Work Clean (32 page)

■
Perfect your movements.
Stand up. You'll be less inclined to file and replace large items if you remain seated.

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Slow down to speed up.
Working quickly comes from first working slowly. If you wish, give yourself a few days for an extended 60-minute Daily Meeze to get used to the motions and the decisions you have to make. But once you've gone through the motions several times, speed them up.

■
Finish the action.
Slowing down also helps when you hit a particularly dense bit of input, like a long document of notes from a meeting that you must methodically pick over for action items. As you find yourself getting impatient or ornery, slow down. Breathe. Finish the action. Move through the work deliberately until it's done. There: You don't ever have to see that document again.

■
Clean as you go.
Avoid bad habits like dumping loose items on random surfaces during the course of your day. Try to get everything to your desk inbox.

When cleaning our station, we must ensure that our inputs are cleared and that the Actions we've received are logged. This is the “wave” we must surmount and stay on top of every day.

STEP TWO: SHARPEN YOUR TOOLS

(approximately 5 minutes)

The next step in your Daily Meeze, a quicker one, is to make sure your planning tools are in perfect order, adjusting and sorting all the Action items in your calendar and Action list.

Part of creating today is redeeming yesterday. Look at your schedule's past 24 hours. Now:

1.
Reschedule the appointments that didn't happen or tasks that didn't get done.

2.
Unschedule the items that you can't or don't want to reschedule immediately, putting them back on your Action list if they are not already on it.

3.
Review and adjust your scheduled Routines. Make sure these time buckets square with what you have in store for the day ahead.

Tip:
I “check off” Action items that I have accomplished by switching their color, so I can easily see what's been done during the course of my day and week.

After clearing your station, your Action inbox will be filled with uncategorized items. Here's what you do next:

1.
Assign each incoming Action item to a Mission. After that's done . . .

2.
Adjust the order of each Mission to display the proper Frontburner at the top. Order the next several Backburners. Often a new Action will become the Frontburner, bumping the former Frontburner down a notch; or else a new Action will become a Backburner itself.

Tip:
Sometimes incoming Actions can be best executed by grouping them into Routines (i.e., calls to return, errands to run). If you have a digital Action list, you can use tags to create task lists for your Routines. For example, you might have three Actions from different Missions that are all things you want to read during one Routine you've set aside for reading. You can tag each of these Actions as “Reading” and refer to that bucket of Actions the next time you're ready to run that Routine.

You should now have a fully ordered Action list and no incomplete Actions from days past on your schedule.

STEP THREE: PLAN YOUR DAY

(approximately 10 minutes)

You face tomorrow knowing the Actions and Routines that are already scheduled for tomorrow on our calendar. With that information, you:

1.
Make a list of the Actions and Routines already scheduled for tomorrow along with the other Actions and Routines you
want
to add to tomorrow.

2.
Identify which Actions are immersive (longer, requiring 30 minutes to several hours) and which are process (quicker, can be grouped together).

3.
Ballpark how many hours you have available for new Actions and Routines.

4.
Schedule new Actions and Routines on your calendar, aiming to

a.
Maximize
the number of Frontburners

b.
Balance
immersive and process time

c.
Stay under
your Meeze Point

Optional:
Create a daily timeline, your schedule in list form. Every day, I create an analogue of my schedule on a sticky note. It
contains exactly the same thing that my schedule does, but in list form. It's not necessary, but it encourages me to always view my appointments as tasks—rather than as impediments to accomplishment. Plus, the size of a sticky note and the size of my handwriting work together to keep me under my Meeze Point. If I can't fit all my tasks on a sticky note, I know I'm doing too many.

Don't overschedule. You may be tempted to throw a bunch of things on your calendar and fill up every available block of time in the name of efficiency.
Don't do that.
Leave spaces in your schedule, especially before and after meetings, not only to account for travel time, but to allow for the kinds of interactions and processing of Actions that inevitably precede and follow them. Leave space, even to do nothing, or to call a friend, or to take a quick walk.

Pushing yourself a little here and there is good. But you don't want to create task lists and calendars that are so impossible to execute and disconnected from reality that you end up not trusting
them, not trusting yourself, and not using them. If you
know
you don't have enough time to accomplish all the things you've set out for yourself but schedule them anyway, that's not ambition, that's denial.
Run your calendar or your calendar will run you,
it's that simple. You are going to have to say “no” to many things. You are going to have to be the executive, which necessitates being an executioner, the decider, the one who kills one option to save another.

Instead of overscheduling, try underscheduling. Couture entrepreneur Coco Chanel once famously advised, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” It's also great advice for creating your daily schedule. Give yourself one less thing to do. Your day will be full and complete anyway. And if you end up being able to do more than you've planned, then you get to experience the joy of exceeding your own expectations.

As part of wrapping up your Daily Meeze, gather the resources you need for the next day. If you do your Daily Meeze at home, load up the bag you'll be taking with you tomorrow. I check the next day's weather the previous night so that I don't spend precious moments the next day on my wardrobe. Some people lay their next day's clothes out the night before. Do whatever you can do to give yourself as little as possible to plan or do the next morning.

Tracking your Daily Meeze helps you work your way to the 40-day mark, an important psychological and physiological milestone for creating a new habit, increasing your chances of success.

Now we put our planning tools in their proper places, turn off our devices, and leave our workstation. We enjoy the rest of our evening.

That's the ideal. But what if, on some days, we have so many new items in our inputs that we can't get through them all?

Should we extend our Daily Meeze if we can't get everything done?
I think that 30 minutes of planning per day on average is enough to handle a working person's busy life. Less than 30 minutes of planning wouldn't be a serious enough commitment. Beyond 30 minutes begins to feel out of balance with our other needs and duties and causes a lot of stress. It's vital that we constrain the Daily Meeze. Limits promote discipline and efficiency. We're not going for a lazy, lopping, sprawling, distracted planning session. As we've said, your Daily Meeze should be a
hustle.
Keep it tight, move smoothly and quickly, make choices. But when all the demands of our Daily Meeze are difficult to squeeze into 30 minutes, here are some suggestions.

Do part of your Meeze one day, and the other part the next.
If one day you have an excess of stuff to organize, it may be fine to do the second part of that incomplete Meeze on the next day. For example, you might not get to clear all your inputs in 15 minutes. So you leave the rest of it until tomorrow. Usually we can miss a day of
full
planning and still remain ahead of the game. The important thing is to do your daily 30 minutes, whatever you happen to accomplish within it. If you keep a good planning practice, you will catch the excess the next day.

Schedule an “overflow” appointment with yourself.
If you've spent most of your Daily Meeze cleaning up incoming mail and absolutely need to make time to move things around on your Action list and calendar, schedule another 15 or 30 minutes with yourself for later or for the next day.

Schedule different Meezes for different days.
You may have to check your e-mail every day, but do you really need to check Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn that frequently? Or maybe you've found that you can schedule your Actions several
days
at a time, or that you don't need to reorder your Mission lists
every
day, or even that organizing your task list is something you need only do once
per week. If so, do those tasks only on certain days, freeing time to concentrate on other elements of your Daily Meeze.

Make moves
after
your Meeze.
Don't execute any Action items during your Meeze. Just flag and log, and handle your Action items afterward.

Even after trying these alternatives, you may find that 30 minutes is just not enough for the kind of workload you have. If you have the energy and willpower for a regular 45-minute or hour-long planning session, then you might be able to do that. In my experience, however, planning for more than 30 minutes per day gets you into an area where you might be accommodating bad habits rather than confronting them.

Does my Daily Meeze need to be daily?
To form a habit, yes. My teacher always said that it takes 40 days of unbroken practice to break an old habit, 90 days to confirm a new habit, and 120 days for you to
become
the habit. One study published in 2009 found that turning a conscious action into a nonconscious, automatic one took an average of 66 days. I think a 40-day commitment to your Meeze is sufficient to start. If you skip a day in that initial 40-day period, start the 40 days over. It's hard to form a habit and so easy to stop, so we want to treat our Daily Meeze as inviolate, the way a chef or cook would treat her mise-en-place.

Can't I skip the Daily Meeze on some days?
Not until you make the Daily Meeze a habit. Thereafter you can skip weekends, vacations, and other days off. For me, the Daily Meeze is a spiritual practice that serves all parts of my life, so on weekends I focus more on organizing personal things. I rarely skip a day unless I am on vacation or immersed in a project that requires me to go on a personal retreat.