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When do you find time to sleep?
So far Redmond has been awesome. The people, the friends and just about everything has been incredible. The amount of support and interest for Shockey Monkey has far surpassed my expectations and the number of folks that have been giving me feedback on.. well, everything I do, has been incredible. I cannot say enough thank you's…
The single most frequently asked question of the weekend has been: "Vlad, When do you sleep?"; I am not blowing this out of proportion, I think almost every other person I've introduced myself to has asked the same question in a number of different ways… When do you sleep? How do you do all you do? Where do you find the energy? I don't know how you do it!
Well, here is how:
What Is The Secret?
First of all, I do not have a clone. What I do have is a real appreciation for my time:
"appreciation: understanding of the nature or meaning or quality or magnitude of something"
There are only 24 hours in a day.
There is nothing you can do about the number.
There is a lot you can do to yourself to make sure those 24 are spent the best way possible.
Opportunities To Be Productive
There is working hard.
There is working smart.
They are certainly not the same thing. You can bust your ass working day and night and not accomplish what someone else can do in the space of ten minutes. What separates the two? Productivity. Productivity, in Vlad Modern Dictionary, is simply defined as the ability to do things that need to be done.
Allow me to elaborate on the "be done" part. Every job, task or project have their characteristics. Start. Plan. Perform. Finish. Evaluate. The best way to ruin your productivity is not to know where you are or what you are trying to do. If you don't know where you are in the function you are performing it is easy to stop actually performing. You start daydreaming, you allow yourself to get sidetracked, you get bored with the task at hand.
Truth of the matter is, we are all given plenty of <i>opportunities</i> to be productive. For example, I am writing this very blog post during a very boring and pointless keynote. Although I've committed, paid, taken time off and committed my time to getting the most out of this conference and out of this session it is clear as day to me that this lady not only has no understanding of who she is speaking to but also has very little to say. I have an opportunity to do something good with my time, you're reading the fruit of it.
Recognizing these opportunities is not very hard. However, maximizing your time is. So the burning question is how do you maximize your time?
In effect, the question all the people have asked me is not "When do you sleep?" but "How do you get this done?"
How I do it
This is perhaps another book Karl Palachuk can write for you but I'll offer you a quick insight into my philosophy called "shit-to-do list":
Shit-to-do List
This quote comes from my mentor, who very early in my career told me that if I allowed myself to get so consumed in what I was doing I would never even remember to go to the bathroom. Ironically enough ten years later my business is in high security data centers that separate me and the bathroom with 6 doors, cages, locks, biometric scanners and guards. Going to the bathroom is now really an effort but it illustrates the fact that we all have responsibilities that need to be taken care of… when we get a chance or when the nature calls.
I implement these responsibilities in a way of a list. Every time I need to do something I log it. Be it CRM, workbook, outlook, onenote, back of a business card, edge of a Splenda package – I realize I am busy and all things remaining the same I have better odds of forgetting stuff than remembering it. I do not write things down so I can remember them, I write them down so I can track them.
Tracking is incredibly important. Having stuff to do is a given, everyone has stuff to do. The secret to getting all of that stuff done in as short of a time as possible is only feasible if you dedicate yourself to being able to commit time to organize yourself and know how much time would take to finish the task at hand.
Commit Time
Commiting time for a project or a task that you do not do frequently is nearly impossible. If you book yourself end to end and do not complete your task you will rush, make mistakes or even worse, demotivate yourself and ruin the remainder of your day.
One way to avoid that is to spend just a bit of time identifying the task. If you spend a second thinking about the three stages of anything "planning, working, evaluating" you can think about what is involved in each stage and do so in a repeatable fashion.
The key here is that it is easier to take care of little things in between big things than committing yourself to a single task and betting that the phone won't ring, nobody walks in your office or nothing else of importance comes up.
So learn how to break this up. If you plan you will get better at it. You will find yourself spending more time organizing what you're attempting to do and a lot less time actually doing it. Why? Because half the work is usually trying to find a way to solve the problem. It also gives you more of an understanding on how the task is going to be completed.
Understand what completion means
Completion has many different meanings. The most dangerous of those is making the problem go away by making it someone elses. Email is a great way to "complete" things by just bouncing the issue to someone else and divesting yourself of them. I had a great conversation with Dana Epp and a few guys today about this – people seriously view email as the way to wash their hands off their responsibilities. Here are the excuse templates:
"Oh, I emailed you about it."
"I sent you an email and never heard back."
"I'll just email it to you."
Email is a great way to do a handoff because as long as the problem is not sitting in your mailbox unresolved you technically have no responsibility for it. This is a horrible, horrible thing but I see more and more of it every day. No wonder people cannot get everything done, half the time is wasted bouncing responsibility to someone else.
Completion is simply a term for a job that will not have to be looked at again. How do you know you've reached it? By evaluating. If you sent off an email and did not get a response, try calling them. If you left them a voicemail, send them an email. If you did something for someone, ask if they had everything they needed. If they don't respond, rinse and repeat. Go back to the basics, have you done what you planned? Have you accomplished what you needed to? Is the (customer) recipient satisfied with your performance?
Live in the Cheesecake Future
One of my dearest friends has lately used this phrase with me a lot: "I just can't be bothered."
What it means really means is that there are only 24 hours in a day and that the life goes on regardless of what happened. Always evaluate and look forward. If you allow yourself to over-analyse what just happened or constantly dwell on "could have" or "should have" you will never be able to take on that "next" thing.
How Vlad Does It ™
So thats my philosophy, here is how I do it.
The List
I keep two books. One is digital (Outlook tasks) another is analog (TS2 orange notebook).
The digital copy holds all of my tasks and their associated progress and importance. This is critical for my success because it gives me an overview of what I need to do and where I stand at any moment in time. I can sort this list by subject, by importance, by progress. It is a quickie.
My analog list holds all of my objectives, doodles and promises. Do not discard the analog list, do not try to digitize it. Do not be an accountant. Not everything is a line entry on a sheet. Life is far more complicated than that. There are drawings, concepts, flowcharts, ideas… doodles. I draw, flowchart and diagram the crap out of everything we do. Over time this drawing takes shape through so many papers that is making a forest in Brazil cry right now. Point is that its very hard to put structure to the unknown, you have to consider all the factors, posibilities, controls and expected outputs/results.
I put things in play through my analog list. I doodle, I draw, I brainstorm, I scribble. When things take more of a form and I know what needs to be done I put it in Outlook. Once it's in outlook it is trackable, sortable, searchable and identifiable.
I want to do the damn thang
"Vlad didn't say it if it didn't have a 2 Live Crew reference" – Now we're in Outlook.
I have my list of things to do in Outlook. It sits there with my progress, my title, my details, my priorities. Sometimes I'm in the mood to do something fun. Sometimes I need a pick-me-up of crossing something off my list. Sometimes I need a challenge. Sometimes I just need to get things done (or staff doesn't get paid). You get the picture, it is all based on the circumstances. So here is how I work:
My day is relatively unstructured. I do have committments and schedules and appointments but between them I might as well be watching porn. This is a very attainable stage by the way, so long as you're consistently performing and getting things done nobody is sitting on your back, looking over your shoulder or trying to manage you into producing results. They just give you the space because they know you'll do it. So what I do, how and when depends on my mood to a large degree. Obviously things with the highest priority are the ones I focus on. But if I'm having a really bad day, combined with a headache and a difficult client on the phone I know that day is not going to make it to 7PM. So do I just go to bed?
No. I look down the list. Is there anything that can make my day better. Do I have to follow up with a client I really like? Is there something that I need to update? How about just going through the tasks that are nearly complete but could use some extra TLC (tender love and care) to make sure they are spectacular? That sure sounds a lot better than troubleshooting someone's firewall policies right about now!
Point is: you maximize your time. You use up that clock to its fullest potential and you get things done. So you don't complete them, big deal, thats why tasks have a completion percentage field.
There are many intangible things that need to get done or the house of cards falls apart. Chris makes fun of me about this all the time. In the limited business travels we've done together he has already figured out that I totally lose it the second things shift even a little. I know this. It is a weakness. So when I'm on the phone and just talking I walk around my office and straighten things out. I file. I scan. I look through my doodle list. Very low priority, low brain-usage tasks that need to get done in order for everything else to function smoothly.
Find your weakness and find a way to diminish it.
Is your screen so dirty you can hardly read through it but just don't have a minute to sweep it? Do you tend to lose things all the time but forget to leave them in the exact same place every time you use them? We all have weaknesses, we are all human, I have them too and I have to live with them but that does not mean I intend to let them control me. I (try to) control them.
Congratualte Yourself
Nobody is going to go out of the way to give you a cookie and say "good boy" every time you do things right. If you're any good, you should get that cookie at least 50-100 times a day anyhow. Every time a job is done you need to train your dogs (customers) to tell you how you're doing. Here are my tricks to make them give me the paw:
"Done, is it working?"
"Done, anything else?"
"Done, whats going on with ____?"
"Working on it, will update in a second."
These are not just acknowledgements that something has been completed but also clear messages that you don't want them to dismiss it. It takes just a second for them to reply and say OK, Sure, Yup. Thanks. Except they never do – you usually get a lot more along with it.
"Thanks, that worked but I am still experiencing…"
"Awesome, I'll let you know if we need that other.."
"OK, but thats not what I asked you to do…"
Hopefully as you make more progress you'll be left with less and less of that last one. But the message is that as important as the planning stage is, the confirmation that its planning and execution were done properly is just as relevant. If it was, you'll feel freat. If it wasn't, you'll learn how to do it better.
Vlad, when do you sleep?
About 4-6 hours a night. Sometimes that's all it takes. Sometimes thats all I get.
I like to think that I work smart, not hard. My fiance would wholeheartedly disagree but that is just how I approach work. I am very passionate about what I do while some aspects of being the CEO depress the crap out of me. But I always try to see the brighter side of whats going on.
I edit the show. I make phone calls. I develop. I troubleshoot. I support. I evangelize. I motivate. I encourage. I listen. I listen. I listen. I listen. I listen. I organize. I review. I approve. I criticize. I listen. I listen. I listen.
So here is your motivational bit for today:
You are capable of so much more than what you're doing right now. Yes, yes you are. That is not BS, no matter what you're doing you could do it better, smarter, more effectively. You know it, too! You know exactly where you waste your time, where you do remedial data entry, you see things on your calendar that you really do not want to deal with, you think of what went wrong the last time… so what do you do, just give up? Heeeeeeeel no.
You find something else that you are in the mood to do. And you go after that thing until you're back in the state of mind to do what you had to do originally. If you track your tasks this switching is almost seamless. If you have no control over your time and responsibilities then just take a deep breath, close your eyes, exhale and kill that task. Problems are not solved through ignorance and delays, they are solved with hard work.
Unless you're lazy there is no limit to what you may be capable of. All you have to do is recognize it, oryanize it and execute it. In the words of Adam Sandler: You can do it!
It’s that easy, you just have to take a picture with us!
