What & Who is Cool-Time?

About Cool Time

If you have ever said (or felt) any of the following, then Cool Time is the solution for you:

• I spend more and more time just dealing with e-mail.
• I often take work home or stay late because that’s when I work without distraction.
• A lot of time gets wasted in meetings.
• There are too many interruptions.
• I plan my day every day, but by 9:15 it’s totally derailed.
• I never feel caught up!

Cool Time is a time management book with a difference. It’s all about keeping mentally and physically cool so that you are always at your best and on top of your game. When you’re mentally cool, you make the best decisions and get the best stuff done, and that’s the root of successful time management.

Cool Time doesn’t focus on prioritizing and agenda setting. In the real world of interruptions, e-mail, and distractions, few people are able to organize their work in isolation from everything else. In fact, effective time management is more about human relationships and expectations than it is about making lists.

Cool Time is a complete approach to managing time and defending it from the endless demands and expectations of others in the workplace and at home.

• Contains practical, personal techniques that will help you apply your new skills to real-world situations: holding time-effective meetings, dealing with distractions, learning to focus, coping with unrealistic workloads, planning for the unexpected, negotiating with your manager over conflicting tasks, using technology effectively (the phone, PDAs, and e-mail).
• Includes suggestions on non-work activities, which make this a complete approach to managing time and balancing life.
• Features lots of examples, practical tips, and concepts that are memorable and easy to apply, as well as to explain and teach to others in your life. Concepts such as the "I-Beam Agenda" for planning and structuring your day, "Keystone Time" that you block off for focused work, "The 60-Second Workspace" for organizing yourself physically and mentally, and many more.

A complete approach to managing time, priorities, and people in an increasingly fast paced world, Cool Time allows you to be in control, feel less stress, and never break a sweat as you go about your day

To return to the main Cool Time page, click here.

Using Leverage for Your Success By James Manktelow

Using Leverage for Your Success
By James Manktelow

Have you ever seen a world-class high jump or pole vaulting event? If you have, you might know that while high jumpers can clear the bar at over 7 feet, pole vaulters can clear 18 feet. It’s hardly fair to make the comparison: It’s not that pole vaulters are better athletes. It’s just that they have the leverage of a pole to propel themselves over the bar.

Pole vaulters and high jumpers can be equally successful because they compete in separate events. But in real life, different categories of competition are rare: If a person gets ahead by finding resources he or she can leverage - legitimately, of course - he or she will be judged a better performer.

So it makes sense to make best use of available resources, and so propel yourself forwards on the path to greater success.

Where’s the Leverage?

A lever is simply a tool that helps you use your strength more effectively. Just as a pole vaulter uses the pole for leverage, you can use other types of leverage to achieve much more with your skills and resources, and with the limited time available.

Leverage can be found in some unlikely places. The trick is always to be on the look out for it: Here are some tips that help you know where to find leverage and make the most of it.

1. Levering Your Own Time

When it comes to being as efficient and effective as possible, the obvious starting place is to make the very best use of your time. If you use your time carefully, you’ll have more of it for things that make a difference.

Look at how you spend time in a typical day. What can you stop doing, or do less of? Can you make more of your “down time”, for example by listening to voice messages or important podcasts on the way to work?

Learn to prioritize, schedule and control your workload. (Visit the time management section of the Mind Tools website, and see our Make Time for Success! program to become expert at this.)

When you do these things well, you will be more efficient and better organized. Not only will you get more from your time, you'll also get more from the other types of leverage as well.

2. The Leverage of Technology

Do you make the best use of the computer systems and personal productivity tools available to you? Just take a look at what’s available on your computer. You can often find easy ways to make big improvements.

Do you use a customer database, or re-type people’s details over and over again? Do you hand-write your to-do lists time and again, when you could better use a personal organizer, Outlook or even MS Word?

There will always be faster, sleeker, more powerful gizmos that promise to answer all your personal productivity needs (and promise to "make the tea as well.") But a simple solution is often most effective - the trick is to find a solution that works and use it well. Stick with it, at least for a while, or else you’ll spend more time changing systems than the time you save!

3. Leveraging Knowledge, Skills and Experience

With the right information and the right training, you’ll be much more effective on the job. Make sure you have the right reports, manuals and background information to hand. Get the training you need and keep your skills up to date. If someone else did the job before you, pick their brains and learn from their experience.

If this sounds too obvious, you’ll be surprised how often it’s overlooked. Just think back through your recent experience at work. What other knowledge, skills and experience would have made you more effective? When you take on a new activity or project, think this through in advance. Gather the resources, book the training, talk to people with relevant experience, and see how much leverage you can gain.

4. Leveraging Other People’s Time

However efficient you are, there are only 24 hours in a day, right?

Wrong. Serious leverage comes when you can tap into other people’s time: The more you can delegate, the more hours there are in the day! This is particularly true if you can delegate to someone who is a real expert at doing the job.

Whether you delegate to people in your team, to consultants or an outsourcing partner, delegation is an important skill to build. Our article on delegation gives more tips on how to do this. Identify things that you currently do that could be delegated to other people, and give it a try.

If you already delegate a great deal, try delegating more! Remember always to make sure the right checks and controls are in place. And see how many hours you can find in other people’s days.

Key points
Leverage is very important for a successful life and career: Intelligent use of it is what moves people from being good performers to being truly spectacular ones. And it's not just in the areas we've discussed that you can find it: Money, resources, contacts... the list of different types of leverage just goes on and on. Make sure that you think often about how you can use leverage, and understand what it can do for you.

This article is adapted from a full chapter on leverage in Mind Tools “Make Time for Success!” program, written by James Manktelow and Namita Anand. Click here for more about Make Time for Success!, or here to find out how to license it for your training or events.

GTDGmail

GTD - Getting Things Done - is a simple and effective productivity concept: designed so that even the laziest and most scattered of people can be organised and stress free.

It is a way to get things done with "less effort, more ease and elegance".

GTD focuses on Contexts and Next Actions. A Context is the best place to achieve something, and a Next Action is the thing you think is most important to do next.
Projects and complex priorities are strongly devalued as they are rarely the answer to organisational problems.
As a very simple example, a to do list might have the Context 'At Computer', with the Next Actions being 'Visit GtdGmail.com' and 'Download GtdGmail'. Thus, when you are next sat at the computer, you know exactly what is most effective to do next.

The emphasis is on the fastest, easiest way to clear your task list.
A primary example being the 2 Minute Rule: any task that can be done in two minutes should be done straight away.

GTD is built on the notion that a person's mind is a very ineffectual place to store their todo list. It aims to move these lists somewhere else, freeing the brain to concentrate on the task at hand.
Enter Gmail...

GTD originated in David Allen's best selling book that promises to boost your productivity and open up your creativity; not to mention adding six months to your life.
Allen is in an excellent position to identify 'the way' - a Zen Budhist before even going to college - he has spent over two decades dedicating himself to making people more effective.

It strives to be simple and fun.
GTD asserts that we never just 'do' projects, instead we complete a series of very smaller steps that move us closer to the goal of completing multiple projects.
Hence the concept of Projects - and unrealistic priorities - are pushed to one side.
Instead, we focus on task lists that are grouped by context - i.e. what tasks can be best done where?
For example, a list of Phone tasks are those tasks that can be achieved when you are near a phone.

There is also the 'reminder' element. Rather than doing whatever comes first into your mind, you have the 'Next Action' for a given Context (or possibly Project) readily labelled.

In short, you keep nothing in your head; and whenever you think "What should I do now?" GTD has the most appropriate 'Next Action' ready for you.

The Process

This is derived from GTD's page at Wikipedia

Collect

Capture everything that you need to track or remember or act on in into a Bucket.
In this case, the Buckets are your Inbox and Archive.
Aim:

• Get Everything Out of your Head
• Minimise the collection buckets: your Inbox should be emptied once a day.

Process

When you process your inbox, follow a strict workflow:

• Start at the top.
• Deal with one item at a time.
• Never put anything back into 'in'.
• If an item requires action:
  • Do it (if it takes less than two minutes),
  • Delegate it, or
  • Defer it.
• If not,
  • Make it a Reference
  • Throw it away
  • Incubate it for possible action later - add it to the Someday / Maybe list

The 2-minute Rule: If it would take less than 2 minutes to do something, just do it right away.

Organize

• Decide on Context
  For any Actions in your Inbox, choose the best place/way in which you'll do them - i.e. the best context. For example, if a task is to call someone, then the Context is phone. If the Task is to pick something up from a shop, then the Context would be Car (or maybe Offsite/Onroad).
• Next actions
  For every item requiring your attention, decide what is the next action that you are effectively able to do. For example, if the item is 'Write project report', the next action might be 'Email Fred for meeting minutes', or 'Call Jim to ask about report requirements', or something similar. Though there may be many steps and actions required to complete the item, there will always be something that you need to do first, and this should be recorded in the next actions list. Ideally, your Actions should be ordered in the Context (e.g. phone, email, work desk) in which they are done.
• Projects
  Every process in your life or work which requires more than one physical action to achieve becomes a 'project'. These are tracked and periodically reviewed to make sure that every project has a next action associated with it and can thus be moved forward.
• Waiting For
  When you have delegated an action to someone else or are waiting for some external event before you can move a project forward, this must be tracked in your system and periodically checked to see if action is due or a reminder needs to be sent.
• Someday/Maybe
  Things that you want to do at some point, but not right now. Examples might be 'learn Chinese', or 'take diving holiday'.

Now you're organised, you can pull up a list of Next Actions based on different criteria - such as by Context if you are a specific situation (e.g. on the road), or by Project if the project is urgent, or simply by a general view of all Next Actions in chronological order.

Review

The lists of actions and reminders will be of little use if you don't review them at least daily, or whenever you have time available. Given the time, energy and resources that you have at that particular moment, decide what is the most important thing for you to be doing right now, and do it.

At least weekly, the discipline of GTD requires that you review all your outstanding actions, projects and 'waiting for' items, making sure that any new tasks or forthcoming events are entered into your system, and that everything is up to date.

Do

Any organizational system is no good if you spend all your time organizing your tasks instead of actually doing them! David Allen's contention is that if you can make it simple, easy and fun to take the actions that you need to take, you will be less inclined to procrastinate or become overwhelmed with too many 'open loops' (aka entire Projects).