Francesco Nencini _ Workaholics #05, originally uploaded by Francesco Nencini, detto Nencio..

I haven’t worked long hours (over 50 hours)for quite a long time, since my investment banking and consultancy days in fact. Ok there are still days where I am burning the midnight oil but it’s my work so it doesn’t occur as such and it’s not on a regular basis
Anyway recently I got myself a job. Setting up my business was taking too long and I needed the money and a different challenge.

I’ve been working self employed as a coach for almost a year now and while I love it, one thing I realized is that I need more from my work… mental stimulation.

I have an analytical mind and like to solve problems, learn new things and create solutions. I have a degree in Electronic Engineering, I have a corporate finance background, and I’m interested in technology, science, business and learning new things. While I can and do my own research for my business, applying it in service of another company and getting paid for it is very satisfying.

So right now I’m getting the feel good factor of making a difference in my work as a consultant/coach/speaker and the intellectual satisfaction of putting my analytical mind to use…

Funnily enough as a coach you have to quell the problem solving side of yourself as you tend to try and figure out the solutions to people’s problems. As a coach you need to empower people to figure out their own problems.

Anyway I’m doing some consulting work involving operational modeling using Excel at the same time I’m still developing my business and I also have some corporate finance consulting work on the horizon. And I’m loving it. I love the sheer challenge of managing 2 jobs and a business. It pulls me to be way more efficient and effective.

The job is 9-6.30, the coaching project was 2 days a week (but I’ve noticed part-time work always seems to expand to fill your free time is almost as much as full time work), and my business I do on the weekends.

I’ve managed to organize my week so I do a few hours coaching a week and ½ a day on my business. I’m learning the power of delegation, planning and working in concentrated work bursts.
The great thing is I also have a great social life. I went out clubbing last weekend and usually have at least 2 social evenings and a week.

So I guess I am a workaholic I’m excited about having lots to do and accomplishing it all while still having a great social life.

My whole reason for my being in business is to have it all and teach people to have it all, so obviously I need to walk the walk
In all of this I’m a bit different from the average workaholic in that I realize it’s about getting the job done and that doesn’t mean I have to do it all.   I’m not working to avoid life I’m working to achieve more and enjoy life.

So here’s to the true alcoholic there are plenty of us around who are working, building businesses, running charities, multi careerists

So here are my tips for the true workaholic
1. Realize you’re never going to get it all done, focus on the priorities and the big wins

2. There will be breakdowns and setbacks, anticipate them, learn from them and make sure they don’t happen again.

3. Give up frustration. There is no time to get angry or frustrated with setbacks. When they occur, deal with them quickly and as completely as you can. Then move on to something else

4. Keep a to-do list of quick wins that you can do whenever you have a few minutes.

5. Manage your energy. Energy management is vital when you have more to do. You will put in more hours so you need to be at peak performance. The consequence of not managing your energy is stress, exhaustion and burn out.

6. Use your waiting time.  Whenever you find yourself waiting practice abdominal breathing and energy management techniques. I have some great energy techniques in the Zone Life System.

7. Delegate. Delegate. Delegate. We all know to delegate but sometimes you need to give away work. This means giving away the opportunity to someone else. This may be money or recognition but people are willing to take things on because they get something from it. Let them have it. Think win/win
8. Manage eustress – Ok you are having so much fun doing what you are doing you just can’t contain yourself.  Eustress (positive stress) can be a great thing, it is fun to be excited but too much eustress leads to burnout and exhaustion. I’m guilty of having bouts of hyper excitement. I’ve trained myself to check in to my body and calm down my heart rate and pulse when I notice that I am in eustress

9. Know when to quit- if you are pushing and not getting results take a break, call it a day and come back to it. Or you can delegate it or ask for advice.

10. Work to your strengths. Again delegate the things you are weak in and work to where your strengths or interests lie.

11. Manage your emotional stress. Getting frustrated about what you can’t do or change is energy depleting.  We all have to deal with work colleagues, impossible work structures/environments but you’ll be happier in life and more effective when you accept the things that you can’t change.Practice emotional freeing techniques. I’ll be sharing some of these in the future

12. Get your time managment/productivity systems in order. Set up your productivity systems and keep refining them so they support you.

13. Practice focusing on one thing at a time. Set up the morning so you focus on one thing and get a good chunk of solid work under your belt before you do anything else.  Then have a break where you can relax or do other things that you may have missed out on e.g. emails, phone calls etc..  Then resume focusing on one thing. You’ll find you’ll get way more done and feel a lot more relaxed.

14. Schedule time windows to manage your various projects and check email. Check email relating to various projects once or twice a day. My windows are around 11.30 and 3pm for 15-30 minutes but sometimes I go to 60 minutes. In your time window do the things that will make the most difference to your project/Endeavour. Don’t go over your allocated time. You are training yourself to be more efficient.

15. Focus on completing loops – David Allen in his book “Getting Things Done” talks about keeping loops completed so they are out of your psyche.  Open loops keep a background attention unit and create a feeling of not quite feeling settled.  The more you close open work loops the more at ease you will feel.  This is one of those things where you have to do it to know what i’m talking about.  If you live in a world of open loops you won’t know the power of closing loops until you start doing it.

I’ve just discovered social oomph. An application that lets you super manage your twitter account and schedule to send out tweets.

Recommended to me by Social Media consultant, I struggled to find an appropriate use for it until he explained to me that it would allow me to send out updates without having to be at my computer.

“Hmmm ok, useful”, I thought but not essential. But it got me thinking…

A friend of mine works in a consulting firm where the corporate culture is that those who want to appear to be dedicated hard workers, have a habit of sending out work related emails late at night. She often gets woken up by the sound of her blackberry pinging at 11:30pm.

Ok I have been guilty of sending out late night work emails when I worked as an investment banker, but that’s because I was really working at 1am in the morning, and thought if I’m here I might as well let people know about it.

I have no doubt that these guys are getting on their computer or blackberries at 11:30pm to spend 5 mins sending out their emails that they have been sitting on since they got home from work at 8pm.

So this leads to my great idea for a new product. An even better application than SocialOomph would be Email Oomph.

You could set it up to send emails at late hours while you are in your bed or down the pub and still give the impression that you are doing work.

Even better you could schedule days worth of useful and timely emails first thing in the morning and last thing at night. People would be amazed at your dedication to the job.

Want to take a secret extended lunch break or pop out to the gym, set it up to send progress updates on that report that’s due Friday

I would love for someone to create this… Oh found it, Email scheduler for Outlook. Now all we need is one for the blackberry.

The dreaded stress cycle, if you’ve worked in a stressful job, you will have experienced the stress cycle,  probably many times.  You know how it goes: you enter into a stressful period, the more stressed you get, the less effective you become leading to lower output and increased worrying, the more worried you get the less sleep you have and the more stressed you become and so on.

I almost went through a mini version of this at the beginning of January.  I  extended my Christmas break by a week, and came back to a ton of work and tight deadlines.  I knew what I was letting myself in for but didn’t anticipate the pressure it would cause.

Luckily i’m an expert in personal is energy management so I have trained myself to recognise stress and get out of it quickly.  Recognition is the first step to getting out of the stress loop but getting out of it is a bit harder.

So first let me explain the stress cycle (I found a few definitions of this online after a google search)

The Stress Cycle

When we are in particular stressful periods we often find ourselves trapped in the stress cycle.

A particular stressful period results in poor sleep, which leads to a poor start to the day in the morning, poor performance and productivity throughout the day, mental, physical and/or emotional exhaustion which leads to worry at the end of the day and poor sleep.

We get out of this stress cycle either intentionally through specific techniques or we endure until either the busy period stops, something takes usout of the situation, we become ill or we burn out.

The Stress Cycle

Chronic Stress Cycle

If we stay in the stress cycle over time we slip into the Chronic stress cycle.

Our physiology is only supposed to handle stress for short periods of time.  Over a long period of time, our brain gets used to the chemicals our body produces when stressed, we become desensitized to stress and it’s effect on the body.  The brain can also become addicted to these stress chemicals and we become addicted to stress and stressful situations.  If you feel that you always need to be doing something or find it hard to take  a break you’ll understand.

This a downward spiral of stress leads to longer term impacts on our health as well as decreasing performance, disastisfaction and physical symptons.  In addition, it becomes increasingly harder to get out of the stress cycle.

Chronic Stress Cycle

Traditionally stress management has been about breaking the stress cycle, which is all well and good, but we are missing a trick.

Just as there is a cycle of stress there is a cycle of energy.

The Energy Cycle

It is possible to have the converse of the stress cycle – the energy cycle. A period of increasing energy, vitality, focus and productivity.  I created the Zone Life System to do just that.   The System contains practices that negate and reverse the effects of the stress cycle actually increasing your performance, productivity and wellbeing.  Take any element of the temporary stress cycle and create a practice to produce the opposite and you will get the following:

The Energy Cycle

In practice it looks like this

• You start the morning off, by energising the body, alleviating any tiredness or symptoms of a poor night’s sleep – With 5 to 20 mins of focused energy techniques you can set yourself up for an energised workday.

• When you start work you set an intention for each piece of work you intend to do – Setting an intention focuses the mind.  There are specic tools for getting the mind to focus and concentrate more effectively.

• Manage your energy throughout the day – it is possible to mentally recharge you energy at any time.  In the Zone Life System you learn about the best way for you to increase your energyWe teach you some powerful energy renewal techniques

• At the end of the working day use powerful techniques to complete the working day, let go of all the accumulated stress and plan the next day, you re-energise yourself for the rest of the evening.

• Effective sleep, the best way to go to bed is with an empty mind.  Happy and complete with the day.  For those under pressure who get less than the recommended amount of sleep, or those who just want to learn to sleep better.  Learn powerful techniques to increase the quality of your sleep.

Doing these practices over the long term leads to to greater physical, emotional and mental wellbeing only limited by the extent of practice that one brings to it.  The opposite of the Chronic stress cycle would look like the Long Term Energy Cycle below

Longer Term Benefits of the Energy Cycle

Christmastime in the City, originally uploaded by ☮Kate Monster.

It’s December nearly the end of the 2009

I know many people get busy with Christmas and preparing for the holidays but for me not only is December a time for completing projects before Christmas and the New Year, but its also an opportunity to slow down, take stock and take time to renew my energy and creativity. It’s all about preparing myself for planning and creating 2010. Of course there is time for fun too.

Currently I’m in a mad rush to finish my current projects and complete my tax returns (I hate going into January with Tax returns looming over my head). One of the principles that I follow is to clear a space before creating something new. This works on a physical/ spatial level but also on a temporal level, clearing the past so you can focus on the future.

Many people create New Year’s resolutions and plans in January but because they haven’t dealt effectively with their past habits they have difficulty sticking to those resolutions.

Taking some time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t’ work during the year, will help you more powerfully plan for a great 2010.

Here is a great exercise for clearing the past and creating the right head space for planning 2010. Spend at least 10 minutes answering these questions in a notebook or journal

• What have been your achievements up until now?
• What have been the disappointments or regrets?
• What did you not do that you had intended to do?
• What are you proud of from the year?
• What goals will you carry over into 2010 and what will you drop or rethink?
• Who can you forgive?
• What can you forgive yourself for?
• What are you grateful for?
• What was the theme of 2009 for you?
• What did you learn from the 2009?

• Is there anything you can complete before end of 2009 that would make a difference to your life? If so complete it

If we look at 2009 in context, at the beginning of the year we thought we would be facing economic meltdown. Most people’s concerns were in surviving and making it through.
Many people lost their jobs, many worried about losing their jobs. Overall we are in a much better position than we were 12 months ago, we have come through the worse and there is more of a glimmer of hope on the horizon.
So even if times have been hard, in the grand scheme of things the world is in a better position than it was 12 months ago.

That at least is something to be grateful for.
And there is just one thing to do CELEBRATE!

Office Rescue, originally uploaded by banspy.

I hate Mondays. 

Like many people, I hate Mondays.  I’ve always struggled with them.  For some reason it takes me awhile to get myself into gear for work, especially if I’ve had a heavy weekend.  When I worked in a company Mondays were hellish but at least I knew what I had to do that day, but now working for myself I have too many options and ways to wheedle out of my to do list. I even tried taking the day off but then Tuesday became the new Monday.

According to an article from Reuters we coast through Mondays and then get stressed on Tuesday morning when we realise how much work we have to do for the rest of the week. (Tuesday is a great day for me, I don’t get stressed)

I’m still mastering Monday, but here is what I’ve found works so far.

Focus on energy

Just as we learnt in physics, that it takes an initial energy to get an object moving.  Setting up your week powerfully (also day, month or year) requires an initial burst of energy to get going and build up momentum.  Therefore the more energy you can put into Monday the more productive you will be for the rest of the week.

Focus Monday morning on building momentum for the week and setting out what there is to do for the week more than getting specific results. By Monday afternoon, you want to feel energised, clear and ready to go.  That way you avoid Tuesday morning stress.

The principle of energy

Now when we talk about energy, there are 3 categories of energy we can work with physical, emotional or mental.

Physical: Exercise

When you’re up and active, energy flows, however often on the weekend, the energy flow in our body gets blocked. This can be from lying on the sofa, inactivity or hangover. If you feel lethargic and out of sorts or have kinks or knots in your spine, you will know what I mean.  The best thing to do is some stretching, some exercise or get a rigorous massage.  This will get the energy in your body flowing again.  Do this on Sunday evening preferably but if not Monday morning.

Emotional:  Do something fun or emotionally fulfilling

Doing something emotionally fulfilling will give you a burst of energy. From allowing the ‘inner child’ to play a bit or authentically paying someone a complement.  Do something fun or express your love for someone.

Mental:  Visualisation creates clarity

The biggest obstacle to mental energy is lack of clarity.  By spending 5-10 minutes doing some ‘creative daydreaming’ around your goals and aspirations, you remind yourself of your goals and what is important to you.  This is the big picture, the why.  Then you can break that down into what to do for the week.

Bizarro email hell from flickr

Any student of GTD knows to keep their email inbox empty buts lets face it,  sometimes our housekeeping gets a bit lax.  If you’re the type of person who goes from hyper efficient ordered GTD follower to chaos and clutter after a couple of days then you’ll need an emergency practice to avoid the build up of email clutter when you don’t have the time or inclination to empty everything.

Here are my quick tips for when you only have a few minutes to deal with a mass of email.

Switch on emergency mode.  Ok you’re not going to get clear your inbox but you can at least avoid  an escalating build up.  I take the ‘if there was fire’ approach.  If there was a fire and you had 5 mins to deal with your email, what would you genuinely keep?  What would you delete?

Step 1. Have a deal with folder – This folder is to put everything in that you are going to deal while you are fishing the actionable items out of your inbox.   this can be a temporary folder or permanent.  If you’re likely to keep things lingering in this folder and forget about them. Then make sure this is a temporary folder and delete it as soon as you are back to normal GTD functionality.   If you are disciplined, keep it as part of your email practice.

Step 2 Clean up your emails in categories

The quickest way to clean up your emails is to switch between different views or ordering and process accordingly.  This works better with an email program such as Outlook, rather than web based email.

Put your folders into the following views and collapse all groups.

• By Sender
• By Subject
• By Date

The order of the views depends on your work.  If you have emails from a few select people, start with By Sender.  If you have many chained emails with the same subject, check By Subject.  If none of the above check by Date.

Clear up as many messages as possible leaving each collapsed group empty.  E.g in By Date view, leave yesterday empty.  If By Sender view deal with and delete all emails from a particular sender.

As you put emails into the deal with folder you’ll have an idea of  how much time to allocate to then process the Deal items.

Have a standard email to send for when you are overwhelmed.  Switch on the out of office reply when you are are busy.  For any important email store a message that you can easily copy and past that says some thing like  “Thanks for you message, I am dealing with a particularly heavy work load right now.  I will deal with and respond to your message by [Date]”

Don’t forget to Schedule in your calendar to deal with this email

We were running a special course for some our clients today and while having tea and coffee before the course I was chatting to some of my coaching clients.

One of my clients hadn’t had breakfast and asked me if I had eaten.  I said yes, to which she replied of course you would you always take care of your health.

I didn’t reply but I wondered why it was an issue.  To me it was unquestionable that I would have breakfast. It is just a standard for me.  So that got me thinking.  Often we all have habits that are just standard for us while some people struggle with the very same issue. By adopting other’s successful habits maybe we can be more successful in those areas where we are not…

What is a standard?

I’m defining a Standard as a habit that is automatically ingrained in what you do that helps you be successful.  A standard requires no thought or attention.  It doesn’t preoccupy any of your life. It’s automatic. 

Another obvious standard for me is to be on time for meetings and appointments.   Now that may seem like something obvious, most people would want to be on time for meetings and appointments, but to have it be a standard requires it to be a habit so ingrained that it (almost) always happens. 

Many years ago I struggled to be on time for everything.  It would be an ongoing battle fraught with rushing around, just making my transportation, constantly checking the time and praying I would make it on time.  I would arrive between on-time and 10 minutes late, feeling a bit frantic or frazzled.  Arriving within this timeframe wasn’t what I wanted but it was how I survived; however at some point I got tired of it being a constant battle.

I had to work on being on time, I changed my paradigm, it became a requirement for me to arrive on time or early, calmly composed and having enjoyed the journey.  Once I had this under my belt and I arrived on time consistently, it became a standard for me.

An extraordinary life requires high standards.

From my experience, the great people I met have great standards.  Where you find greatness you will find great standards.  One of my mentors had defined standards for nearly everything, some of those I liked were ‘always greeting everyone you interact with, making sure you remember their name’, ’always be presentable’,  ‘Always eat quality food’ (I follow this one too)

 How to create great standards

A great way to look for new standards is to look at what are you tolerating right now?  Things that you tolerate occupy mind space and niggle away at you.  By taking on a standard you deal with the problem permanently allowing you to get more peace of mind, and free up your ‘life’ capacity.   That’s how I turned around my unpunctuality.

Here are some common tolerations and the corresponding standards you can take on:

Standards for greatness

Beyond what you are tolerating, look for people that  you admire and incorporate some of their standards in your life.

These are some of the standards that I personally admire that I have learnt from others

• Make an effort to remember people’s names when you meet them
• Always send a thank you note to clients
• Always acknowledge someone for a good deed.
• Look for the greatness in others

No time?

Speak to anyone these days and they will tell you, they are too busy and don’t have the time to do X.

That X is usually something that will benefit them in the long run. They may then proceed to tell you about all the other things they have to do instead.  Those other things being not as important as X but more pressing.

I’ve been coaching people to get back into the job market for a couple of months and while I really love my clients, I feel a bit bemused by the fact that they are not working, yet still don’t have the time to do the things they need to do. Being someone who is used to working 70 hours a week (although I have now scaled down to 40-50). I have had the experience feeling just as busy working 70 hours as at 40 hours. Ok at 70 you feel a bit more stressed but the difference between 70 and 40 is not proportional.

But the thing about time is it is entirely a matter of perception. The only way to get an objective view of your time is to measure it.

Measuring gets you out of the realm of perception into the realm of reality. I’ve started keeping a specially created time log tool ready for when anyone says they’re too busy. I get people to measure hour by hour what they did during the period and compare that to what they intended to do in that hour. I also get them to describe which quadrant that hour fell into according to Stephen Covey’s model. I then get them to assess the day as a whole to see what they accomplished (as distinct from what they did) and how much energy they had throughout the day.

I’ve had some great results from this. One of my clients used it to plan her next day and realised she only had 2 hours of any meaningful activity. She had a light bulb moment and realised she spent most of her time doing not very much; wasting her life away. She is now looking at how to use all her spare time on things that are important to her.

I’ve been using the tool myself. I think I’m pretty productive but after one day I noticed how much of my time was wasted on phone calls, fraffing around with IT and ‘quick’ Google searches for information which expanded to longer searches. Usually I don’t spend much time checking email but today I got really annoyed by an accusatory email I received from a co-worker and after I had finished my reply, I realised I had spent an hour writing an almost legalese in precision, email, checking my facts, getting back up emails and data to prove why I was right and he was wrong. Looking back if I had known it would have taken so long I probably would have put less ego into the letter and spent half the amount of time it took to write it. I now wonder how much time gets spent on conflict. Just tracking my time for one day was a real eye opener and will help me sharpen up any departures from my schedule.

So the point of this article is this. Instead of saying you’re too busy which is a dead end statement ask yourself where is my time actually going and what improvements can I make to the way my time is used. Start measuring your time at the very least you can reassure yourself that you really are too busy but at best you could get a whole new way of organising your time.

Speak to anyone these days and they will tell you, they are too busy and don’t have the time to do X.  That X is usually something that will benefit them in the long run.  They may then proceed to tell you about all the other things they have to do instead.

I’ve been coaching people to get back into the job market for a couple of months and while I really love my clients, I feel a bit bemused by the fact that they are not working, yet still don’t have the time to do the things they need to do.  Being someone who is used to working 70 hours a week (although I have now scaled down to 40-50).  I have had the experience feeling just as busy working 70 hours as at 40 hours.  Ok at 70 you feel a bit more stressed but the difference between 70 and 40 is not proportional.

But the thing about time is it is entirely a matter of perception.  The only way to get an objective view of your time is to measure it.

Measuring gets you out of the realm of perception into the realm of reality.  I’ve started keeping a specially created time log tool ready for when anyone says they’re too busy.  I get people to measure hour by hour what they did during the period and compare that to what they intended to do in that hour.  I also get them to describe which quadrant that hour fell into according to Stephen Covey’s model.  I then get them to assess the day as a whole to see what they accomplished (as distinct from what they did) and how much energy they had throughout the day.

I’ve had some great results from this.  One of my clients used it to plan her next day and realised she only had 2 hours of any meaningful activity.  She had a light bulb moment and realised she spent most of her time doing not very much; wasting her life away.  She is now looking at how to use all her spare time on things that are important to her.

I’ve been using the tool myself.  I think I’m pretty productive but after one day I noticed how much of my time was wasted on phone calls, fraffing around with IT and ‘quick’ Google searches for information which expanded to longer searches. Usually I don’t spend much time checking email but today I got really annoyed by an accusatory email I received from a co-worker and after I had finished my reply,  I realised I had spent an hour writing an almost legalese in precision, email, checking my facts, getting back up emails and data to prove why I was right and he was wrong.  Looking back if I had known it would have taken so long I probably would have put less ego into the letter and spent half the amount of time it took to write it.  I now wonder how much time gets spent on conflict.  Just tracking my time for one day was a real eye opener and will help me sharpen up any departures from my schedule.

So the point of this article is this.  Instead of saying you’re too busy which is a dead end statement ask yourself where is my time actually going and what improvements can I make to the way my time is used.  Start measuring your time at the very least you can reassure yourself that you really are too busy  but at best  you could get a whole new way of organising your time.