What’s YOUR working day like?
That’s what I’d like to know, given:
- a) That I’ve had a mind-stuffing week of conferences, in which I learned much and produced a bit, while totally detached from the office;
- b) My earlier post on the working methods at 37signals;
- c) My even earlier post about the Results-Only Work Environment.
So, ‘fess up, please: How do YOU work from day to day? Is it effective for you? What would you change if you could?
(Photo via WunderBlog: the Sam-&-Ralph cartoons were my favorites, too.)
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This very topic has been on my mind recently. Tim Ferriss interviewed Gina Trapani and talked about how some folks like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Warren Buffett don’t have calendars; they just have a list of a few key items to accomplish that day.
But I wonder…. Those guys are high enough on the food chain that they have minions to manage the details of their calendars for them. If you want to meet with Arnold, you talk to his secretary. Same with Jeff Immelt, President Bush, Henry Paulson, and probably Buffett as well.
By contrast, I shackle myself to my calendar. By allocating time to each commitment, I’m able to ensure that the important things don’t get lost in the maelstrom of the urgent. The calendar enables me to ration out the limited resource of my time – and that act of rationing helps me allocate wisely.
You make a good point, Dan. But I think the larger picture is that we should make sure we’re acting rather than reacting. Yes, the fat cats have the advantage of dictating schedules, and of relying on high-quality helpers to keep track of things.
For the rest of us, if we have lots of appointments, we need to use the calendar. But somebody who has few appointments might do better with a prioritized to-do list.
Steve Pavlina, for one, has talked about how he blazed through his undergraduate career by making a big list of everything he needed to do in a semester, and then just knocking things off the list as he had time, often by taking one task and running it down to the end. Yes, he *also* had a packed daily schedule (he was taking a huge load of courses), but he didn’t schedule his work so much as he attacked it piece by piece.
All that to say this: you and I are both firm believers in getting out of the Inbox. Some folks will thrive with the structure of being “shackled” to the calendar; others will wilt. The point is to address the genuinely needful tasks at hand, rather than reacting to whatever happens to come up.
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