Happy Holidays! From the Schwartz family to all of you.

On Friday morning, my alarm didn’t go off. As it turns out, this was technology trying to warn me of the day ahead. It’s easy to think that if we can plan well enough, have excellent time management skills and stay motivated, we can control our productivity. In reality, there is a limit to how much we can control. The rest lies with how we adapt to the speed bumps we encounter. Let me tell you about Friday…and how you too can deal with your most insane days.

Into the Storm

Friday was supposed to be a wonderful day. It was the last day of teaching for the summer. I had finished a lot of my end-of-year responsibilities early. I had plenty of time for the few things I had left, and in the evening, I was looking forward to attending an outdoor concert with some of my friends to kick off the summer.

Then, my alarm clock debacle in the morning turned into countless other things that went wrong. This included, but was not limited to, chasing a scorpion around my living room for 20 minutes, a 5 minute phone call with my bank that turned into a 3-hour customer service nightmare, a maintenance issue at our rental property, a dying cell phone, an office chair not fitting into the back seat of my tiny Corolla, and a whole slew of other things that I need not go in to.

Surely you’ve had a day like this, where you feel that despite your best planning efforts, your time is slipping through your fingers and your day is spiraling out of control. These kinds of days are frustrating to everyone, but especially to those of us who are planners at heart and don’t like to feel as though we are losing control of our time.

3 Strategies to Keep a Crazy Day on Track

1) Keep Your Cool

When things go wrong, it’s easy to start stressing, but this only exacerbates the situation. Keeping a level head is the only way to keep moving forward with your day with any sort of efficiency.

2) Adapt

You can only do so much to control outside factors that will disrupt your to-do list. Rather than lamenting the fact that your day’s productivity plan is ruined, focus your energy on adapting the plan to fit the new circumstances. This includes prioritizing what truly needs to be done and what can be delegated. (For example, I wanted to be at the rental property to deal with the maintenance issues, but circumstances prevented me from doing so. As it turns out, everything was fixed without my being there.)

3) Don’t Forget Your Desserts

When it becomes clear that we must cut a few things from our day to keep all of the wheels spinning, it’s easy to put our enjoyable Dessert activities on the chopping block first. While this is an easy, short-term solution, it does nothing to help your long-term stress level. You need your Dessert time and you owe it to yourself to try to protect it just like you would protect any other important task.

This is why I was determined to make it to the concert with my friends Friday evening. I’m proud to say that I made it, and getting through the day’s events made that Dessert all that much sweeter.

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Do you remember doing jigsaw puzzles as a kid? We frequently had one going on our dining room table growing up and my sister and I used to love taking a few minutes to put a couple pieces together every time we walked by. Little did I know that I would long for that same sort of casual productivity in my adult working life!

Every kid knows the most productive way to do a puzzle. You can’t just start randomly fumbling with the pieces, you start with the edges first because they are the easiest to find. Then, once you have a good outline started, you can start slowly building pieces toward the middle. It doesn’t take very long for kids to figure this out, but we adults tend to forget this process as we dive into tasks.

Set Up Your Outline

This week, I had frequent 30-40 minute chunks of time open in my evenings that I really wanted to use to be productive. The problem was that every time I sat down to tackle a task, I got overwhelmed because I didn’t really know where to start. I have so many new projects on my plate right now, and yet I was struggling to figure out how to use these short bursts of time.

Then I realized, I would be able to put these small chunks of time to much better use if I first set aside a larger chunk of time to outline what the components of these projects needed to be. I was trying to start the middle of my puzzle without my edge pieces.

Taking Time to Plan

This weekend, I sat down and planned. I have very little concrete product to show for my work, but that’s OK. The product is going to come later. The product will come when I have my next short burst of time available and instead of wasting it, I’ll be able to consult my project outline and start tackling it, once piece at a time.

When we get excited about our work, or feel stressed that we’re falling behind, it can be tempting to just start doing something so we feel productive. I urge you to step back and sketch out your plan. Unless you were one of those kids who liked to do the puzzle without looking at the picture on the box, in which case, you’re on your own!

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Photo Credit: Digital art

Ever feel like time is just disappearing as you’re trying to get everything done? Well, this weekend, time really did “disappear.”

Unless you are fortunate enough to live in the great states of Arizona or Hawaii, you lost an hour today as we Sprung Forward for Daylight Savings. Don’t worry. You can make up that lost hour with a few  time management strategies. Try these time management tricks this week to make up for your missing 60 minutes.

1) Kill a Time Killer
Remember, Time Killers are those little things that waste our time without our permission.  Little things like email, Facebook, YouTube and Internet surfing can be necessary for communication and fun Desserts…but only at the right time! Don’t let these things prolong your work by distracting you.

2) Invest Your Time
Over the past few months, I signed up for an email management service for my mailing list and a database to keep track of all of my citations for my school papers. Both of these services took time to figure out, but I have more than recouped that investment in the time these services ended up saving me. Have you been putting off a similar time management investment? Waiting for later? What better time than now? Do it this week.

3)  Delegate
Do you remember when you were 7-years old and you’d try to slip extra food on your dinner plate to the dog while your mom wasn’t looking? Oh how times change. Now that we are all grown up we try to heap more tasks on our plate and take care of it all ourselves. This week, pick one thing and delegate it. You don’t have to have a staff working under you to delegate. It could be as simple as asking a family member to help out, or hiring out a household chore if you can afford it.

And don’t worry, you’ll get that lost hour back in November anyway!

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Photo Credit: Idea Go

Many of us are content to do everything ourselves. In fact, we often ensure that we do everything ourselves by not telling anyone else how we do things. But what happens when we need other people to help us out? Think of those people as your understudies.

As I was watching Wicked for the first time on Friday night (because I don’t catch on to things until years after they are popular) I flipped open the program to see if any of the leading roles were being played by understudies that night. After all, I had paid a lot for these tickets and I was going to be bummed if I didn’t get to hear the “real deal.”

Then it occurred to me, we all have “understudies” in life, whether we plan to or not. No matter how hard we try, there will be a time where we simply can’t do everything. Either we’ll get sick, an emergency will come up or we will have just over-committed ourselves. The better we get at letting people help us, the easier it is when these situations arise. After all, the “show” must go on, and you don’t want the “ticket holders” in your life to be left hanging.

“If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”
How many times have you used that phrase as an excuse to not let others help you? It’s easy to point to other people’s failures as a reason to not delegate, but did you really set that person up for success?

Consider what would happen if the understudy for a major Broadway musical was given no script, no choreography and no direction. He was simply left to figure it out. No one would be a bit surprised when the performance crashed and burned would they? Make sure you don’t do the same thing with your understudies.

1. Take time for training
While it seems like taking the time to thoroughly train someone on a task takes far too long, it actually saves time in the long run. Give the person the right tools to succeed and you won’t have to waste time redoing it later.

2. Consider the person
Make sure the person you are asking for help has the skill set necessary to complete the task. You won’t ask a soprano to be the understudy for a tenor.

3. Assess
Make opportunities to assess the work others help you with. If something goes wrong, don’t simply take the task away. Help fix it. This will allow the person to learn rather than fail.

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Photo Credit: Phanlop88

Below is an excerpt from my new book, “The Time Diet Time Management for College Survival.” This section deals with one of the common pitfalls of college: procrastination. Don’t let poor time management skills affect your favorite college student. Pick up your copy today on Amazon.com for only $11.99!

Procrastination: The Enemy of Time Management

“Sometimes we procrastinate because we can’t find the time to get everything done. However, there are other times we procrastinate because we just really really don’t want to do our homework. We know we should work, but work isn’t fun and watching college sports and reality T.V. is. Don’t worry. You’re not alone. Even the best students feel like this sometimes. Here are some ways to motivate yourself to do homework you just don’t want to do.

Break a large project into smaller pieces

The best way to combat laziness is to break up a Meat task into smaller pieces and tackle them one piece at a time. For example, if you have a research paper to write, you may not want to start it because it seems like such an immense task that you don’t have the energy to tackle. Watching TV, going to the gym or getting a root canal all sound more appealing than starting something so overwhelming.

Instead, break the large project into smaller chunks that are more manageable. Instead of saying “I’m going to start my research paper today” say, “I am going to start my research paper today by compiling a bibliography of library sources.” Setting smaller daily goals makes a large project feel more approachable.

Promise yourself a reward

We can all agree, there are a ton of things in life that are more fun than doing hard work! Instead of having the mindset that your work is preventing you from doing something fun, just re-frame your thinking. You are still going to both have fun and get work done today, but you are just going to switch the order around a little bit. When you finish compiling your bibliography for your research paper, then you are going to reward yourself with a 10-minute chill-out session with your iPod, or run over to the Student Center for a smoothie.

Be creative with your rewards. Rewarding yourself with a lengthy break or Dessert task every time you finish a difficult chunk of work is not always practical. Instead, be creative with your rewards, particularly if you are trying to save money and a java mocha chiller just isn’t in the budget every time you need a pat on the back.

A reward can be as simple as stepping outside for some fresh air, eating a few jellybeans from your drawer stash, or texting with a friend. Finally, remember that putting off your homework won’t make it go away even though you really wish it would!

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Graduation is coming up. Instead of presents that will clutter a dorm room, why not get some time management advice that will help students succeed? They will thank you later. Click here to buy on Amazon: The Time Diet Time Management for College Survival

Don’t let your fear of a big task get in the way of taking the first step. That is the idea behind “National Novel Writing Month” (NaNoWriMo for short). During the month of November, aspiring novelists can sign up with NaNoWriMo.org and pledge to write a 50,000 word novel (about 175 pages) between November 1st and November 30th.

While this may seem like an insanely short amount of time to write such a lengthy piece, there is one rather large catch to the whole process: it doesn’t have to be good.

NaNoWriMo is all about quantity, not quality. The idea is that aspiring novelists often get caught up in the planning and editing process in an attempt to make their novels perfect. However, instead of ending up with a “perfect” novel, they end up with a perpetually unfinished one.

The purpose of NaNoWriMo is to create a finished product, even if it isn’t very good, with the assumption that you can always go back and revise later, but at least it’s done. It is also much easier to sit down and write once you’ve removed the pressure that it has to be your most brilliant work.

Removing the Need for Perfection

While we don’t all aspire to be novelists, we surely all have some big task in our lives that we dream of accomplishing, but haven’t found time to do. I challenge you to take a page out of this book (pun intended.) Remove the pressure that it has to be your best work, and simply start working.

Too often, we let our pursuit of perfection get in the way of productivity. A mediocre finished product is always better than a “perfect” half-finished one. What have you always dreamed of accomplishing? Try making December or even January your month to finish that big task you’ve always wanted to. (You can even give your month a hip abbreviation.)

Let me know what you decide to finish. Over 30,000 people wrote a novel during NaNoWriMo last year. What will your accomplishment be?

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Technorati Keywords Time Management, Efficiency,

Photo Credit: Renjith Krishnan

Time is Money. We’ve all heard this saying so many times that it almost loses its effectiveness, but this weekend I was reminded of how true it really is.

I grew up learning that it’s always better to know how to do things yourself rather than paying someone else to do it. My dad did all of the landscaping. My mom did all of the painting. I never had a store-bought Halloween costume and my sister and I had an awesome tree house made out of scrap wood from our garage.

I carried these habits into my adult life. Because of that, I now know how to do so much more and have saved more money than if I had tried to find people to do these things for me.

The Value of Our Time

This past weekend we moved into our new house. I cannot think of a busier or more stressful time to have placed such an event, but such is life! I was wondering how in the world we were doing to do all of this, until my husband suggested we hire movers to take care of it all.

My first thought was, “No! That’s not how we do it! We rent a U-Haul, we load it ourselves, we unload it ourselves and that’s that!” But then I realized I wasn’t placing a high enough value on my own time.

Sure, we could have moved all of our stuff ourselves, but it would have taken several days. I wasn’t necessarily just paying someone to do something that I didn’t want to do, I was paying someone to free up time in my schedule.

Every hour I didn’t have to spend moving I could spend grading projects for my class, working on my doctoral projects, getting speaking gigs, etc…I wasn’t paying a mover 30 dollars an hour to move my furniture as much as I was paying 30 dollars an hour to have that time free for other things.

I am certainly not advocating that we all spend our last dime paying people to do things for us. However, if you’re anything like me, it’s good to have a reminder once in a while that we don’t have to do everything ourselves either. Our time is extremely valuable and we owe it to ourselves to use it wisely.

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Technorati Keywords Time Management, Efficiency,

Photo Credit: Renjith Krishnan