How to Build a Plan That Actually Bends
"A million dollars a shot is my price. But I only take one a year. The rest of the time I maintain my skills."
That was Francisco Scaramanga, the villain in The Man With the Golden Gun, played by the superb Christopher Lee. Who, interestingly, was a cousin of James Bond creator Ian Fleming and a regular golfing partner of his.
Now, while I certainly wouldn’t recommend following Scaramanga’s career path, there’s a valuable lesson in that line.
The reason Scaramanga could ask such a high price was not because he worked all the time. It was because he spent most of his time practising, refining, and maintaining his skills so that when the moment came, he could perform at an exceptional level.
And that brings us to this week’s question, which is all about developing, and more importantly, maintaining, your skills at managing your work and your time.
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Script |421
Hello, and welcome to episode 421 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
There’s a belief, held by many, that becoming better at time management and productivity is something you learn once and then you’re set.
Or all you need to do is buy the latest productivity tool and all your struggles disappear.
Hahaha, it’s not quite so easy.
Theoretically, it may be possible to add a new app or use a new process for getting your work done. Unfortunately, life doesn’t fit perfectly into the little boxes we create. There’s always something different or new.
This is why the idea of plotting out every minute of your day on your calendar doesn’t work in practice.
Simple, natural things are not always predictable. You don’t know when you will need a bathroom break, or if a colleague asks you a question, or perhaps you spill your coffee all over your desk.
If any of these things happen when you have carefully mapped out every minute of your day, your day is ruined.
The missing pieces are flexibility and practice, and that is where this week’s question comes in.
So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Kathy. Kathy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve recently taken your Time Sector System course and loved it. One thing that’s worrying me, though, is that no matter how well I plan my week, by Tuesday, my whole plan is ruined. Do you have any tips on staying on plan when things become hectic?
Hi Kathy, thank you for your question.
This is a common discovery. Once you know the theory, putting it into practice can show up bumps in the road that cause problems.
One of the first problems people face is changing habits. If, for instance, you’ve never planned a week or a day, getting into the habit of consistently doing so is hard.
After all, you’ve spent most of your life so far without having a plan; skipping a daily or weekly planning session isn’t going to cause too many problems.
Yet when you are building your system, it’s that skipping that causes a problem. The more times you don’t do it, the longer it will take you to build the essential habits.
The goal is to use your new knowledge automatically. When you’re processing your inbox, you instinctively know what to do. It’s like there’s a voice in your head asking the three questions:
What is it?
What do I need to do with it?
When will I do it?
When you start, asking these questions can be slow. You’re naturally thinking too much. But when you’ve done it consistently for a few weeks, you think less, and you automatically move things to their rightful place.
Today, I can process an inbox of twenty items in less than 6 minutes. When I first started following this sequence of questions, though, it would easily have taken me twenty to thirty minutes. I was overthinking and learning patterns.
In one scene in The Man With the Golden Gun, Bond and Scaramanga are having lunch. The lunch begins amiably, but soon turns hostile. At one point, Bond reaches into his coat pocket to pull out his gun.
The camera pans to Scaramanga, who is pointing his legendary golden gun at Bond.
The surprising thing here is that Scaramanga had to build his gun from a golden cigarette case, a lighter, a fountain pen, and a cufflink. All Bond had to do was pull his gun from his shoulder holster.
How was Scaramanga faster? Practice.
How many hours would Scaramanga have had to practice putting his gun together to get that fast?
I know, it’s fiction. But the point is, you get faster the more you do something.
This is why people who continually switch apps are also consistently behind on their work. They remain stuck at being slow.
What’s happening there is they have to learn new ways of getting things into their system, and then moving tasks, and learning all the new features.
And that doesn’t account for the time it takes to move everything over to the new app.
It’s dead time. Instead, sticking with the apps you already have forces you to get better and faster at using them.
Then we come to the realisation that no two weeks are ever the same. No matter how carefully we plan something, things will inevitably go wrong.
This is where practice and experience come in.
I have a client who travels for work a lot. Sometimes he travels domestically; other times he travels internationally, often to the other side of the world, which involves 20 hours of flying time.
He found the Time Sector System worked brilliantly when he was working from his office, but it fell apart when he had to travel.
When we analysed the problem, we discovered that he was trying to run things the same way while travelling as he did at his office.
How many times have you booked a flight, found that WIFI would be available for the flight and thought, ah, I’ll catch up on my email and messages when flying, only to discover that the WIFI doesn’t work?
Now, you could respond to your actionable emails while flying, but you won’t be able to send them until you get into a WIFI zone. But that disruption to your plans can leave you feeling very frustrated.
The solution in this case was to have a travelling routine. On days when my client was travelling, he reduced his task list to the essentials. Rescheduling or postponing routine tasks
He also set up a routine for international travel, using the flight time to plan and clean things up. None of which required WIFI.
The first few times he used this new process, he found he needed to make adjustments, but after a few tries, he had it working perfectly.
And that’s the key part. Build in flexibility.
In my client’s case, it was not to try and follow the same system when travelling as he does when at the office.
When you plan your week, allow for the unexpected.
One way to do this is to ensure that, when you plan your week, you have time for the essential things. That would be your core work and the parts of your life you have decided are important. Time with family and friends, hobbies and exercise, for example.
Once you have those on your calendar, then really you have the beginnings of a solid plan that should be flexible enough.
Hopefully, you have already locked in your core work.
When I was a teacher, I had an hour each day protected for class preparation. I was teaching around four to five hours a day; those times were fixed each month and were non-negotiable. I had to be in the classroom teaching.
The class preparation time did change from day to day, but it was always there, and I tried to fix it around the same time each day, which made it much easier to make it a habit.
The unknowns often come from project work. Projects, by their very nature, are unique. Each one requires something different. You will find that while you may not be able to plan precisely what needs to be done at a weekly level, scheduling time to work on your projects each week will help ensure you have enough time to keep these moving forward.
If you’ve ever read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you will no doubt remember the chapter: Sharpen the Saw.
In the chapter, Stephen Covey uses the example of a wood cutter who’s working so hard that they never stop to sharpen the saw. Over time, the time required to cut the tree increases, not because the woodcutter is getting weaker, but because the saw is becoming blunter.
Your time management and productivity skills operate the same way. Sometimes you have to stop and sharpen your skills.
For example, I use an iPhone, and every time Apple updates its iPhone operating system, I review my collecting methods to see if anything in the new software will make collecting faster.
For example, when Apple added the action button to their phones, it let me map that button to add tasks to my task manager’s inbox. It’s super fast, and after a few days it became automatic for me to tap the action button when I needed to add something.
The most productive people I know spend time improving their ability to produce.
This is why athletes train, musicians practise scales, pilots rehearse procedures, and surgeons continually update their skills. The performance people see is only possible because of the preparation and practice nobody sees.
This is also why the Scaramanga quote fits this question. His point was essentially the same. As he said:
“The rest of the time I maintain my skills.”
Scaramanga’s version is darker, of course, but the principle is identical. Exceptional performance is not the result of the moment itself; it’s the result of the time spent preparing for that moment.
If you find that by Tuesday your plan for the week looks destroyed, allow for that when you plan your week.
One way you can do this is to plan your objectives.
What is it that you want to get accomplished next week? These could be:
To finish an important proposal
Get on top of your emails
To clean up the garden
To exercise a minimum of four times
To update your LinkedIn profile
With these five objectives, you can then decide when you will do them.
One tip here is to front-load your week with these activities. This way, if you do get waylaid, there’s still time to recover in the week.
This reminds me of a story from one of the world’s top rugby coaches. When he joined a new team, he found that if the team got ahead early in the game, they invariably won.
However, when they went behind early on, the likelihood was they would lose.
When he analysed this, he found that the team panicked when they fell behind, dropped their plan, and spent too much of the game taking unnecessary risks to get ahead.
He reminded the team that it was an 80-minute game and that what really mattered was sticking to their plan.
Tackle aggressively, maintain their defensive line and minimise mistakes. If they stuck to that, they would likely end the game ahead.
You don’t win games in the first twenty minutes. You win the game over 80 minutes.
It’s the same for you, Kathy; you don’t win or lose the week early on. You win the week by sticking to your plan and making adjustments where necessary, without losing sight of it.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.