Entrepreneurs and new business owners have a tough time “changing channels”.  If you are one, you know exactly what I mean.  When we are at work, we work.  When at home, we relax…and work.  When at your kids baseball game, we cheer them on…and work (thanks you blasted smart phone!).  Now, the benefit to this often is seen in the ability to simply take time off whenever desired and still be able to finish up those contracts, or whatever.  This has been handy for me more than once.  The danger is, however, quite obvious.  If my wife said “lets go to California next week” (where she is from), we could do it.  I would, of course, likely take time to chat with clients and do some work.  With such short notice, there would inevitably be things that ought not be left or lack time to delegate.  This can be great, although worthless if I simply worked the entire time we were there!  Learning to manage the “channel surfing” of our attention is an invaluable skill and utter necessity, especially with other important attention grabbers such as family.  This brings us to a powerful principle of productivity, part of the meMethod… fixed-schedule lifestyles.

This principle was illustrated quite well in a blog post offered by Cal Newport here.  You may also learn more about him on his own blog here. The starting principles for fixed-schedule productivity are as follows:

• Formulate your ideal schedule – divide your day in an “ideal” fashion. When are you working? When are you not (and I mean NOT)?  Do you have gym time or other health activity in there?  While you work, what general activities do you do and when? (i.e. email, writing, customer service phone calls, project work, and other general tasks). What time do you wake up? This all will be different for each person.  Some will get up early, work, take a nap, go to the gym and lunch, then work, then break, then work, then done for day, or whatever.  It is important to line out the tasks as well, such as email only after lunch for 30 min. then writing work, etc.
• Now, work backwards to fit everything in – This stage is where it gets interesting.  Often times, our workload and task lists grow to such astronomical proportions that we need to be “productive” about 28 hours a day.  With so many productivity systems out there causing us to realize how much there is to do and creating productive resistance at the same time, this task can be a challenge.  Concepts that may be foreign to you will come alive! such as actually turning people down and gracefully saying no from time to time.  Giving people and projects actual, realistic time-frames and completion deadlines (I’m not kidding, you might actually hit those deadlines!).  With no ability to justify projects based on the idea that you could simply put in an extra 30 minutes tonight, you become more reliable in project timelines.  When someone asks you to do something, you MUST look at your schedule before giving them any time frame on completion.  You will quickly realize that you don’t need to do have the stuff you currently do.  You will seek ways to delegate and outsource the more menial tasks.  You will also begin finding ways to be more productive during the time you do have as that is all you have.

That is it!  Those are the key steps in understanding the fixed-schedule lifestyle.  Each persons’ ideal schedule may be different and that is exactly as it should be.  Its important to realize you are NOT allowed to do tasks out of their scheduled time.  You are however, at liberty to adjust your schedule as needed but not because you are lazy!  Don’t make excuses!  This will be the toughest part, learning to change the channel.

Jim Collins

Jim Collins has sold over seven million copies of his canonical business guides, Good to Great and Built to Last. He attributes the success of these books to his research discipline. As he revealed in a New York Times profile from last May, he leads teams of up to a dozen undergraduates in the process of information gathering. His books require, on average, a half-decade of time and a half-million dollars of expenses to get from their initial premise to the polished ideas. When he enters his “monk” mode to covert this research into a manuscript, he produces, at best, a page a day.

In other words, Collins is a hardworking guy. You would expect, therefore, that like many hard-charging business-world types he would be a blackberry-by-the-bedside workaholic.

But he’s not.

Scrawled on a whiteboard in the conference room of Collins’ Boulder, Colorado office is a simple formula:

Creative 53%
Teaching 28%
Other 19%

Collins decided years ago that a “big goal” in his life was to spend half of his working time on creative work — thinking, researching, and writing — a third of his time on teaching, and then cram everything else into the last 20%. The numbers on the whiteboard are a snapshot of his current distribution. (He tracks his time with a stop watch and monitors his progress in a spreadsheet.)

Collins is a pristine example of fixed-schedule productivity in action. An author with his level of success could easily fall into an overwork trap: long nights spent updating twitter, signing partnerships, building elaborate web sites and launching product lines, speaking at every possible venue. But he avoids this fate.

Even though Collins demands over $60,000 per speech, for example, he gives fewer than 18 per year, and a third of these are donated for free to non-profit groups. He doesn’t do book tours. His web site is mediocre. He keeps his living expenses in check so that he’s not dependent on drumming up income (he and his wife have lived in the same California bungalow for the past 14 years), and he keeps only a small staff, preferring to bring on volunteers as needed.

“Mr. Collins…is quite practiced at saying ‘no,’” is how The Times described him. (He once wrote an article for USA Today titled: “Best New Years Resolution? A ‘Stop-Doing’ list.”)

His fixed-schedule approach to life comes from his simple conviction “to produce a lasting and distinctive body of work,” and his “willingness…to focus on what not to do as much as what to do” has made that possible.

He’s not alone in reaping the benefits of the fixed-schedule approach…

The Baby Factor

Michael Simmons, a good friend of mine, reported a similar story. His company, the Extreme Entrepreneurship Education Corporation, expanded quickly in the years following college graduation. Around the time I was reading The 4-Hour Work Week, I started to discuss the possibility that Simmons tone down the hours. It was his company, I argued, so why not take advantage of this fact to craft an awesome life.

Among the specific topics we discussed, I remember suggesting that Simmons cut down the time spent on e-mail and social networks.

“This isn’t optional for me,” he explained. “Any of these contacts could turn into a important partner or sale.”

But then Simmons’ daughter, Halle, was born.

Simmons’ work schedule reduced from 10 to 12 hours days to 3 to 5 hour days. He took care of the baby in the morning, then worked in the afternoon while his wife, and company co-founder, took over the childcare responsibilities. Evenings were family together time.

Halle forced Simmons into the type of constrained schedule that he had previously declared impossible. And yet the business didn’t flounder.

“The baby turns ’shoulds’ into ‘musts’,” Simmons explained to me. “In the past I used to put off key decisions, or saying ‘no’, because I didn’t want to deal with the discomfort. Now I have no choice. I have to make the decisions because my time has been slashed in half.”

“Since out daughter was born about a year ago, our business has more than doubled.”

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