Design Your Day

Laura Vanderkam, author of What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend, suggests a great strategy for making sure you are maximizing rejuvenation in your weekends, and it’s all about something she calls “anchor events.” The concept is this: Choose a few pleasurable activities you want to do over your weekend, and schedule them in. It may be “bake a cake with my daughter on Saturday,” or “watch a movie as a family on Friday night,” or “go biking with a friend.”
Whatever your anchor events are, by scheduling in this fun time, you’ll be able to take advantage of the happiness we all get from the anticipation of them.

Every day, we continue to do things—or take on new things—that don’t connect with our true passions or goals. Little by little, we stuff our lives and lose our way in the process. Bob attacked this problem directly by starting to quit one single thing every Thursday. As he learned, the single act of cutting down and cutting back can have an incredible cascading effect in your life.

Email should be done when you have less energy, rather than more. Figure out when that is, whenever it is, and create a block of time in your schedule to fit in your emailing in that period. In my experience, the lull in the afternoon is a great time to go through a bunch of non-urgent emails.

Erik told me that Jerry Seinfeld has said that he became a better joke writer by ensuring that he wrote a joke each and every day. To maintain this discipline he used a calendar with the whole year on one page, and he hung it on a wall where he would always see it. Whenever he did his work for the day, he’d use a big red marker to check off that he’d completed his task.
Some folks say that if it’s not on your calendar it won’t get done. I agree, and tell folks to calendar as much as you can to encourage yourself to do what you need to do.

Sometimes, you’ve just got to sit down and do the work. In Ann Patchett’s memoir, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, she talks about how to make yourself write when you don’t want to. As Patchett says, you’ve got to show up. You’ve got to sit yourself down at your desk for two hours each day without books to distract you, or an open Internet connection. You’ve just got to sit there. Doing nothing. And after a week—or maybe two—you will either start writing because you are so bored out of your mind from not writing, or you will get up out of the chair, go watch television, and never write again.

The biggest misconception people have about working less is that you’ll get less done. In reality, if you made yourself work twenty hours this week instead of forty, you would likely adjust quickly to identifying what is important, and to only doing those things. This is the premise behind the concept of editing down the time you spend at work.

Time experts like Laura Vanderkam might say that there’s nothing better than a good old grid for a true time diary (whether in an Excel spreadsheet or on graph paper). The concept is simple: divide the day into twenty-four hours. Spend a week or a month noting what you do during the course of a twenty-four-hour period and add up the results to understand where you spend your time.

If you put on your ACTIVITIES list that speaking at conferences is something that only you can do, you then need to 100 percent ensure that speaking at conferences is actually a Big Win for you, and that it’s not just on the Big Wins list because it sounds impressive or others would be eager to do it.

The first thing to do here is to look for where items on your Big Wins list also appear on your Activities list. The items that appear as Big Wins AND appear on the Activities List as “Things Only You Can Do” are your Best 20% Activities. Let’s now order all the items on the Activities list to see where they fall in terms of your priorities.

To get going, take out two pieces of paper. Label one BIG WINS and the other ACTIVITIES.
On the first sheet of paper, write down some of your biggest wins in the past few years in your personal and professional life. This should be a list of one-off individual things like, “The deal I closed with that big firm,” “Appearing on my local radio station,” “Taking a family trip to Mexico,” and ongoing things like, “Learning from my mentor,” “Taking piano classes,” or “Spending regular time with my children.”
On the second sheet of paper, ACTIVITIES, think about all the activities you take part in on a regular basis—no matter if they led to those big wins or not.