Emily Schwartz

Are You Going Too Fast?

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Police StopIn our fast-paced world, we have so many factors asking us to speed up, do you have anyone encouraging you to slow down? Or do you live each day pedal to the metal hoping your schedule doesn’t come crashing to a halt when it becomes too much? I was reminded yesterday why paying attention to the speed limits in your life is so important.

A Less Than Speedy Weekend

This weekend, I drove 6 hours to California for my good friend’s bridal shower. That’s a lot of time by yourself in the car for both thinking, and making sure you don’t get a speeding ticket on the open desert highway. As I passed a car on the side of the road being written up by highway patrol, I thought to myself: “Yeah, I bet that guy is pretty upset, but he’d be even more upset if he’d kept speeding and gotten in a horrible accident.”

Even though I’m irritated when I see a cop parked behind a bush with a radar gun, clearly trying to catch speeders unseen, I’m glad they are there, telling us all to slow down before we hurt ourselves or someone else.

Who Are The Cops In Your Life?

Then it occurred to me. Who are the “cops” in our work lives who tell us to stop going so fast? Who reminds us to take a break, stop overburdening our schedule, and let go of a pointless pursuit of perfection? Sometimes it’s a friend, a spouse, or a child. Other times it’s a bad cold, a headache, or a forgotten deadline.

Whoever the highway patrol in your life is, listen to them. It’s easy to get caught up in a whirlwind of tasks and ignore the warning signs of a dangerously fast-paced schedule until it’s too late. Just like speed limits are meant to slow us down before we cause and accident, we must also keep our schedule at a reasonable pace before we hit a wall of stress, illness, or both.

Don’t dismiss the highway patrol in your life. Let them slow you down and help you out. Going 65mph might not get me to California as quickly, but it will get me there in one piece, which is what I hope for the end of my workday as well.

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The 3 C’s That Waste Your Time

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Time Management To DoSince our time is limited and our to-do lists are long, we can’t afford to have time wasters in our schedule, especially if they also steal our positive energy. Take this opportunity to review how you’re spending the precious minutes in your day. If it includes any of the following “3 C’s,” get rid of them now! You deserve better.

1. Comparing

Having role models is great. Constantly comparing yourself to others to see how you “measure up” is not. There will always be someone who is smarter, richer, or has a fancier job title than you. So what? Judge your accomplishments based on your goals and priorities, not someone else’s.

2. Complaining

Complaining takes away valuable time and energy you could be spending  finding a solution or making the best of a sticky situation. It also brings down the people around you.

3. Criticizing

It’s easy to find the bad in every situation and person. Finding the good becomes easier when you make it a habit. Take a moment to point out the good in something. It takes just as much time as a criticism but puts you in a better mood to plow through the tasks on your to-do list.

Getting rid of these 3 C’s helps free up your time and energy for more useful and productive endeavors. Enjoy!

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This Frog is a Multitasker. Are you?

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time management multitaskerThis week I read an article explaining how a certain breed of frog looks for multitasking when selecting its mate. Oh how similar we are to our amphibian friends in our obsession with doing more than one thing at a time!

The truth is, while multitasking sounds important and necessary, we need to separate what is possible and productive from what is eroding the quality of our work. Try these tips to “toad-ally” revamp your approach to multitasking (Ouch. That pun hurt. You’re welcome.)

1. Don’t kid yourself

I can hold a coffee and my computer, conduct a conference call, eat a sandwich, and roll a suitcase through the airport…for about 5 seconds before I fall flat on my face in a puddle of nonfat double shot mocha. Multitasking might be possible, at least for a little bit, but eventually it produces lower quality, distracted work, which can lead to oversight and disaster. Don’t convince yourself that your constant multitasking is producing the same results as focused work.

2. Do many things, but let them take their turn

Just because you fill many different roles and responsibilities, doesn’t mean you have to attend to them all at one time. Sometimes people say, “I have to multitask, I’m constantly juggling multiple projects at once.” Great! But that doesn’t mean you have to jump haphazardly from one to the next and attempt multiple different tasks at once. You can still maintain the appearance of a multitasker by hyper-focusing on one project at a time, even if it means tackling several projects in the same day.

3. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

With the rise of smartphones, people essentially have a small computer in their pockets constantly, which makes multitasking seem much more feasible. Just because you can do two things at once, doesn’t mean it’s the most efficient, productive, and focused use of your time. Before you split your attention, ask yourself: “Am I doing two things because I must or because I can?”

In our on-the-go society, occasional multitasking is inevitable, but the more we strive for singular focus rather than split distraction, the better.

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Photo credit: freedigitalphotos.net

How to Wake Up Earlier

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Time management morningWhat would YOU do with an extra hour in the day? Would you exercise? Spend it with family? Clean that room you’ve been meaning to get to? One of the easiest places to find more time in your day is in the morning. Unfortunately, we aren’t all chipper morning people who easily bound out of bed at 5am, ready to start the day.  Try these three tips to start your morning before the sun does:

1. Schedule a morning appointment

Getting up early is easier to do when you’re accountable to someone else. Try joining a networking group, exercise class, or book club that meets early in the morning. When I chose a Toastmasters club last spring, I almost opted for the 11:30 lunch break meeting, but instead chose a club that met at 6:30 in the morning. Not only does this force me out of bed earlier, but it leaves my afternoon hours free for other things!

2. Look forward to breakfast

Aren’t you much more eager to get out of bed when you know that a gourmet cup of coffee and delicious omelet are in your immediate future? A luxurious breakfast need not take a lot of time. Take a few minutes before bed and cut up some veggies and chicken to throw into a pan with some eggs in the morning. Or just spend the extra few bucks and spring for the “good” cereal or coffee. Having a delicious breakfast to look forward to can provide an extra boost of morning motivation.

3. Lay off the Snooze Button

Set your alarm clock for the time you “no really” want to be up. Setting it earlier and allowing yourself to hit the snooze button 4 times will just decrease the amount of restful sleep you get and allow yourself to linger in bed for longer than you planned.

Like most things in your schedule, getting up early only becomes part of your routine when you do it regularly and form a habit. Don’t be discouraged if it’s difficult the first week or two. Just stick with it, and enjoy the new-found time in your day!

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Photo credit: Freedigitalphotos.net

3 Ways to Find Balance in the Busy

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Time Management BalanceWe all strive to live a “balanced” life, but what does that really mean? Living a balanced life is more than just physically removing yourself from work once in a while.

Balance has just as much to do with your mental state as it does the hours in your schedule. If you’re thinking about work 24/7, it doesn’t really matter that you “allowed” yourself to go out to dinner with friends on a weeknight, or splurged on that 3-day weekend getaway. Try these three tips to allow yourself to mentally let go of your work on a regular basis.

1. Enjoy “Guilt-Free” Desserts

When you take a little time for yourself, do you feel guilty? An enjoyable Dessert task in your Time Diet is hardly enjoyable at all if you spend the whole time berating yourself for not being productive. Instead, broaden your definition of productivity to include doing things for yourself and recharging your batteries.

2. Ditch Your Connectivity

Just because you can take a moment to check your work email while out to dinner doesn’t mean you should. Allowing yourself to be constantly connected to work via your smartphone makes relaxing difficult.

3. Make Enjoyment a Priority

Do you only allow yourself to enjoy the “left over” time at the end of the day when you’re exhausted and worn out? Make Desserts a priority in your calendar just like everything else. It’s easy to work late and skip your favorite yoga class because there “isn’t enough time,” but remember, we make time for the things that are important to us.

Motivated and driven people are naturally going to worry about their job “off the clock” from time to time, but the more we can strive to compartmentalize that worry and turn it off once in a while, the better.

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In Defense of the Paper Calendar

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Time Management Paper CalendarGrocery store check-writers.
90 year old ladies who don’t use email.
That one person who isn’t on Facebook yet.

I have been compared to all of these people because of one simple fact: I carry a paper calendar in my purse everywhere I go. I use my smartphone to message my friends, purchase my lattes, tell me directions, and accept credit cards, but when it comes to my deadlines, I rely on good ‘ol fashioned paper and pen. When people discover this, they are shocked. “Emily,” they say. “You write a time management blog. Why on earth do you use a paper calendar?” Allow me to explain…

The short answer: It works for me.

As a time management speaker, my goal is not to tell you what I do and convince you it’s best. My goal is to help you find what works best for YOU and have the dedication to stick to that plan.

The long answer: I’ve chosen to stick with my paper calendar for three main reasons:

1. Flexibility

I like to be able to write some things big and some things small. Some things get stars, others don’t. Some repeated events just get a line through the whole week. My formatting options are limit-less.

2. Big Picture

Many of the phone calendar apps out there make it difficult to see your week at a glance due to the screen size. When I open my paper calendar, I can see all the week’s deadlines at once. It gives me a good “big picture” idea of what I have in store.

3. Retention

I find that I remember things more if I write them rather than type them. Perhaps it’s because I type pretty much everything else in my life and when I write something in pen, it stands out.

The biggest drawback:

Sharing. I’ve almost switched to a digital calendar many times because it is easier to share my schedule with others. To get around this, I keep a Google calendar with shared events that others need to see, and then transfer them to my paper version. Duplicated work? Yes. Inefficient? Possibly. But so far, the extra few seconds of transferring those deadlines has been worth it.

So, fellow paper fans, raise that pen high with pride! No longer should you be labeled a “technophobe” or “dinosaur.” You’re just doing what works for YOU and that is all that matters.

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Photo credit: Freedigitalphotos.net

3 Ways to Celebrate Success

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Time Management CelebrationsYOU are amazing and have accomplished incredible things. Have you stepped back and appreciated that recently?

Sometimes people are hesitant to celebrate success because it takes time, and they’re afraid they’ll become complacent with their accomplishments and lose the drive to keep moving forward. If we never lift our noses from the grindstone, we risk facing burnout, stress, and ultimately slowing our pace of productivity. Try these three steps to propel your motivation and energy forward while celebrating your past successes.

1. Write it down

Write down five things you’ve accomplished in the past year. They don’t have to be huge undertakings, just something that required some work and dedication. Treat yourself to a “Dessert” you enjoy, be it a hobby, a relaxing afternoon, or special meal. While you’re enjoying this Dessert, think of all the hard work that led you to that point and appreciate how good it feels to know you’ve accomplished something worthwhile. If these were team accomplishments, bring your coworkers in on the celebration!

2. Improve while still appreciating

Looking back at past successes is not only a chance to see how far you’ve come, but also see the opportunities for future improvement. Be careful not to brush off past accomplishments because they now seem small or trivial. Remember, those small, early successes are the foundation on which you continue to build.

3. Recognize success in others

We all know how difficult it is to take time to appreciate our work, so help others out with that process. Take a moment to tell your friend, colleague, or family member what a great job he or she did on a recent task. This doesn’t have to be a formal hand-written note. It could be as simple as stopping someone in the hallway and giving heartfelt recognition of a job well done. Appreciating success in others will also help you appreciate success in yourself.

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How To Stop Wasting Your Time In Meetings

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time management meeting“Oh, what a productive meeting! I was 100% enthralled with all 60 minutes of that conference room gathering” …said no one ever. Most people seem to agree that meetings can be a huge drain on our productivity, and yet they continue to plague our workday. Try these tips to turn your meetings from obligatory time fillers to shining examples of efficiency.

If You’re The Meeting Planner…

Schedule shorter meetings. Having a written agenda, keeping people on topic, and avoiding lengthy rambling icebreakers can all help make a meeting shorter, but if you’ve scheduled an hour for only 10 minutes of information, you’ll find a way to fill that extra time. If your meetings are usually an hour, try scheduling one for 30 minutes. If they are usually 30 minutes, try 15. Restricting your available time forces people to be brief and also respects everyone’s schedule.

If You’re a Meeting Attendee

It’s easy to recognize when other meeting attendees are wasting everyone’s time by veering off track and speaking just for the sake of speaking, but sometimes it’s hard to recognize when we’ve become that person! Before you interject, ask yourself: “Is this related to the agenda? Is it a question that will pertain to anyone else in the room?” If the answer is “No,” save it for another time.

Notice one of the self-questions isn’t “Is this important?” Just because something is important doesn’t mean it belongs in the meeting. That’s the purpose of an agenda – to determine which important things will be discussed right now.

Meetings don’t have to be a waste of time. Just keep your collaborations on track and to the point and everyone will leave happy.

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My Journey Into Gray

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Time management careerThey say that in order to get high blog traffic, your best bet is to make your blogs short with a catchy title. And don’t write about yourself too much because then the readers won’t be able to see themselves in your words. This blog breaks all those rules. I apologize. I hope you’ll read it anyway and share it with your friends because I believe this message is vital to living the life you want to lead and I wish someone had shared it with me earlier.

Black and White

When deciding how to spend our time, it’s easy to look for the black and white options. I will either pursue this career or that career, this path or that path, this choice or that choice…as though life were always that dichotomous. Sure, our time is limited and we can’t do everything, but our opportunities aren’t as cut-and-dry as we’d like them to be. If we’ve chosen to accept black and reject white, we might miss out on all the potential gray has to offer. Adopting the “gray philosophy” has changed my life and opportunities dramatically and I know it can for you too.

My Journey Into the Gray

I spent the first several years of my professional life with black and white tunnel vision. I have a degree in education, so I became a full time teacher in a public school district with a good reputation. Then I decided to get an advanced degree in education with the hope of teaching college at a small school in a small town and then move up to a large school in a large town. That’s the well-trodden path that others have forged for me. If you do A, B, and C then X, Y, and Z will happen.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that path, but I realized I was on a straight freeway when I was really looking for a curvy backroad – the kind that might lead to a dead-end, or right back to where you started, but could also lead to an amazing scenic overlook you never expected. That’s when I decided to start my own consulting business.

I did not jump in with two feet with the “sink or swim” mentality that some entrepreneurs recommend. I put my toe in the water with a blog and a few workshops here and there while continuing to teach full time. As my business grew and I quit my teaching job to pursue my doctorate, I felt pressured to keep my worlds separate. “Nobody outside of teaching cares about my teaching background,” I thought, “and nobody in education will understand the opportunities I’m trying to explore outside the classroom walls.”

I thought I was on two very separate paths but I’m now starting to see that they aren’t separate at all; I’m just forging my own in the middle.

New Possibilities

Since leaving the classroom, I have continued to grow my consulting business with both students and adults. I use my expertise in education to coach college students on time management and speak to high school and college audiences about how to succeed. I became a consultant with a bank delivering financial literacy seminars to student and adult audiences. I also travel around the country delivering professional development workshops for a non-profit that offers adaptive assessment software to school districts. And I teach music as an adjunct professor at Arizona State University. And I sell my three books on Amazon.com as I’m writing my fourth.

Where in the world is the manual for that career path? Where is the black and white? What do I tell people when they ask, “What do you do?”

I have no idea where this “path” will lead, but I do know that if I had continued to view my life as a series of black and white options, if I had continued to believe that teaching in the K-12 classroom was the only thing I could do with a degree in education, I would have been blind to so many exciting opportunities.

Expand Your Own Tunnel Vision

Your career path probably isn’t as narrow as you think it is. Don’t let your focus on one path blind you to possible detours and side streets that could lead to slightly different and new possibilities. Just because it isn’t “typically” done doesn’t mean it can’t be. Don’t be afraid to waste your time on an activity or opportunity that doesn’t fit the mold. Be creative. Be open to new things. Most importantly, find what you love doing and then find a way to get paid for it, even if it means taking the road less traveled or forging your own path. (See how I waited until the end for the trite Robert Frost poem reference? Go ahead and admire my restraint.)

Thanks for making it all the way to the end! I’d love to hear your comments. Either comment below or email me at Emily@TheTimeDiet.org. Thanks friends! Now go enjoy your week and feel free to tip-toe off the path and see where it takes you.

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Photo credit: Freedigitalphotos.net

Are You Losing Time After Your Vacation?

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Time Management VacationSummer vacations are wonderful! Coming home from summer vacations? Well, that’s a different story. After a relaxing week of fun, coming back to the harsh realities of work can seem daunting, stressful, and a bit overwhelming. Try these tips for a seamless transition back to real life so you can maintain your feeling of relaxation instead of drowning in “vacation recovery” upon your return.

1. Tidy Up Before You Leave

Nothing screams “back to work!” quite like a messy home and office. Before you leave for your marvelous trip, take a moment to organize your work and living space so it’s ready for your return. As you’re throwing things into a suitcase, cleaning is the last thing on your mind, but that pile of unsorted mail, heap of dirty laundry, and stack of clutter on your desk makes it difficult to ease back into a productive mindset.  Make tidying up part of your pre-vacation planning.

2. Minimize Jet-Lag

If your vacation took you across several time zones, you might lose several days to the groggy effects of jet lag when you return home. While some of those effects may be inevitable, minimize them by getting back to your home time zone as quickly as possible. Get in bed when the local time says you should, and find as much light as you can in the morning to help wake you up and get you back on track.

3. Un-Pack Right Away

You may not want your vacation to come to an end, but it’s difficult to return to business-as-usual when your suitcase takes up permanent residence in the middle of your room. Even though you’re worn out, unpack right away to get back to your normal routine as quickly as possible.

Vacations are an enjoyable “Dessert” in your Time Diet. Don’t let the post-vacation slump stop you from taking them in the first place!

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