QuietSpacing

Tim Ferriss, of The Four-Hour Work Week fame, proposed the idea of mini-retirements – saving your money and taking blocks of time off (measured in months) throughout life to enjoy being alive.  It’s really a terrific concept and it works especially well for single people without kids.  The rest of us need something a little more manageable but with similar results – which is something I call mini-breaks.

A mini-break is a very short period of time – five minutes or so – during which you download all the stuff rummaging around in your brain, take a deep breath, enjoy the beautiful sunshine or heavy rain (or whatever) and generally get a battery boost.  Think of these like the portable cell phone re-chargers now ubiquitously available in every airport sundry shop or like the brief pause during a hike to train your eyes on something other than your next step.

The benefits of mini-breaks are several:

• Time Management:  We are forever behind schedule.  A mini-break allows you to catch up just a bit.  The respite it provides allows you to regain command over your hectic schedule.
• Workflow Processing:  A terrific use of the mini-break is between meetings.  Schedule one in between every meeting to allow you to core dump what’s in your head from the last meeting and enter the next meeting focused on its subject matter.  You can use your scheduling software – Outlook, etc. – to schedule things down to one-minute increments.  Just schedule each meeting to last until the full or 1/2 hour, but don’t start the next meeting until five or 35 after.  It’s kind of like TBS television programming!
• Work/Life Balance:  Two of the hardest things to achieve in today’s frenetic world is a sense of peace and a sense of command.  The mini-break provides both of these.  The brief interlude allows you to simply slow down for a minute and enjoy the day.  Moreover, knowing you “have five minutes” puts you directly back in charge of your schedule and your life.

Give it a try.  Just put one or two mini-breaks into your day to start.  You’ll find that you can add them in almost everywhere once you get into the habit.

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The NK2 file stores all the AutoComplete information used by Outlook to “auto complete” the e-mail addresses you use.  I discovered it a few weeks ago while getting ready to launch the QuietSpacing(tm) blog.  The immediate value of the NK2 file is that it contains all the e-mail addresses of people with whom you’ve communicated – even those that aren’t in your Contacts yet!

There are a number of free utilities you can download that will allow you to access and manipulate the Nk2 file data, including saving it to spreadsheets and uploading it into other programs – like an e-mail newsletter list.  Here’s the one I used:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/outlook_nk2_autocomplete.html

but a Google search on “NK2 file” will turn up a host of other sites with information and utilities about this little buried treasure!

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Here’s a QuietSpacing(tm) QuickTip:  Whenever you’re on a conference call or have your laptop with you in a meeting, open the Calendar event for that call/meeting on your computer and take your notes in the comment area provided.  There are several points of leverage here:

1.  You are putting all the transitory information (notes) in a place you’re likely to be able to find in the future.

2.  You can leave the event reminder in the Reminders Window (don’t Dismiss it) until you have done, moved or delegated all the tasks that resulted from that meeting.

3.  You can print and/or Save As that event as a document on your hard drive or document management system in the appropriate place.

Note, you can also drag and drop documents of all sorts into that event further aggregating things related to that event in one location.

Stay tuned for more QuickTips.

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I engaged in a fabulous conversation late last week with a coaching client that dissected the interchange between workflow processing and time management.  In short, we concluded that workflow management is about the “what” of productivity and that time management is about the “when” of productivity.  With that in hand, the final question centers on the “how” – which is where programs like QuietSpacing(tm) pay dividends.

The What:  Most of us have some mechanism for tracking the work that needs to get done – either efficiently or inefficiently.  Many of those techniques and behaviors were learned in an ad hoc manner when we first started working.  The “to-do list” is the most common method for tracking “what” needs doing.  These little scraps of magic are effective…to a point.  The  biggest problem we suffer in today’s working environment is the speed at which new things come at us via our advanced communication technologies.  Nonetheless, most people steadfastly adhere to the notion of a “to-do list” trying desperately to keep up-to-date during the daily barrage of e-mails, phone calls, and meetings.

The When:  Back in the “old days” we knew there would be periods during which we could get work done – quiet time between meetings and phone calls that served as periods of focus.  Those serene moments were obliterated by e-mail.  Now, most people try to snatch small segments of time to get work done in between the hundreds of new emails that come into their Inboxes.  The result, whether we admit it to ourselves (and others) or not, is productivity is greatly reduced.  In its place is lots of activity with no corresponding accomplishment.

The How:  Given that we have more coming in faster in today’s modern working environnments, the historical methods for handling our workflow and time need to change.  Instead of trying to freeze moments of time and work into snap shots and blocked periods of work, we need to view these efforts as an ever-flowing event.  Our work and our use of time must be viewed as a constantly-changing continuum and the tips and tricks we use to track what needs doing and when we do it must similarly flow forward.

Whether you choose QuietSpacing(tm) as that method or some other productivity model, I encourage you to look with a critical eye at the architecture being proposed.  Does it move with time seemlessly?  Does it allow you to readily and with minimal administrative effort track your work?  Does it promote the technologies you find in your work environment as ways of increasing your productivity and your sense of well being? 

These are the questions we face in the modern world of global, electronic working envrionments.  Make sure you’re adapting to it by using the most effective means available to you!

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