Tag Archives: time management

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Filling in all the down time. I’ve got a marked tendency towards filling every available gap in down time with something I deem to be productive. That might be a good habit to have when you’re working full time, writing 20+ hours a week, and trying to keep a house from being covered in filth, but I’ll be honest, that part of me that is fundamentally a slacker really misses big blocks of down time – those chunks of time when I played video games, watched movies, and otherwise did absolutely nothing productive. Lately it’s been a mad dash to get it all in before crashing at 10:00 or 11:00 in hopes of squeezing in five or six hours of sleep. I’m not sure that’s going to, or if it can be an enduring schedule for me, but since there’s still so many things I want to get too and not so much in the way of time available to get to them, there doesn’t feel like there’s going to be much room for change in the foreseeable future.

2. Wants versus needs. In a perfect world I’d divide my day more or less equally between writing and sitting on a beach on some out of the way island. Unfortunately, I need to eat, need to pay rent, and need some kind of nominally stable income (which is what government work use to be before the sequester kicked in). Whereas I want to write, I actually need to work… unless I can gin up a way to start selling 137 copies of Nobody Told Me… The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees every day of the year. All I need to is improve sales by 6850% and I’ll be all set to unify my wants and my needs under one banner. I was probably happier before I knew that little factoid.

3. The Congress of the United States. One of my perennial favorites. On a positive note, they appear to have managed to pass a continuing resolution (not to be confused with an actual budget) that will keep the government open for the rest of the fiscal year while continuing the federal pay freeze through the end of its third year. Somewhere in the fine print, they also managed to allow DoD to dodge sending out 800,000 furlough notices for two more weeks… which doesn’t actually mean that anyone will be furloughed for fewer days, just that we’ll have less time to cram in all the days into an ever shortening fiscal yeah. I’m sure the Members are deeply relieved by this while they head home to enjoy their two-week Easter recess. Even now I’m sometimes still amazed that this is the way we really run this country. Bat. Shit. Crazy.

Scheduling conflict…

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So there was a bit of a scheduling conflict this weekend. Between kicking the book out the door, driving to Western Maryland and back, and trying to squeeze in some quality time, something had to slip… and because you guys are mostly good at not raising hell about it, it was weekend blogging that took the hit. I’d say I was sorry about that, but it was a really good weekend, so I’m really not very sorry at all. Since I like you too much to spout fake apologies, we’ll just leave it at that, ok?

I know, this won’t make up for missing yesterday, but for your reading pleasure five new “old” posts are now available in the archives. Now that the book is out and all I’m busy doing is hectoring people into buying it, we should be back on track from here on out… unless someone wants to hire me for a speaking engagement, symposium, signing, or birthday party. In that case, you’ll get updates when you get them.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The telephone. Once again, for those that didn’t get the message the last time, at any given moment there are probably 5-10 different ways of making contact with me that don’t involve my needing to answer a ringing telephone. Facebook, email, text, Facetime, IM, certified mail, fax, telegram, smoke signal, and semaphore, are all perfectly acceptable methods of reaching out to touch someone. Regardless of whether I’m at the office or at home, more often than not I’m doing at least three things at once… and regardless of how important I think you are as a person, the chances of me stopping all of those things to focus exclusively on a phone conversation are slim to none. Translation: You’re going to get a better and more thoughtful response when you send me a text or an email. On the phone, the best you’re going to get is an occasional “uh huh,” and a “what?” now and then when I get distracted by whatever else I’m working on. So please, can we all agree to reserve the actual phone calls to legitimate life and death situations?

2. Facebook advertising. I know I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook, but lately I can’t get past one or two items down through my newsfeed before finding myself looking at some kind of poorly designed add or “sponsored” post. I’m not dumb enough to think that Facebook should be providing their service for free, but I really do wish they’d find some way to make the ads slightly less obtrusive. All the current iteration of ads seem to do is interrupt the general flow of the page and make me wonder how long it’s going to be before enough people are sufficiently annoyed to start heading to the door. I really do believe Facebook is a valuable utility, but they need to do a hell of a lot of fine tuning to make the current brand of in-your-face marketing at least palatable. Until then, I’ll just make it one of my own small personal missions not to do business with any company that spends dollars running these craptastic social marketing spots.

3. Time management. Just because I’m not freaking out, don’t assume that I’m not busy. In work, as in most things, I have a method to my madness. If you watch carefully, between 8AM and about noon, there’s a flurry activity as I clear out whatever ridiculousness showed up in my inbox overnight. After lunch, there’s a bit of a lull, where I can actually catch up on longer range stuff, read the stunning number of memos and policy letters that we publish, do research, or work on PowerPoint. Starting again around 2PM there’s another flurry of email and phone calls as people try to get things off their plate before going home at the end of the day. If I’m sitting, staring intently at one of my monitors, you can go ahead and assume I’m either a) trying to read for comprehension; b) trying to decipher something higher headquarters wrote in a wholly misguided effort to “be helpful”; or c) trying to compose an articulate message that easily comprehensible by all who receive it. What I’m not doing is sitting around, being bored, and looking at lolcats. Usually.

Balancing the budget…

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Anyone who’s ever tried to eek their way out of debt knows that the first step is to put themselves on a budget. Unless you’re a natural bean counter or have a high pain threshold the process is pretty much agonizing. Since what I seem to have lately is too much to do and not enough time in which to do it, I thought maybe some of the same principles could be applied. Just like preparing a budget, the first thing you need to know is how much you’ve got and where it’s going. Conveniently I’m a creature of habit so this part wasn’t too hard.

So far, here’s what I’ve come up with for a typical weekday*:

* And yes, the hours are blurred because posting the exact times you do things regularly on the internet is pretty dumb, but not having any graphic way to show where my day goes leaves the post a little flat, so that’s my compromise.

The first thing that became apparent to me was that the vast majority of things on this schedule are pretty much non-negotiable, with the exception being “free time” that usually falls around 7:15-9:30 PM. That’s two hours and 15 minutes out of a 24-hour day that’s more or less unaccounted for by something I consider a “must do.” It’s the part that gets cut out when any of the other activities run long… and I’m starting to understand why my weekdays feel like a sprint most of the time.

So the good news is I pretty much know exactly where my time is going. The bad news is I lack the ability to create more time, so that pretty much leaves trying to rejigger the time that’s already available as the only real option. It seems the only way to add new activities is for something I’m already doing to fall off the list… Which explains why I haven’t touched a computer game or the Xbox since I got serious about writing again. It also explains why the house is never quite what I’d call “clean”.

Looking at your day laid out in black and white is sort of depressing, if only because you realize how little flexibility you actually have. Now that I can see how little time there really is for the fun stuff, it’s time to start making hard decisions about what stays and what goes… and figuring out how to get less than six hours of sleep on an average weekday and not to fall asleep at my desk. If I could just cut two hours out of the time I’m laying in bed doing nothing, I think I’d be way ahead of the game and might actually manage to write and watch an hour long television drama all on ths same day.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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Note: I know I missed last week’s edition, so you’re getting a “best of” What Annoys Jeff this Week that covers that last two weeks. No extra charge. Enjoy.

1. Meetings that start at 6PM. Saying this out loud is probably detrimental to my career, but I can’t think of any good reason aside from executive ego that justifies starting a meeting at 6PM when most everyone in the room start their day between 7 and 7:30. You either have no respect for their time or really bad time management skills. Either one of which is generally considered bad form by fancy business schools everywhere.

2. People with no sense of urgency. When I’ve been telling you for more than a week that something needs to happen by X Day, don’t be surprised, offended, or otherwise defensive on X+2 when I tell you what you’re giving me is too late to include. I don’t care that you worked really hard on it. In conclusion, you’re a douchebag.

3. Large volumes of small children. Individually and in small numbers, I’m surprisingly ok with (other people’s) kids. Pack lots of them into a relatively small space and it has a tendency to make me twitchy. It’s just that they’re collectively so loud… and fast moving. When you’ve spent your entire adult life living in blissful solitude, I’m not going to lie, a gang of 15 six year olds reeking mayhem and chaos next door is something of a shock to the system. It’s a shame that the uberwealthy hiring a hermit to live on their property to give it a pastoral feel went out of fashion with the Victorian Age. I think that’s a career path where I could have really set the standard for excellence.

4. “Scooter” People. If you’re going to ride the electric scooter at Walmart, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that you pay at least partial attention to what you’re doing. And by that I mean try not to drive it directly into my back while continuing your conversation with whatever slack-jawed yokel you came with to do your grocery shopping as if it didn’t happen. I have to admit it took real stones to give me a dirty look when I called you on it. Most of the time, I have an instinctive tendency to defer to my elders, but in your case I’ll make an exception. You, you muumuu wearing, blue haired battle-ax, are an asshat.

Time keeps on slippin’…

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I got to spend an entire day this week in class. You can imagine my unrestrained joy at being given this “opportunity.” Still, there’s an old saying that goes something like “Early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable.” Of course sometimes life happens and even the most obsessive of us can arrive a few minutes late to our destination. On any given day when how long it takes you to get back from lunch doesn’t really matter to anyone, extending your meal a bit doesn’t hurt at all. Since this was one of those moments that we were all in it together and nothing was going to happen until all the butts were back in all the seats, what possessed one car full of you to decide it was a good day to take a two hour lunch? I mean, I don’t like this class any better than you do, but somehow I managed to wander back it at something approximating on time, even if that was mostly driven by the desire to get things over with as soon as possible. You tools, on the other hand, seemed dead set on dragging a long day out even further.

I thought the lip smacking and crinkling of paper wrappers when you got back was an exceptionally well planned touch, by the way. I mean how on earth could you have spent two hours out wandering around and not managed to spend at least some of that time jamming half a sandwich into the filthy stinking sewer that you call a mouth? Your incompetence, lack of interest in anything other than yourself, and dare I say apathy, has reset the bar for the rest of us. Look, I may be an apathetic fuck, but I somehow manage not to let my own proclivities bleed over and cause problems for other people. All I’d ask is for the same courtesy of not screwing the rest of us because you’re having a bad day or can’t be bothered to do two things simultaneously.

The crowning irony of our little drama today was that we were all part of a new mandatory-for-the-universe class on improving professional conduct in the workplace. Maybe this was part of the class – A living example of how not to do things.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Neck Ties. I completely understand that there are times when we all need to look just a little more formal. On an average day, though, when I’m going to spend 6-7 hours sitting behind a keyboard or going to meetings with people I see every day, putting on a tie is really just a pointless exercise. That’s why I don’t wear one unless I absolutely, positively, can’t avoid it. Certain men’s fashion magazines will tell you that it’s all about “self expression” and having “good fashion sense.” Meh. I express myself using things like the English language and I can’t remember a time I ever gave a tinker’s damn about anything involving fashion. Hard as it might be to believe, it’s just not something that ever seemed worth the effort to be interested in. As long as everyone shows up freshly laundered without body parts hanging out, I’d say we’re good to go. If I’m going to court or taking a meeting with the president, I’ll probably manage to find a tie that isn’t stained (too much). Otherwise they’re going to continue hanging in the closet in case I ever need a tourniquet. If companies like Apple and Amazon can make a gagillion dollars without anyone wearing a tie, I think it’s safe to say that a colorful piece of silk hanging around my neck like a noose isn’t going to make anyone more productive or professional. Mostly it’s just going to get in the way and make me uncomfortable until I pull it off and stick it back in my desk drawer. Thankfully, I’m winnowed the activities requiring a tie down to about one a week… and even then, I ditch the damned thing before going to lunch.

2. Fakes, flakes, and liars. There’s really only one standard of conduct I try to live by; do I do what I say I’m going to do. Most of the time, I do. Occasionally I miss the boat. Sometimes that’s intentional because the situation has changed and other times it’s because of circumstances beyond anyone’s control. That’s a long way of saying that I don’t always practice what I’m trying to preach. Most people, on most days, are trying to do the right thing and despite being a pessimist by nature, my natural inclination is to give people the benefit of the doubt. At least until they intentionally drop a steaming pile on my head. Then… Then they’re irredeemably dead to me. You’d think by this stage of the game, I would have learned to manage my expectations and not be caught by surprise. Still, from time to time, someone weasels through the gaps and catches me off guard.

3. Taking big bites. Sometimes biting off more than you can chew is fine strategy. It gives you something to work towards. The other side of that, of course, would be that sometimes the only thing a big bite does is get stuck in your throat and leave you sucking for air. Facebook, Twitter, jeffreytharp.com, a few other sites and blogs I contribute to, ebooks, email, and a few other odds and ends have been consuming a ridiculous amount of time and attention lately. Through in the probably misguided desire for all those interactions to be substantive on a daily basis and, well, you tend to end up taking very big bites. All of those things are voluntary, of course, and as I wrap up a few current pet projects I’ll be doing my best to limit new things I take on in those areas. In the meantime, I’ll be doing my best not to choke. If I start really feeling frisky, I might even decommission a few of the social media accounts I find myself not really using enough to justify having around. Yeah. That would probably be a great first step towards a more sane Jeff.

4. But wait, there’s more! I could go on, and on, and on, and on about the small things that are annoying Jeff this week, but I’ll spare everyone the administrative minutia. As my mother would say, I’m “in a mood.” In all probability, this mood will resolve itself sometime after 4:00 tomorrow afternoon. I’m more than ready to get into something that doesn’t require the application of more than two or three brain cells at a time.

Wasted Sunday…

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This hasn’t been the sunday I thought I was going to have. Mostly it involved dragging the computer down from the office (not all that hard since it’s a laptop) and spreading out the dozen odds and ends I’ve been putting off around the kitchen table and taking them on one after another. The good news is that I just shredded the last bit of paper and closed the last file. The bad news is that I’ve been sitting here in the kitchen hammering at the keyboard since almost 8:00 this morning. That’s pretty much the working definition of a wasted Sunday. Sure, it’s all stuff that needed done and I’d been putting some of it off for weeks now, but that doesn’t make looking at the tail end of the weekend any easier… Especially when you know you’re going to spend the next five days hammering away at a different keyboard. I’m glad it’s all done, I just wish I could have figured out a way to do it in half the time. You know when going down to the crawlspace to shut off the outside water spigots counts as a break, you’ve seriously misspent your day.

For the time being, I’ll take as much comfort as possible in knowing that getting this particular pile of stuff done now frees me up next weekend. The long break coming after the next two work weeks is definitely a high point. I’ll do my best to live in the moment, but for the record my head is already in Western MD complaining about how friggin’ cold it is up here.

40 hours…

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The 40-hour work week where everyone arrives and departs at the same time each day probably made eminent sense when it was instituted for a country with a massive manufacturing sector committed to assembly line methodologies. When you’re living in an electronic age and the output product of your efforts live in a storage device as a series of ones and zeros, a fully regimented work schedule is a little harder to understand. In a plant where they build cars, you can expect X number of frames to roll by a given point on the line each eight hour shift every day of the week. OK, a standard 8-hour day makes sense there. In the information sector, Wednesdays might be the heavy volume day and represent 11 hours of required work while Monday only requires five hours of work. Even though the requirements have shifted, we largely cling to that magic eight hours a day, five days a week concept.

If I were king for a day, I’d propose a new standard for information workers. In this system, you’re paid your base salary for 2080 hours a year. On days when you get the work done in 5 hours, feel free to go on home. On days when workload is high, plan on staying a little longer to get it done. All things being equal, I’d be willing to bet that in most cases, the time would even itself out over the long term.

Of course we know that all things are not equal. Some people are going to abuse a system based on them being honest about their workload. Some people will work half days every day and others will put in 12 hours every day. So yeah, I intellectually understand that there are pretty high barriers to getting away from the standard work week. I get that my new system is a managerial nightmare and completely impractical, but on those days when I blow through my assignments in 4 hours, it sure would be nice to have the option of punching out for the day rather than sitting around watching the clock tick on towards the end of the day…. because let’s face it, when their actual work is done, no one is sitting around dreaming about what other great things they can do for the overlords, right?

The process…

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I wish I had more time to just sit and write. There are always enough things that need to get done that writing never seems to fall at the top of the list, but there are still hundreds of ideas, even one or two big ones, that are just screaming to get out. Finding the time to massage them through from concept to notes to drafts to reality, though, has been the challenge that I haven’t been able to overcome.

One of the definitive characteristics of writers, of course, is that they write. They have a process. My process is mostly jamming 150-300 words down on a page in whatever free minutes of the evening I have available. It’s hard to work out the definitive history of anything 150 words at a time. And thinking about telling the epic tale of the rise and fall of a small government organization a paragraph at a time? Forget about it. You’ll end up with pages of notes and a couple of intro paragraphs and then lose focus completely.

For me, the process is not working. Maybe I’m not supposed to write an epic. Maybe the story is supposed to come together in 200 word segments; one blog post at a time. Maybe I need to change direction completely with my idea of what it means to write. Whatever the case, I need to find a new process – one that works better for me and one where I can start seeing the threads of the story coming together. It could be time for a change of focus around here.