2009 TAA Conference * San Antonio TX * June 25-27

Listen to podcast on time management

Jean Lukesh
Susan Robison

Listen to a podcast of the 2009 TAA Conference session on time management by psychologist and author Susan Robison, "What To Do When You Don't Have Time," on the Copyright Clearance Center's Beyond the Book site: http://beyondthebookcast.com.

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Treat authoring like a business: Create a home office just for authoring
by Kim Pawlak

Robert Christopherson, author of the best-selling U.S. and Canadian geography textbook, Geosystems.

Treating your authoring like a business means creating a home office just for authoring, said Robert Christopherson, author of the best-selling U.S. and Canadian geography textbook, Geosystems.

"Prepare your home office and writing studio as if it were a formal business," he said.

Christopherson had a cabinet maker build a full desk, elevated bookcases, and lateral filing cabinets for storing his preparation files, into his home office. The desk takes up three walls, and in the corner -- so no space is lost -- there's a 36-inch lazy susan for storing supplies. The bookcases are elevated to allow room for a 14-foot long cork board for tagging items on. "Around the computer, the cabinet maker built a large theater-organ like console so that the computer screen is surrounded by a workspace where things can be posted and set," he said. "I work on big broadsheets a lot of the time and I can put those broadsheets around the screen and keyboard."

He suggests purchasing the following additional items to make your home office more business-like:

A copy machine. While he currently does a lot of electronic transmission of PDF files, Christopherson still finds having a full-service copy machine valuable for working with images and faxing. "For years we would buy second hand or reinvigorated copy machines at a discount, and either put them on our tax depreciation schedule or write all the cost off in one year," he said. "Having a copy machine in my office has saved many miles and much time and effort."
A telephone headset. To have your hands free is critical for those long teleconferences and calls to your editors, he said.
A large computer monitor. "I recommend the 30-inch Apple Cinema monitor (works on PCs as well) because when writing, there are at least six documents I can think of that should be open simultaneously, like the glossary, your new features, marketing talking points, table of contents outline of H1, H2, H3 heads, the text document itself, and your Internet browser," he said. "Doing that on a 14- or 17-inch screen is just too small."

Since Christopherson's textbooks are physical geography, Earth system science, almost every time he and his wife Bobbé, who takes all the photos for his books, step out of the house, they're doing business. "We keep a detailed travelogue of stop-and-start mileage and a description of what we did," he said. "We also keep detailed records of equipment and office supply purchases. I've had a home office since 1981 and all is well."

In keeping with treating your authoring like a business, said Christopherson, you need a specific business card and letterhead saying that you are an author. He has found that creating text-specific business cards and letterhead, and a PO Box, phone number and email address, to be critical to communicating with adopters and students, and for use at academic conventions.

"At national sales meetings [which Christopherson regularly attends, volunteering to man the sales booth alongside the publisher's sales reps], you can display the business cards in the booth so that when people are coming by, there's the author's business card," he said. "When somebody talks to you in the booth or you're walking down the hall and someone stops you, you can hand them a card, asking for feedback."

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Don't manage time, manage goals
by Kim Pawlak

Susan Robison instructing conference attendees on how to manage their workload, not their time to complete tasks.

While you can't actually manage time – because it operates independently of you -- you can manage your goals, said Susan Robison, a psychologist and faculty development consultant with Professor DeStressor, during her 2009 TAA Conference session, “Time Management: Why You Don’t Need It, Can’t Do It Anyway – And What To Do Instead."

"One of the things that the research on time management workshops show, is that they don't work," she said. "What happens to people emotionally is they come out of the workshops feeling absolutely overwhelmed by a thousand techniques they're not going to do, and so they're not going to manage their time any better."

If you find that you don’t have enough time to do everything on your to do-list, said Robison, you may have too many goals: "What you really need to get under control are those goals. Learn to manage the control of the tasks or goals and how to sequence them, what to do, when to do it, and so on and so forth. Those are things you can control.”

Robison shares five things you can do to begin managing your goals:

Anchor your tasks to a sense of meaning and purpose. “No more trivial tasks unless those trivial tasks are in support of things you are deeply, deeply moved by and want to do with your lives,” she said.
Prioritize which tasks are worthy of your resources of time, talent, energy, and attention. “Although there are tasks we all have to do because they support what we want to do -- such as filing your grades from the last semester -- you should be spending most of your time doing things you choose to do and that are fun to do,” she said. "Develop a Dream Book or Wall to keep all of your goals parked so that you can pick and choose which ones get your attention and other resources. Procrastinate creatively so you can make time, energy, and space for professional activities, including research and writing. Plan backward and estimate time-to-completion more accurately."
Allocate tasks across units of time. Use tracking sheets to keep track of all your goals, not just writing, and apply the “strive for nine-or less rule” so that your to-do lists are realistic and achievable. "Here's how the strive for nine-or-less rule works: You choose to do nine things a day. You decide which nine things by choosing three things that move your vision forward, three things that avert disaster (pay your bills, show up at a meeting your dean is going to be at), and three things you're going to do to take care of yourself (your bedtime, your exercise routine, and what you're going to eat, etc.). If you finish all nine of them, you get to start on tomorrow's list. If your to-do list is all of the things you choose to do that day, you will get all of them done. I guarantee it." Use the "focused 15" to develop work habits that lead to flow, engagement, and fun. Do this by making sure that each of the nine tasks are 15-minute segments of your important goals.
Accounting for the results of the allocation. "Your accountability to yourself includes your tracking sheets, Dream Book, and Strive for Nine," she said. "Your accountability to others includes finding a buddy to work with, a 'Mastermind group' (a whole group that reciprocally helps each other), or a Coach (a non-reciprocal relationship -- someone who helps you either informally or someone you hire formally)."
Build and broaden your resilience and happiness while you do the above things. "Resilience is your ability to handle stress," she said. "If you don't build in some credits, when the debits come along, you're depleted. Some people live right at the edge of their threshold, and when something comes along, they flip out. The key to doing stress better is to actually purposely choose to stress yourself in ‘choiceful’ ways, so you can build your capacity for stress.”

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Manage your goals with use of 'Pyramid of Power'
by Kim Pawlak

Psychologist and author Susan Robison (right in blue jacket), attracted a full group for her Roundtable Discussion expanding on her earlier session, "Time Management: Why You Don't Need It, Can't Do It Anyway — And What To Do Instead."

To help her clients focus on important tasks instead of wandering from task to task, Susan Robison, a psychologist and faculty development consultant with Professor DeStressor, created the "Pyramid of Power" -- a pyramid-shaped goal-setting model.

"I chose the pyramid for the design of my model because that is the most stable structure you can construct," she said. "It has a wide base and a narrow top, with your goals at the top. The model can work top down and bottom up."

Many people operate with their goals as a huge top, with a very narrow bottom or no bottom at all, says Robison. "The goals are floating around up in the air and they aren't anchored to anything," she said. "The Pyramid of Power reverses that, anchoring your goals."

The Pyramid of Power has four elements. They are, from the bottom up, said Robison:

Purpose Statement. Your purpose statement is your philosophical belief. This doesn't change much across your whole lifetime. "You may be able to come up with your purpose statement in minutes, or it may take you over a year," she said. "The amount of time it takes is no reflection on your intelligence, your physical attractiveness, or your mental health. It is a phenomena all by itself. So if you're struggling with your purpose statement, it's something that's going to be an ongoing take-home assignment for you. One woman I worked with spent half of her time teaching at a university and the other half of her time serving as a liaison between a diversity center on campus and the urban community in which she lived. We came up with a purpose statement for her that said: 'I am a bridge connecting ideas and people for the greater good.'"
Mission Statement. Your mission statement is more practical, and changes every three to five years for adults, and sooner for students. Your mission statement answers the question, "If I am here for this purpose, what shall I do about it? "To write your mission statement, you will need to know what your strengths are (three verbs), what your values are, and to whom you typically offer yourself to," she said. "As a result, your mission statement will follow this formula: 'My mission is to (verb, verb, verb), that are my strengths, for, to, or with (people, people, people), who want (value, value, value - your four to eight values). When you put your mission statement together, it's really helpful to use information from the outside world, such as your students."
Vision Statement. Your vision statement is the outcome of your mission. Here's a device to get at your vision, she said: "The phone rings five years from now. You've been waiting a long time for this very special call. Who is it and what do you want them to ask you? Is it the Nobel Committee asking you to come to Stockholm to accept your award? Is it yet another publisher chasing you down, offering you millions of dollars to write a book? What kind of call is it that you have hoped for and worked for your whole life and it's finally coming together?"
What things shall I do to make my vision come alive because I'm living my mission because I know what my purpose is? These things are your goals, which can be broken down into tasks. "Once your Pyramid of Power is in place, it motivates and energizes everything you do," she said.

Ask yourself the following questions based on your Pyramid of Power to prioritize new opportunities as they come to you, said Robison:

Does it fit my Pyramid of Power? (If you have trouble saying no, it's now going to be easy because anything that's not in your Pyramid of Power is a no.)
What does the opportunity cost me in time, money, energy, and attention?
What's the loss and gain of this opportunity and the loss and gain of the other opportunities you don't do while you do this opportunity?

In order to work with your Pyramid, said Robison, you've got to procrastinate: "I think we all need to procrastinate a whole lot more than we do, because what we need to do is delineate between different kinds of procrastination. Destructive procrastination is the failure to do what you value and want to do, and we need to get rid of that kind. Constructive procrastination, however, is what we need to do more of and this is doing what you value, and ignoring or putting off what you don't value. We also need a little dose of creative procrastination, and this is when we delegate our higher for lower activities to free us up for higher-level activities. For example, if you are spending a lot of time filing and someone else could do that and you could pay them, you might think of creatively procrastinating it, which is delegating it to somebody else. When you increase your 'no's', your 'yes's' get stronger."

Robison said people often use the words "I have to” rather than “I choose to”: “’I have to go to the grocery store today.’ ‘I have to teach my class.’ If you change 'I have to' to 'I choose to,' watch what happens. ‘I choose to go to the grocery store today.' Hmm, do I? I don't even really want to. I think I'll choose that tomorrow. While I may not be in the mood to, I choose to teach because basically my mission is about education and I really do love to teach even though I'm not in the mood today, and if I don't show up for a whole lot of classes, they're going to fire me and it probably means I'm doing a job that's not aligned with my mission, so I'm going to choose to go to class today. So, the next time you're looking at your to-do list and you say 'I have to do this' and 'I have to do that,' think about whether you can choose to do it instead.”

"When opportunities come in, the Pyramid, like a prism, breaks up the opportunities that appear into a rainbow of things that you are willing to commit to, and lots of things that you're going to say no to in order to have this beautiful, wonderful, colorful life," she said.

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