You’ve heard the saying, “the early bird get’s the worm”. Well a new study by Philippe Peigneux, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, compared the performance of subjects who woke up around noon with subjects that routinely work up at 5-6am.

According to the article “Want to Get Ahead? Sleep In” at Globe and Mail.

After 10 hours of being awake, the early birds showed reduced activity in brain areas linked to attention span, compared with the night owls. The early risers also felt sleepier and tended to perform tasks more slowly, compared with the night owls, when their level of alertness was measured.

This flies in the face of traditional thinking such as “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” -Ben Franklin. Research has shown that whether you naturally are an early or late riser is dictated by your genetic makeup. However, people who are naturally late risers are often forced or pressured by societal norms to wake up early, which causes sleep deprivation and this lack of sleep hurts performance. Natural late risers also tend to consume significantly more caffeine, probably due to being forced to fight their natural circadian clock, which can lead to chemical dependency or large swings in wakefulness.

According to the book Brain Rules by John Medina:

“Sleep must be important because we spend 1/3 of our lives doing it! Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.”

A set schedule for employees that requires that they show up at 8 am every day, may be robbing them of their most productive hours. It may increase productivity of workers if they are allowed to come in whenever they prefer, even if their start the day at noon.

Related Article

10 Benefits of Rising Early and How to Do It Zen Habits

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Find a Zen-like place to work

Sometimes I struggle to focus when working from home because there are many distractions. I will notice clutter that I should organize or be tempted to watch a show I recorded on DVR. I have found it helpful to escape these distractions by finding a place where I can better focus on the task at hand. For me this is a Starbucks, for others it could be the library, or the park.

Lock away your mobile device

Many of us are addicted to our mobile devices. For some it is an extension of our bodies and we can feel incomplete without it. To avoid being tempted to check your mobile for text messages, the Twitter stream, or being interrupted by calls, put your mobile device out of reach. This could be in the other room or in your coworkers desk. Anything that makes it more difficult to habitually check your phone should help.

Let go of the need to know everything

Former Apple and Microsoft executive Linda Stone wrote this over at BusinessWeek:

In the case of continuous partial attention, we’re motivated by a desire not to miss anything. There’s a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With CPA, we feel most alive when we’re connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly scan for opportunities – activities or people – in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, “What can I gain here?”

The fear of missing things is often overblown. The book The 4 Hour Work Week suggests that you should completely avoid reading news and rather ask others if anything interesting is going on. It is good to revisit the consequences of not reading every blog post in your RSS reader or reading every Tweet from the people you are following. You will see that a lot of the information that you consume on a daily basis is insignificant and you would be just fine if you ignored most of it.

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Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on sequentially, one at a time. This attentional ability is not capable of multitasking…To put it bluntly. Research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention rich inputs simultaneously.

Every time you switch tasks, your brain must undergo a specific process called rule activation. When your brain wants to start a new task, your anterior prefrontal cortex activates and sends out a two part message. The two parts include a search query to find the neurons responsible for doing the task, and a command to arouse the specific neurons once discovered. When you need to switch your attention to something else your brain must disengage from the current task, then activate the anterior prefrontal cortex, which sends out a new message to find the neurons you need for the next task and activate them. This process takes several tenths of a second. “Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50% more errors.” -Brain Rules Some evidence that shows how bad we are at multitasking is the awful driving performance of people who drive while talking on their cell phone. According to Brain Rules “Cellphone talkers are a half second slower to hit the brakes in emergencies, slower to return to normal speed after an emergency, and more wild in their following distance behind the vehicle in front of them. In a half second a driver going 70 miles per hour travels 51 feet…50% of the visual cues spotted by attentive drivers are missed by cell phone talkers…they get in more wrecks than anyone except very drunk drivers.” So if you are serious about getting more done, turn off the email alerts and close your email, close the internet browser windows you are not using, and limit unscheduled co-worker interruptions. You’ll be more productive and probably less stressed by not trying to do a million things at once.

This is a paid service and costs $29.95 a month, which gives you 1,000 minutes to record and 30 minutes of transcription to text. Each additional minute of transcription costs 99 cents.

There are several useful applications of this tool. If you are having an important conversation with a client or partner, it may be very beneficial to have the information recorded in audio and text. Since it could take hours to type out everything that was said, this could be a good time and money saver. The transcription was very accurate when I tried it, which suggests it is transcribed by a person rather than a computer.

You can also take advantage of audiobooks to “read” while waiting in lines, doing mindless tasks like yard work, or while you work out. It is often difficult to read a book while doing other tasks. If you like to collect books on your bookshelf as keepsakes, you may not like audiobooks.

One of the drawbacks of audiobooks, is that it can prevent you from day dreaming when you are bored, which is when many of us have our greatest ideas. You also cannot take notes or highlight key passages in an audiobook, and it is difficult to find an important passage that you want to revisit.

Audible.com is the leader in audiobooks and was recently purchased by Amazon. Most of the more popular books are available at Audible and some of the more obscure titles. You can sign up for a trial and get 2 free audiobooks by going to audible.com/twit2. If you don’t like it, it is one of the easiest subscriptions to cancel.

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I am surprised that AT&T and Apple would allow this because it could allow iPhone users, many who have been required to use AT&T’s service, to be able to talk for free or for pennies with Skype’s low cost subscription. If you have an iPod touch, you could get a microphone attachment and use it as a phone. Since you can not rely it if you don’t have a wireless signal, you could get a pay as you go phone for situations when you don’t have a WiFi signal. If you live in an area with free WiFi, or have WiFi in your home, this can be a great thing.

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How it works is simple. When someone sends you a message they receive an auto-responder message informing them that you only check email a couple times a day, but if it is an urgent matter they can click on a link to fill out a webform. People with urgent messages are directed to awayfind.com/yourname where they can submit a short message that is delivered to your cell via SMS.

It is a brilliant idea and it is free for the basic service. It basically retrains senders to prioritize your email for you. It only takes a couple minutes to set up so it is definitely worth a try.

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According to BusinessWeek:

Rosen, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told the Associated Press that the decline in housing prices is only about three-quarters complete, and the cumulative slump could reach 24% this year. To offset such a plunge, Rosen is proposing a foreclosure moratorium to help stabilize the economy. He said as many as 8 million homes could go into foreclosure in the next three years without government action, the AP reported. “I worry about the cumulative decline of all the job losses leading to a second wave of foreclosures. So we have to stop this downward spiral,” Rosen said.

The U.S. unemployment rate climbed to 7.2% in December, before all the job cuts that were announced so far this year. Although investors are grabbing up bargains (the sale of existing homes rose 6.5% in December) this is being countered by new home sales dropping to the lowest level on record.

However provisions in the economic stimulus package could prop up demand in the form of a tax credit for home buyers or a foreclosure moratorium as Rosen suggests.

Many economists are refraining from making predictions because there is no telling what may happen in the coming months and multiple factors make trying to time the market almost impossible. For many home owners, the only option is to just grit their teeth and wait out the storm.

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Remote virtual assistants are very affordable. Indian companies like Tasks EveryDay advertise services for as low as $6.98 per hour.

Some of the negatives of a remote virtual assistant from India can be difficulty communicating or misunderstandings. In the 4 Hour Workweek they give an example of a virtual assistant who wasted a lot of time on the clock because they didn’t understand what the client wanted. Therefore it is important to make sure that you are on the same page and you check the status of longer projects to ensure the VA is using time wisely.

However, I think the pros outnumber the cons, and even if you don’t need a VA right now it is good to get some experience managing a VA for when you do need one. If you are a busy executive, just think of the things that a VA can free you up to do.

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This post is about the principles of time management that underlie the book Do It Tomorrow by Mark Forster:

Have a clear vision
Have a clear vision of your goals, of the things you want to do and the things you don’t want to do. A clear vision directs your priorities. Setting priorities is only meaningful between projects, not between tasks that have to be done anyway (’project’ is loosely defined here as an activity that leads to some desired result and that cannot be finished in one go).

Your vision is not something static: it will change over time. So frequently revisit your vision, to keep your priorities clear as well.

One thing at a time
Focus, focus, focus! Use for example timeboxing or working with a pair (like pairprogramming) to work in highly focused way. Don’t dilute your focus by having too many projects at the same time.

Little and often
Work on things frequently, in small bits, iteratively and increment, so that results grow over time. If you want e.g. to write a book or finish a Ph.D. thesis, work every day on it. Actually doing something and keep doing it is more important than the amount of time spent.

This works for writing, uncluttering your home or office, bookkeeping, and many other larger activities.

Define your limits
Creative thinking works better within clear boundaries. An example of limits is timeboxing your activities, e.g. using the pomodori technique.

Defining limits is also important for your projects: determine the boundaries (and frequently re-determine them) to get a clear focus of what you’re doing and what you aren’t doing, instead of being busy with a cloud of all kinds of vaguely interesting and possibly relevant stuff.

This week, I’ve started to make a map of all the projects that I currently have and that I want to take on this year. Being an independent consultant, I don’t have an organisational context that sets a lot of boundaries for me so I’ll have to set them myself in order to be effective.

Closed lists
A closed list is a list that has a line under it and that will not change. For every day, you make a Will Do list, a closed list with the stuff that came in the previous day and your recurring tasks. As the list is closed, it will only shrink when you’re finishing items from the list. This will give you a feeling of accomplishment at the end of each day, when all the Will Do items have been checked.

Anything that comes in during the day and that is not a real urgency, will be put on tomorrow’s list or below the line of today’s list. You’ll first finish all the items above the line, before doing the newly added things.

This approach enables you to plan most of the work you do, so you can work much less reactively and much less governed by self-inflicted urgencies. Your day to day planning will become more predictable and you’ll get early feedback when you’re structurally overloaded.

The Will Do list is limited by your daily processing capacity (so you will need to find out what it is), so you prevent backlogs from building up. If you get more work each day than you can handle the next day, you’ll have to either cut down on your commitments, make your systems more efficient, and/or allocate more time for the stuff on your lists.

Willem asked, what do you do when the telephone rings? It depends: you can answer the call, make a note, and take action tomorrow (unless, of course, it’s about your house being on fire). You can also decide that you won’t answer the phone during certain activities, listen voicemail later on, and get back to the callers the next day. It depends on the nature of your work and your preferences.

Another advantage of closed lists is that you don’t have to prioritise between the items. They all need to be done and if the list is limited by your daily processing capacity, it will be finished. Prioritizing doesn’t make sense for stuff that needs to be done anyway.

Working this way gives peace of mind and reduces waste: you don’t have to spend your energy making difficult decisions about priorities. Prioritizing is waste: it’s work that adds no value, but just increases the pressure on you! You’ll have more time and energy left for actually doing useful stuff.

Forster’s recommendation is to start with the least urgent things first. If work has to be done anyway, why not do it right away?

A bright, grand idea like writing a book is not something you can finish the next day. This becomes a project, a task that recurs (a little attention every day) until the work is finished.

Reducing random factors
By preventing most ‘urgencies’, you will reduce a lot of (self-inflicted) variability in your day to day work. Closed lists system make the underlying systems problems visible. You can’t eliminate all variability and randomness, but you can reduce them substantially, giving you more freedom, making sure your important things get done, and enabling you to handle the remaining randomness better.

Commitment vs interest
You can be interested in a lot of things, but you can have only a limited amount of commitments. It is important to know your commitments, as these provide a framework for your decisions. It’s like the pigs and chickens metaphor used in Scrum (chickens are only involved, but pigs are committed). A pig only has limited ham and bacon it can provide… (the pigs and chickens metaphor has its limitations, but that’s another story)

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 Netherlands License.

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