Supercoach - Michael Neill [47]
Other useful external reminders to do something include:
• Making an appointment with another person to work on it
• Putting it in your diary as an appointment (even if it’s an appointment with yourself)
• Setting an alarm to go off shortly before you’re due to do it
• Leaving yourself a message about it on your answering machine
• Asking your boss, manager, colleague, friend, or spouse to check in with you about it and hold you accountable for doing it
2. Personal routine. Chances are that you almost never put “Brush teeth” on your to-do list. This is because brushing your teeth is a routine that you’ve followed for so long that you don’t even have to think about it—you just do it.
For example, I found that when I switched from writing daily coaching tips to weekly ones, the task became much harder. My personal routine had been disrupted. Once I created a new routine, getting them done each week became so effortless that I’ve now written more than 700 of them!
Here are some of the traits of an effective personal routine:
• There’s no decision to make—it’s not based on whether or not you feel like it.
• It happens regularly enough that you don’t have to remember whether or not to do it today.
• You’ve either done it or you haven’t— there’s no real wiggle room.
Which leads us to these guidelines for creating a routine:
• Tie it into an existing one, something you already reliably do pretty much every day. For example:
– Practice your Italian during lunch.
– Go for a run on the way home from the office.
– Work on your novel in the bathroom (reportedly a favorite strategy of the French novelist Victor Hugo).
• Decide up front how much is enough. Phrases like “as long as I’ve written a single word,” “at least ten minutes,” “exactly three times,” and “no more than an hour” work much better than “until I’m tired” or “as often as I can.”
• Remember that the effort you put into creating the routine will be repaid in how effortless it will be to carry on with it in the future. Don’t worry if it’s hard to get started—you can do hard. Once you’re used to it, you won’t even have to think about it. It will be as natural as brushing your teeth and as easy as taking out the garbage.
Clarity of intention and value, and prioritization of tasks and projects make it easy to know what to do when; structure, in the form of systems, process, and routine, creates the pathways for getting those things done.
So why do we even need a third word?
Because no time-management system on Earth can get you to actually live according to your clear priorities or make use of your robust yet elegant structures.
Enter “the last word” on time management . . .
Word #3: Boldness
Another thing Steve Chandler pointed out to me was that ultimately, the effectiveness of any time-management system comes down to boldness—your willingness to actually follow through on your priorities and capitalize on your systems and structures, regardless of what circumstances the world happens to throw at you on any given day.
Over the years, I’ve worked with:
• Spouses whose partners want them home for dinner while clients want them to stay late at work
• Upwardly mobile parents trying to balance getting a raise at work with raising healthy, happy kids
• Would-be artists, musicians, and writers whose friends can seemingly never understand why they want to begin creating early in the morning when the evening’s revels have only just begun
In every case, the solution to their apparent dilemma was the same: finding the boldness inside themselves to say yes to their personal priorities and no (for now) to everything else.
If you’re afraid