Cool Down (17 page)

The bottom line here is that productivity starts with fuel, and fuel must be delivered properly at the start of the day. This requires a small amount of time, a small amount of
slow
.

The daily commute is that twin set of episodes in the day in which time is spent battling the elements in an attempt to get to work reasonably punctually. For people in a home office, this might simply mean a short trip up or downstairs. For others, it might mean getting to different locations to visit different customers each day, and for the majority, it means getting to your place of employment to carry on with the projects and challenges at hand.

Not wishing to repeat myself, I would like to state simply that the difference between a
cool
, calm commute in, and a frenzied stress-filled one will be visible in all of your actions and abilities for the day to come. That is why in Chapter 3, “The
Cool
Approach to Commuting,” I highlighted the value of a slower drive, and in Chapter 5, I advocated the use of this time for blue-skying rather than taking on additional work as per the demands of Parkinson's Law.

What I wish to add to this is the value of the changed mindset that a
cooled-down
commute can provide. The commute is a mental changing room. It is where people must shift from home mode to work mode and then back again at the end of the day. It's an opportunity to ramp up to that level of focus and preparedness that will ensure top-quality productivity and stress management throughout the entire day. Recall in Chapter 2 the analogy of the NBA player and the need for warm-up, both for him and, by extension, for your colleagues around a meeting room table. So, too, it is necessary to do this on the commute in, so that there is greater opportunity for you to handle appropriately the immediate requests that will be waiting when you arrive at your workplace. We must eliminate the “event-to-event” mindset that defines the commute as a mere inconvenience and use it instead as an opportunity.

The work-bound and home-bound commutes both offer yet another opportunity for personal growth and profit by mentoring with carpool colleagues. In Chapter 9, I will challenge you about your mentoring commitments, both in seeking out a mentor and in being one. The benefit, as I describe more fully in that chapter, has to do with not only hearing another person speak, but in also hearing yourself, as you will always be your own best audience and critic when it comes to creative thought. The secret, however, is to let those thoughts escape your short-term memory for a moment by speaking them out loud and have them reinforced by hearing them spoken. One of the best ways you can do this is by changing how you view your commute. Turn it from a solitary race against time to a learning opportunity, by sharing the drive—carpooling.

Throughout this book I highlight many situations in which the value of face-to-face communications outweighs the perceived advantages of high-speed activity. Talking together within a carpool is a great central example of this difference. Someone might ask, for example, what the difference would be between conversing with people who are physically in the car (or on the train) with you, versus talking on a cell phone. The answer is significant: When a person is talking to you on a cell phone, she cannot make eye contact, and she cannot read your facial and non-verbal messages, and she doesn't know about the specific driving challenges you are currently facing. She continues to talk, and the expectation from both parties is that the conversation must continue at this pace, even if traffic is becoming challenging. This is why, as I mention in Chapter 2, talking on a cell phone while driving causes significant impairment: The driver's faculties are largely taken over by the conversation due to his inability to meter it in any other way. By contrast, a discussion in a car takes advantage of numerous interpersonal dynamics, in which the conversation can be attended and paced through body language, and even paused if the driver needs his full concentration and reaction abilities. Mentoring and being mentored in a carpool is part networking, part blue-skying, and part education. It makes even the most congested route more of a pleasure and far less of a waste of time.

A similar warm-up happens for those whose office is at home. It is always highly recommended that a home-based professional assign a room, or at least a corner of a room as a designated workspace. This is not merely for organization's sake; it serves to create a mental division between work life and home life, just as a commute does for others. People with home offices tend to subscribe to Parkinson's Law just as much as anyone else, even if they don't own a wireless PDA. The temptation to check and answer email at 10:30 at night is just as strong. However, those who create a designated space, and who take the time to commute to and from it, rather than bringing work to the dining room table, allow a mental transition to take place. This makes it easier to let go of work in the evening and to turn away from it when the day is done, even if it's only six steps from the kitchen to the office.

A
cool
commute, for all working people, is an opportunity to don the “work suit” in time for the arrival at the workplace, and more importantly, to take it off again when it's time to go home.

Once we get to work, of course, we then have to get to work. Management guru Peter Drucker said it many years ago: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” This prompts the question: Are the tasks that you plan to do, or more precisely the tasks that you actually do, important enough to be done, by you, now? How can you tell? What is your benchmark? What do the tasks mean with regard to your working goals for the day? For the week? For the year? What will they mean this time next year? What does your manager think about the tasks you choose to do? Are business and speed causing you to react rather than pro-act? How can you tell? Is high-speed technology just allowing you to do unimportant things faster? What can you do to replace busy-ness with business?

That's a barrage of questions, but they lead back to the central statement once again that high-speed reactionism costs more than it makes. Planning and assessment require that you slow down before moving ahead, long enough to ensure that your efforts are being wisely used. Many people turn to their email first thing in the morning. For some, as we've seen, this may be essential to their primary line of work. But for others, it's merely reaction without strategy. Are you able to take some time, seconds, even, to think through your actions before acting? Such an action often yields some surprising and helpful revelations. Consider the following case study:

Sally was a hard-working professional who came to me seeking help on what she thought was a problem with procrastination. “I tend to put things off until the end of the day,” she said, and this was causing her obvious distress. Together we reviewed her workload and her work style. What we discovered was that she was really quite an organized person. However, her manager was a workaholic who never seemed to leave the office before 9:00 p.m. To match this, Sally, who was eager to appear as a team player and a responsible professional, had also been staying longer and longer so that she could complete her work and deliver it to her manager. What appeared to be procrastination was really Sally's unconscious desire to reorganize her workload so that the important things were still there to be done around the close of the day. In this way she was “forced,” by her own will, to stay later in order to hand them in and appear indispensable. Sally had no time to assess the circumstances that caused this to happen, namely the personality of her manager. She had been just plowing ahead, unaware of the dark path down which such high-speed pursuits were leading her. What would you advise Sally if she had come to you for advice?

 

My recommendation was threefold: First, I recommended that she take some time to understand her manager's personality and approach to work. This included talking to a mentor on the nature of workaholism and how to deal with it. The time required to do this, however, would pay off in her improved ability to approach and negotiate with her manager. Second, I recommended that, armed with her new knowledge, she and her manager should step away from the grindstone and discuss their different schedules with an aim to negotiating a revised and mutually satisfactory schedule of tasks and expectations. Third, I recommended Sally review the questions in the opening paragraph of this section

(Are the tasks that you plan to do, or more precisely, the tasks that you actually do, important enough to be done, by you, now? How can you tell?), prior to embarking on, or saying yes to additional requests or scheduling tasks for earlier or later times in the afternoon.

The expression used in project management circles is that those who fail to plan, plan to fail. In Sally's case, as with so many other time-pressed, high-speed people, this applies equally well. Taking the time to plan and work things out allows you to better know what you're getting into. Otherwise, momentum will just carry you along on its blind path, at your expense.

We had a good look at meetings in Chapter 2, and offered a few tips on running them better. But what about your reaction to a meeting invite? This is another example where a
cool
approach can help win back a significant portion of your day for your own use. Whether the invitation comes by way of voicemail message, a direct face-to-face request, or worse, the meeting is simply inserted into your calendar by way of an electronic scheduling system, those who are able to assess its worth and then negotiate accordingly stand to gain more time to do more of their other tasks than those who willingly comply. When you are asked to attend a meeting, is it possible to slow down and ask some or more of the following questions?

Such questions are never intended to challenge the authority of the requestor. They're intended to step away from candid reactionism and to seek alternatives to simple “death-in-harness.” Just because meetings have been run a certain way for many years does not mean we no longer have the opportunity to offer suitable alternatives. All such discussions must be approached with respect, of course, especially towards the chairperson. However, much can be said for speaking in the language of mutual benefit.

Negotiation, in this scenario, as with all others, must always aim for the win-win. This is a language that all people understand, and when phrased correctly, they will be able to visualize how the results will benefit them.

One final demonstration of the power of
cooling down
comes from the alleviation of confusion and stress when trying to prioritize multiple conflicting activities. This is a situation in which overload happens quickly, and the cost is great. In Chapter 5, in the section entitled, “I like Causing Creativity,” I used the unusual metaphor of clogged sinuses to illustrate the way the human brain processes creative thought. Most important, I pointed out the value of recording your ideas, and in so doing, more creative ideas will rush in to fill the space. Later, in Chapter 8, I will describe how taking time to write things out actually helps us to cope with or even alleviate fears, simply through the act of making them “solid,” that is to say, getting them on paper. This technique has great value for anyone who is struggling with the mental overload of handling more than one task or urgency at a time: Slow down and separate the items on paper.