronted his boss's stubbornness— or changed his job sooner.
He could have saved himself two years of misery. The Homemaker's Special Problem The homemaker's problem of finding leisure time is particularly acute. The demands go on twentyfour hours a day, and such deadlines as getting a meal on the table or clothes on the family's back are unyielding. Interruptions tend to be traumatic; children get hurt or sick or need emotional help right now. Mother stays on the scene all the time. She can't turn off her job 5 P.
The truth is that, with purchasing, budgeting, minor repairs, husbandly complaints, family nutrition, keeping inventory, deciding how many kids can wear this sweater or use that bike—on top of th physical labor of it all—a woman is running a tough little business in which the responsibility is all hers.
Given all these problems, a homemafcer must work especially hard to find any leisure time for herself at all. The solution ge back to scheduling. She has to schedule time for herself on a regular basis. One homemaker arranged for someone to come i every Wednesday afternoon; she was a theater buff and used Wednesday afternoons to go to a matinee when there was something she wanted to see. Otherwise, she had it free for museum or gallery visits, shopping, or seeing friends.
I strongly recommend regularly scheduled free time for homemakers. But setting aside time on a particular day leads to the expectation of having tha time and results in getting the time you want. One homemaker I knew had a standing Thursday evening date with her husban to get out of the house, be free of the cooking, and enjoy a restaurant meal as well as the relaxed atmosphere.
If a homemaker is on the alert for external changes that affect her time, she can often find extra hours that she has overlooked. She knew weeks ahead when the course would be ove but she did not make any effort to schedule that time profitably for herself, and so she let the sitter go when the course end She could have furthered some other lifetime goals in the time that was open for her on Tuesdays.
I find it a good idea on regular occasions to take a look two or three months ahead and ask what's on tap. What advantage ca you take of the time when the kids are in school, or when your associates are on vacation? Note what events will influence y schedule in a major way: the semiannual national sales conference, the deadline for the seasonal catalogue. What has to be done to allow for pickup of activity after Labor Day? For people being away around Christmas? By taking note of these situations well in advance, you can often make or find opportunities for furthering some of your mos important goats.
And again you might say to me, "But I don't have enough time for everything. One kind of time that is often overlooked is what I call "transition time. For most people amounts to about forty minutes a day, usually a bit longer for women than men.
One man I know has reduced it to fifteen minutes. He uses the time only to do essentials—eat breakfast, shave, dress—and he does these as quickly as possible.
There may be an advantage in extending rather than reducing this transition time. If your day is broken into many parts, transition time offers you perhaps the only block of time you'll have alone and undisturbed. It is a good time to reflect on th best use of your time during the coming day and to consider those time management techniques that will help you get things done. As I mentioned before, I get up early—5 A. What is the right time to wake up in the morning? Almost every tim you read about a busy, famous man Senator Dirksen was one I remember , he started with paperwork at 5 or A.
There are other ways to enrich transition time. The late Robert Kennedy was reported to have listened to Shakespeare plays while shaving. One creative manager, realizing that he got some of his best ideas in the morning, has come to expect them a "catches" them for further development while they—and he—are still fresh.
This can also be hobby time for jogging, painting sculpting, reading, writing, or whatever. How to Use Commuting Time If you feel it takes you too long to get to work, have you considered moving closer?
In most cases this is not practical, yet mo often than you might suspect a person does have the very real option of moving closer to his place of employment. If you're professional person, how about working out of your house twice a week and skipping that fortyfive minute commute on the freeway?
If you drive to work you're limited in the use you can make of the time you spend sitting in traffic jams. Safety comes first. B you can also listen to the radio. You can practice that new vocabulary exercise. How to Use Coffee Breaks Coffee breaks can be a good time to relax. But suppose you're not particularly tense or tired. How about learning a word from your dictionary? Writing that unpleasant but important note to the bank telling them why your installment payment is late?
O calling your dentist for an appointment before that temporary filling falls out? The True Price of Lunch In some selling jobs, of course, the client is crucial, and in such a situation a working lunch may be beneficial. But by and lar a fullscale lunch is a fantastic waste of time. For most people, lunch just adds calories and expenses they can well do withou Many doctors today are dead set against "Three square meals a day," and many firstrate M. On the other hand, if you have a hectic business day a lunch break may provide the only breathing time or you.
In that event, if you cut back on your lunch time you might decrease your effectiveness the rest of the day. Maybe this is a good time for you to take a walk or a s at the Y. A general merchandising manager, recently promoted, no longer took a regular lunch time off. He felt that since his job involved more responsibility, he should be available all the time, and so he just grabbed a quick sandwich on the run. After several weeks of this, he found himself irritable in the afternoon, snapping at his colleagues, and having difficulty concentra on important matters.
I convinced him that he needed a sitdown lunch to restore his energy and inner calm. So he began hav a more leisurely lunch and made certain that nothing interfered with this midday break. He developed the practice of going lunch with a different person each day.
Some were friends with whom he enjoyed a social occasion. But gradually he also lunched with all his subordinates and got to know them better. When he had to ask them to do something for him or when th were asking him for help, he had the benefit of personal relationships to support those quick backandforth requests.
He was careful, even though he took a long lunch time, not to eat too much, as he found it made him sleepy in the afternoo But as this executive found out, what you eat might not be nearly as important as who you eat with and what you talk about How to Use Waiting Time It you have to wait for the subway, bus, or your car pool, you can use those patches of time profitably, too.
You might read paper, but suppose you've had a lifelong goal of reading the classics. Most of them are available in paperback. You may not always feel like reading Don Quixote as you wait for the bus at the corner of Main and Pine, but isn't it nice to have the optio Waiting time can also help solve that particularly tricky problem that's been bothering you at work.
Think it through sequentially. First, try outlining the problem step by step. Then, if you have more time, pick out an aspect that might be thoroughly explored in, say, five minutes. You probably won't be able to solve the whole problem, but at least you have the rolling.
Books by Alan Lakein. Public Pastes. Python 5 min ago 1. Python 6 min ago 0. Java 9 min ago 1. JavaScript 11 min ago Java 25 min ago 0. Java 26 min ago 0. None of the above are correct.
Alan Lakein. Export Citation. I decided to re-read my yellowed copy of Alan Lakein's How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life after having read several newer but disappointing time-management books. While published in , its advice is not only succinct and helpful, but still relevant today.
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