Catalyst

Archive for the ‘time management’ Category

When the calendar turned August in Dallas, nature’s thermostat got turned up–to over 100 degrees.

On top of that, our air conditioning is not working just right. It won’t cool down to the set point and I had to work through issues with contractors losing messages to get it repaired.

Society has not always had air conditioning. The closest we came was the “funeral home fan” in the hand of a semi-sleeping human being. As long as the rhythm continued, the breeze kept moving

But without air conditioning today….life skids to a halt.

The technician comes Tuesday so until then, all we can do is endure. I keep learning some things about endurance.

Endurance thrives on the “foreseen end.” The date on my calendar is written in sweat–Tuesday morning the technician comes. Once the hope of “this will be over soon” fades away, endurance turns to hopelessness.

Endurance is a day at a time experience. Right now, I know the day the technician is coming. All I want to do is get through this day. I’ll deal with tomorrow tomorrow. It’s the only way to keep on.

Endurance is not resignation. Is there something you can do about your plight? We turned out lights, ate sandwiches (requiring no heat), and stayed still when sitting. Anything we could do to make it easier, we did.

No one enjoys the “endurance” experience but life puts us in many waiting rooms. Just remember, this too shall pass.

Voicemail (depending on your viewpoint) is either the bane of existence or a wonderful tool to increase productivity. The latter is true… if you know how to leave a good message.

I receive several phone messages each week, many by salespeople. As I slog through the swamp of messages, some are easy to answer and others just get the trashcan. The ones that get a quick “delete” have the following characteristics

• The caller speaks too fast or without clarity. You understand about every third word so nothing gets through.
• The return number is spewed out like the BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. You can’t make out the number and have to listen to it several times just to get it. Usually the person leaving their number only says it once, making it doubly difficult.
• The message sounds like, “This is Bob. Call me.” Even if you know Bob, you probably don’t know what Bob wants or needs. He doesn’t give his number so I can’t return his call unless I want to search for Bob’s number (hoping I get the right one.)

As I’ve handled my voicemail over the years, a few things will make your message easy to return.

• Identify yourself with first name and last name. I may not know right off which “Bob” or “Karen” this is (I know several).
• Give me a thumbnail idea of what you need. Many times, people need information. I may or may not know but could find out. If I am aware of what information is needed, I can get you complete information. If not, it will take a second phone call (both a delay and a waste of time.)
• Give your return number clearly. When you speak on a phone, slow down (especially if you are on a cell phone). When giving your number, speak distinctly, pausing between each digit. Then at the end, say, “that number again is…” and repeat it. That allow me to correct any confusion about the number.

If you really want to get an answer, make it easy for me (and people like me) to answer your call. If it is not easy, the odds are the phone won’t ring.

My wife and I are in the middle of what we considered an impossible project.

Friday comes every seven days–and that’s a good thing.

Fridays are the end of the work week for most. (If it not yours, please adjust this post to fit your situation.) It launches us into rest, relaxation, and family time.

But not everyone likes Fridays. The specter of anxiety hangs as a pall over many Fridays. Jobs are not complete. Tasks procrastinated all week smell like dead fish. So some fill a briefcase and see if they can get to it over the weekend.

One of my goals each week is to get to Friday “clean.” It doesn’t always happen as I get last minute things on Thursday night or Friday. But the goal is to “clear the decks” so I can indeed re-create over Saturday.

I have learned that to have a great Friday afternoon experience, I have to do several things.

I have to plan my week. I need a blueprint of what is coming toward me. What’s on my calendar that needs attention? Is my task list reasonable? What tasks do I do on which day? These questions (usually on Sunday night or Monday morning) are my compass and sextant for the week’s journey. In a sense, Friday starts on Monday.

I work diligently to get work done in a timely manner. Procrastination is like a neck massage. It feels better to let it woo you into the sense of “it will get done. Just relax.” Yet tasks postponed muscle themselves into the times I really don’t want to work. My aim is to have it done by Friday morning. I cannot do a week’s worth of work in 4 hours. It takes a week.

I do a quick sweep on Friday. Friday morning is time for last minute checks. If I’ve done my work through the week, Friday becomes a calm day. I make a few last phone calls that have come in, clean up my email inbox, empty my voicemail on my phone. I feel confident that nothing is left hanging.

I enjoy Saturday. While I have plenty of household tasks to do on Saturday, they are enjoyable because my mind doesn’t flit toward the unfinished. I can let things “settle to earth.”

Friday afternoon should feel like Atlas taking your world onto his shoulders. If it’s not like that for you, examine your life and time. Where’s the leak? No one should come to Friday dreading the end of the week.

Enjoy the Friday afternoon experience.

The class of 2010 has now sat through hours of names read listening for their own. Students sweated bullets over finals (and sometimes standardized tests). Textbooks were closed, accounted for, and stored in the sauna of a dust-disturbed storeroom.

The moving of the tassel on the mortarboard signals the completion of school. It says, “you’re through, finished, completed. School (with its accompanying learning) is over.

Perhaps you need to rethink the tassel and just not bother because it’s a false alarm. Learning of a different kind is just beginning.

Mark Twain observed, “If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” It’s a different kind–and longer–education.

The Greeks practices “praxis,” a philosophy that called for taking what you know and putting into action. How do we find the “praxis” of our lives today?

Find mentors. We grow when we have someone bigger, faster, smarter, and wiser than we are. The tragedy of young lives is they surround themselves with friends with the same level of ignorance and disdain the sage counsel of experience. Make sure your circle includes someone who can teach you something new.

Ask questions of others. Ask them other others. Too many times, we want to appear smart, so we nod in agreement when our mind is nothing more than a fuzzball. Stop and ask, “tell me more about that. I’m not sure I completely understand.”

Reflect on experience. Ask three critical questions to  improve anything.

• What happened?
• Why did it happen? (What did leader, speaker, teacher do to get the result that took place?)
• What would I have done differently?

Keep learning in the right tense. As a minister, I hear people say, “I already learned that in the Bible.” They think learning is a past-tense experience. Once you read it, know it, can feed it back, you don’t need to learn it again. Learning is really a present-tense experience. When you read the Bible, it’s not what you learned but what you are learning.

Let the schoolbooks back in storage. Take your mind out of storage and learn something. The great failure of many lives is that they live by what they learned rather than by what they are learning.

What’s on your “to do” list for today?

I like to listen to comedy. A favorite comic is a woman named Jeanne Robertson. She has a wonderful skit on the “to do” list. On her to-do list is a daily, repeated item that reads “Find the Humor.” She refuses to check it off as complete until she has found something humorous.

She relates an instance when looking for laughing made a difference. While waiting in an airport line, she had her humor radar scanning in high gear. People in the line were agitated, irritated, and surly. Then it dawned on her. She was so intent on finding the humor that she had forgotten to get mad.

Every circumstance has hidden giggles, chuckles,  and snickers. If you can find them, life takes on the joy it was intended to have.

How do you find the humor in life?

Hang about humorous people. They have an outlook on life that will rub off as you spend time with them. I have friends whose stories make me turn life on its head so I can see a different perspective.

Laugh at yourself. Someone has noticed, “you might as well laugh at yourself since others are doing it secretly.” One of the lessons of maturity is not to take life too seriously.

Reflect humorously. Recently, I fell out of the shower door (while taking a shower). While I won’t go into all the details, I wasn’t hurt. The only thing that was damage was my ego. (For self-protection, I won’t go into any further detail.) But my wife’s sides hurt from laughing all day long. The more I think about it, the funnier the scene gets.

Take Jeanne Robertson’s advice. Make sure you put “find the humor” on your to-do list today.

The email read, “We need to meet about…” The issue was neither new nor urgent. Other things are pressing that must rise to the top of the schedule. In fact, the issue had laid on the table for at least 2 years without any action by the leaders in charge.

Would you meet? I chose not to meet…at least not yet.

Meetings are the bane of most people for good reasons.

• Many are unorganized without agenda or purpose.
• Many are too long (usually a function of the first problem).
• Most have people who don’t need to attend.
• Many are nothing but “let’s talk it out” sessions that don’t accomplish anything.

I decided I would not meet with those requesting the meeting until one condition was met. They needed think ahead  and bring solutions to the table, not just the problem. Then, we can refine the proposal.

It has been said that any idiot can find a problem. It takes a real genius to solve one. I’d rather a group start with something to finish than trying to find the starting line.

Before agreeing to meet, ask questions of those requesting a meeting.

• What is this meeting about?
• What do you hope to accomplish?
• Do you have a concrete proposal? (Can I see it ahead of time?)
• How long have you had this problem? (Many times, people are just trying to clear their decks.)
• What do you need from me in this process? (I don’t want to leave the meeting with the monkey on my back.)

Second, ask yourself some questions.

• Does this fit with my responsibilities?
• Does this fit with current priorities? (If we did not meet, would it really make any difference?)
• What will suffer if I meet about this issue?

I go to many meetings, but they must meet one basic criterion–do you have solutions to bring to the table? If not I will not meet until…

Life is a collision of urgencies grabbing you by the collar demanding your attention. After a while, in boxes are stuffed and to-do lists that resemble a train derailment leave your nerves on their last fray.

It’s time to get some rest.

Recently, I took some time off to see my daughter and son-in-law in North Carolina. We could fly but chose to drive. The mountain scenery is a break from the flat-land terrain of Dallas, Texas. More important, it provides me and my wife time to talk without interruption.

In Genesis 1, it said that on the seventh day of creation, God rested. The strange word in Hebrew means “to settle to earth.” Like the leaf that has expended its energy of summer, fall brings a time to snap free of a branch and fall to earth. The tree then regenerates for the next season.

Too many times, we don’t take the time to let is all “settle.” Rest and vacations allows us to see what remains and if it is important.

What does it take to let is all “settle?”

Get unplugged. In a digital society, the smart phone is our short leash. Just because it rings or because a text message comes in does not mean it is urgent. While I do check email and provide 1 minute answers once a day on breaks, I don’t indulge the nag of technology. Whatever happens (outside of a family emergency) can wait or can be handled by my assistant.

Have fun. One thing vacations do for me is gives me a chance to read books that tend to get shuffled to the bottom of my deck. I read biographies, novels, and magazines. Your fun my be white-water rafting or playing cards. Whatever it is, take time just to let the muscles of your face flip into smile.

Have adventures. Different things recharge the mind when drained by the daily drill. On this last trip we had to take a different route due to a rock slide in the mountains. It meant we had to pay attention to routes and look at different places that I never knew existed. Go to museums, baseball games, and out of the way places. The diversion shakes loose the cobwebs.

Get perspective. The adage about the forest and the trees is true. We get caught up in the immediate that we don’t see the important. Rest times provide the time to examine what’s most important, what can be jettisoned, and what should be treasured. Without the time, we get spiritual myopia.

Someone has said that what makes music enjoyable is not the notes, but the pauses between the notes. Take time to listen to the pauses.

What do you need to do to let life settle?

Twenty-five years ago, computers turned my world upside down. The possibilities for easier, more efficient work were endless. Spreadsheets crunched numbers. Desktop publishers (as they were called) made preparing newsletters and flyers a snap (and fun). Word processors allowed words to flow and let me change on a fly. One of my great joys was writing a macro that would compress as many keystrokes into one as possible.

I keep a task list on an IPhone synced to the web so it is available on a laptop, a business center computer, or my desktop. I’m very efficient.

Then why, when you go to my desk, do you find a paper time log? It’s all about the purpose.

While some professions use time logging to determine billable hours for various clients, my use is more mundane–to find out I use my time. I could use a spreadsheet where categories are color-coded and a macro could produce an automated report. It would be easy, efficient . . . and irrelevant.

In my church, our elders want to see a monthly report. It helps them see my work better. It’s an accountability tool.

For that process, I use paper. A few times a day, I take a paper week-at-a-glance planner, enter what I did in the appropriate time block, and repeat as needed. It’s done with a cheap ink pen on paper. On the first day of the month I take a legal pad, write down all the things I did in various categories and then transfer the information to a pre-designed report in my word processor.

Why not let a computer do that? It’s because of what I would lose. They key to using time logs effectively is not the historical archiving of dozens of daily tasks. It’s reflecting on what’s happening in your life.

If I let the computer do the work, I get a pretty report that won’t change my thinking. I need the mental processing, the seeing of tasks, the “ouch” of bad time use.

Imagine the learning lost if I did not have to confront questions such as:

•    Where did I use my time? Was it on important things or did I squander it?
•    What did I neglect?
•    What needs to be eliminated or delegated?
•    What time-wasters grab me by my mental lapels and demand attention?

Einstein observed, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” When you take reflection out of life, you learn nothing.

I still use my computer for so many things. But I don’t want it to do my thinking for me.

Are you reflecting on your time? What does it tell you about your life?

Twenty-first century life is lived on a tilt-a-whirl. We spin in so many directions, resulting in emotional and spiritual vertigo.

Life gets as knotted as a first-grader’s shoestring. It may not be what you do but doing too many things at the inappropriate time.

The Greeks distilled language into specific parts. They had two words for time. One describes the placement of hands on a clock–chronos time. The other had a different texture. It swirled with the winds of October gently plucking ochre colored leaves from trees. Such is “kairos-time.”

Kairos time lives by the season, not the timetable. A kairos-based life . . .

• works at the right time.
• plays at the right time.
• rests at the right time.

Confuse them and it is like snow on the 4th of July!

We might avoid the work we need to do with gossip over coffee,  sharing our opinions of why the team lost on Sunday, or looking at the latest funny website. We do everything at work but work. Life’s balance beam falls to one side. Long hours drag you from your family and drops you wearily in a bed at night where your demons invade your sleep. Both work and play feel cheated.

Others never “unplug.” The ping of email, the chirp of text messages, and the interesting link of the internet means minds never rest. The Hebrews use a word for rest which means “to fall to the ground.” Everyone needs time where life settles. The mind and soul need the refreshment of the unstrung bow.

Examine your schedule. (If necessary, keep a time log and be honest!) Ask simple questions, such as, “what do I need to be doing right now?” Make plans to work at the right time, play at the right time, and rest at the right time.