Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [41]
When I was writing pieces on time management, I read thousands of tips on paper management but there were two that really worked beautifully—and unlike so many time-management techniques, these have continued to work over the years.
The first is never to handle a piece of paper more than once. This is a classic piece of advice from time-management guru Alan Lakein, whom I interviewed near the beginning of my career (he returned my call from an airport, between planes, reinforcing the idea that he never wasted a moment). As soon as you touch a piece of paper, make a decision about what to do with it—whether it's file it, pass it on, work on it, or destroy it—and then do just that.
The second is to categorize your work pile. I used to have one monolithic work pile. Some days it was smaller than others, but I never seemed to get to the bottom of it. When new material hit my desk, it would go right on the top of my in-box, and sometime during the day I'd try to sort through and find the most important stuff. It wouldn't be unusual for me to miss some critical memo because it had been pushed down to the bottom, left to mate with an announcement of a new Smokenders’ program available to employees.
Today, everything that comes into my office is put into one of five different-colored folders, depending on its priority and what kind of work it involves. I use a car service to get back and forth to the office, and having the folders makes it really simple for me to attack work in the car. I keep a pad of Post-its, and since I don't handle a piece of paper more than once (I swear, Mr. Lakein), each piece I work on is then marked with a command for my assistant. The combination of these two techniques (classifying and only handling things once) is a great system for good girls because it also forces you into the role of active delegator.
NEVER APPEAR AT THE MERCY OF YOUR TIME FOR WHAT I LEARNED THE WEEK I HAD LUNCH WITH HILLARY CLINTON AND SUSAN POWTER)
Because it's important to a good girl to be perceived as a hard worker, she never minds (in fact she likes it) if someone catches her looking a little frantic: riffling through papers, dashing down the hall with her hair flying, lugging home a huge pile of work on Friday afternoon. Being in overdrive, she believes, shows everyone that she not only has lots to do but is getting it done.
Though it's important to be perceived as energetic, acting frazzled or short on time actually creates the impression that you aren't under control, and that calamity is waiting just around the corner to ambush you. It makes bosses reluctant to turn more responsibility over to you and it makes co-workers and subordinates as anxious as passengers on a bumpy 747.
A few months ago, I got to see the two best living examples of the Frazzled and Unfrazzled styles. It just so happened that in one week I went to luncheons for weight-loss maven Susan (“Only fat can make you fat”) Powter and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I hosted the lunch for diet guru Susan Powter in the executive dining room so that my editors could meet her. We had just done one of the first major pieces about her in a national magazine. She burst off the elevator going eighty miles an hour, and she maintained that speed for the next two hours. Though the message she perpetuates is that women must end their insane approach to food, she never touched her meal, making the rest of us feel like gluttons. She talked almost nonstop in something very close to a bark, never asked anyone a question, and gestured wildly with her arms, at the same speed as a helicopters rotor. (I imagined myself calling security to announce that we had two or three heads rolling around the floor.)
By 2:00 P.M. everyone on my staff looked like