Our studies show that more than half of business and professional people do not take a lunch break, working through lunch, hoping to carve out more "productive" time.

The truth is generally the opposite. After doing what you and I do for several hours, we start to "dull out" and tend to procrastinate important items in the afternoon. A lunch break, a vacation during the day, will charge up the batteries and help us to get going on more of those important items in the afternoon and actually increase our productivity over the long run.

Avoid meetings

On an average day in America, there are 17 million meetings. (It's a wonder anything ever gets done!)

Meetings are expensive. The cost for ten people, at approximately $50,000 per year in salary, is around $400 per hour. Measure that against what was accomplished in the hour's meeting.

Meetings ought to have a specific purpose(s) and definitive results with follow-up to insure agreed items get done. Meetings ought not to be a vehicle to "look productive" or to just "cya".

Take it in bites

"How do you eat an elephant?" Answer: "One bite at a time". The point here is that we will schedule ourselves to work on a large project that will take several hours. The problem is that most of us do not get a solid block of several hours just to work on one thing, but we fool ourselves into thinking tomorrow will be different.

Tomorrow comes, the big chunk of time does not become available, so we procrastinate. "I'll just do this tomorrow."

As an alternative, why not put down the first bite of the elephant for tomorrow, the first twenty or thirty minutes of the project and note it with "(ext)" to remind ourselves to extend the next step to the next available day?

Complete that first bite and then put the next bite on tomorrow's list and subsequent days until it's completed.

It may take several days, but you will get that elephant eaten up, one bite at a time.

Published: December 29, 2003

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