More 5% Idea – Let’s Use it on an Area Important to You

(This is part of a series on the 5% Idea. You may want to start with the first post. Also, I forgot to post this back when I created it. It's a "missing piece" of my discussion of the 5% Idea. Sorry about the omission--Chris)

In my two previous posts about the 5% Idea, I mentioned that we often have difficulty making and keeping maintenance habits (an example for me is flossing my teeth regularly). With habits like flossing, exercise, working on future business planning, etc. we sometimes bounce between forcing ourselves to work on the habit (and overstretching) and forgetting it entirely (becoming burnt out by the habit). We talked about why that is, and why the 5% Idea can be a fresh approach. If we’re a little patient, this approach can get us some great new results that last a lifetime. In this post, I want to detail exactly what you need to do to start using it.

At a high level, here’s how you apply the 5% idea to build up a consistent maintenance habit:

• Examine your past, either by measurement or logging a period of time, to establish a true “average” for you.
• Work to build the habit at that level, focusing on delivering those results continually. Be patient.
• Grow the level of the habit in small increments until you’ve built up the habit to the right level for you.

Step 1 – Establish the baseline for this habit based on evidence

Step one in getting new results in a tough maintenance area is to get realistic. Remember, you’re likely not working on this habit in new ways because it’s easy for you. I’m talking about the maintenance activity you’re really challenged by, but still want to improve. To make progress on flossing (always so hard for me), I had to start by asking myself, “What’s a realistic expectation of myself in this area?

We tend to arbitrarily pick our goals for maintenance habits, usually based on how often we think we should be doing the habit. Keep in mind though, should isn’t useful. It’s usually based on emotion, on a value (sometimes not even yours), but it’s not based on evidence of what you’ve been able to do before. We want something we’ve got some evidence for. So, how to find that?

There are two ways to get this baseline expectation from the evidence. The first is to look at your past behavior over a period long enough to show your true pattern. It wouldn’t give me a very good baseline to just look at how often I flossed last week, while that flossing habit was fresh on my mind. Go over any records you have, combined with your best guess as you walk through that past time, to figure out how often you’ve been really doing this habit.

When I did that with my past flossing habit, I thought through my performance over the previous year. I had to gut feel it a bit, but I came up with an average of less than once a week. I know that’s not a very good average. (OK, I’m feeling embarrassed again, but flossing has always been so hard for me. Hopefully you can relate in some other area.) My less than once a week was all over the place. I was often skipping flossing for long periods, then rushing to try to do it before the dentist. So again, the first part is gathering evidence, looking at how often you’ve done this in the past.

Another way to gather evidence is to do a trial on the habit. This can work beautifully, but you have to do the trial long enough to get a real baseline. It’s easy to exercise more for a week, or focus on our employees for a week, or floss for a week. It’s harder to do that for a month. Based on my experience with clients, 3-4 weeks of recording how often you do it is usually a good trial for any maintenance habit, but you be the judge. Usually by week three or four, if you’ve been overstretching the habit, you’ll have a relapse. That’s good. That relapse will affect your average for that behavior, and you’ll get a truer starting baseline.

So again, the first step is either looking at our history or doing a trial. The goal is to detect a realistic level of achievement in this area for now.

Step 2 – Build the foundation of the habit, doing the habit consistently

Step two is to build the consistency of the habit. If you’re me and you’re only flossing once per week, you’re likely going to want to focus on flossing at exactly that frequency, but doing that consistently. At this point you’re focused just on getting a habit of consistency going in this area. I think this is the hardest part of the stretch for most, for some of the reasons we established in the last post. Just remember your goal at this point: to develop the habit of doing your historical average in this maintenance goal area, but doing that average consistently.

Lets’ say you find that you’re doing an average of an hour of project work a week as you look over the last three months of work. So now, you focus on doing that exact average at a consistent basis for the next few weeks. Your focus should be to build in that hour a week, to get that project work in no matter what. Just keep your focus on building the habit and remember, it’s near impossible to grow the frequency of a habit you haven’t got. It’s like trying to build a house on a foundation that’s still drying. Bad idea, but I think we often do that.

As an example, I started on my flossing habit with once a week. This was hard—to do it consistently, I couldn’t forget to do it for weeks as I had before. To help me get in the rhythm of this new consistency, I chose a day of the week and put the floss in a particular place I knew I would see it. If I missed that day, I’d do it the next day. The goal at that point was to just see if I could do flossing once per week.

Step 3 – Build on the consistency by increasing the frequency of the habit

Once you’re consistently delivering on your average, you’re ready to grow the average. Again, three to four weeks seems to be a good measure of consistency for most habits. If you can do your historical average consistently for that period, you’re probably ready to grow it. If you miss a week, perhaps add another week to the test just to make sure. You don’t need to be perfect, but when you miss, you want to ask yourself, “Did I miss, but I’ve still got that habit, or am I barely able to hold this together, and need to work on the consistency some more?”

Now that you’ve got consistency, your next step is to build in small increments. Even though I call this process of building up your maintenance goals the “5% Idea,” I don’t mean 5% increments literally. That being said, 5% can often work as a starting point for your incremental change, but again, you be the judge. In general, I counsel you to start doing less of an increase than you think you can. As an example, in working on building up my flossing frequency, I thought I’d build to twice a week. But I remembered my own advice: less than you think you should. So I chose to follow the following build:

• Once a week for a month, twice a week for the last week.
• Once a week for two weeks, twice a week for two weeks
• Twice a week for a month…

Remember to be patient and stay focused on the cumulative benefits of doing more of this habit over many years of your future, as opposed to the impatience that drives you to build the entire habit now. If you slip for a month, consider going back to your last level and working on doing that more consistently before you build again. As you prove to yourself you can do the habit consistently at each level, increase it slightly for the next period. Keep growing it until you reach the level in that area that’s right for you.

I still am working to floss more than my current level, but I’m enjoying the fact that I now do it consistently and 2-3 times as often as before. That’s an improvement! I’ve had a lot of fun and some rewarding results with the 5% Idea. I’ll talk in the future about other ways I’ve used this idea. I’d love to share how I built up my current exercise habits using this approach.

Here’s your assignment: apply the 5% Idea

For now, here’s your assignment. Choose an area you’d like to patiently build up as a solid maintenance habit. Remember, it could be anything. Time spent writing, jogging, talking to the spouse, on yourself and your hobbies, in front of clients, in educational pursuits, whatever. But choose something that’s been hard for you and deserves some patience.

Work this through the 5% Idea. Remember to 1) find your past average based on evidence, 2) consistently perform at that average until you’ve got the habit, then 3) slowly grow the average in smaller increments than you think you should. Pretty soon you’ll see the results. Let me know about the results, good and bad. Perhaps we can post a frequently asked questions to help fill in areas that are still unclear.

Good luck!

Don’t Forget a Thing, REMind Yourself of Everything

Have you ever forgotten something small and had it blow up in your face?

Lately, I’ve been posting about energy, taking care of yourself, and developing habits. So, I thought I would teach you a simple habit today that has helped me in each of those areas. This habit, which I call the REM (or REMinder) system, has helped me to keep many small things small. It’s helped me to avoid forgetting those small things, having them turn into unnecessary blow-ups.

In my defense, it’s pretty easy to sweat the small things when you forget them.

Failure to schedule cost me an important day of my vacation

A few years ago, I was planning a trip to New Orleans with my wife, a little three-day weekend celebration. A week before departure I noticed I had a problem. I had a seminar in Seattle on Monday morning. I was supposed to be enjoying New Orleans through Sunday night. There were no flights that would allow me to magically leave Sunday night from New Orleans and get to Seattle on Sunday night, ready to get a good night’s sleep and be up and ready to talk Monday morning.

I ended up having to scrap a whole day of our planned vacation, turning the three-day into a two-day so I could fly back early and get to Seattle. My wife was very understanding, but I felt so guilty, and the weekend was way too short. Afterward, I said to myself, “What could I do to avoid this ever happening again?” Do you ever have those moments? I have a lot of them, but I try to from as many of them as I can.

The solution to this problem was to add a reminder to my REM system. You see, the REM system is made for dealing with loose ends and easily forgotten things. That task, for example, you’re almost finished with, but there’s just one thing left to check on—perfect for the REM system. The things you keep forgetting to do or check—also perfect.

How to set up the REM system for yourself and start getting the benefits

You don’t need much to get the REM system going. It’s just a daily habit to check your reminders and a discipline to enter new “things to remember” into the system.

I’m going to assume that you’re using Outlook to manage your time (many of us are) and tell you how to set up the REM system in that. I’m convinced you could do the REM system in any tool. Let me know if you’d like ideas about how to set it up in other tools (leave a comment), and I’ll be happy to let you know how to do it in other tools.

The REM system’s purpose is to remind yourself of loose ends (that’s why I call it REM, as in REM-inders, not because of the tendency to dream about loose ends if you don’t tie them up). Here’s the big idea: any time you have a loose end, tie it down by making a REM entry out of it.

I use this system constantly. For example, today I used the REM system to remind myself of a loose end around an expense report. I was working this morning on filing an unusual set of expenses. I just sent an email to all involved asking who I should send the receipts to. Right now the receipts are in a file folder, waiting for a destination. (And waiting to be forgotten, if I’m not careful.)

I want to make sure I have a REM for myself in the case I don’t hear back on my email. If they don’t get back to me, I won’t know where to send the receipts, and likely I’ll just forget to finish up this task at all. This might mean a new fire for me to put out when someone in accounts payable needs to close things out by the end of the month and is wondering why I never turned in this expense report.

Making a REM entry in Outlook is easy. (I assume you have a basic knowledge of Outlook, or are always looking for a new place to learn.) I want to remind myself to check back with the folks on the expenses if I hadn’t heard from them in a few days.

Here’s what I do:

• Go into Outlook and create a new task, titled REM.
• Set the due date to three days from now. (That’s when I want to be thinking, or acting, on it next).
• Enter in the note of the task: Have I heard back from J yet on the expense question?
• Save the task.

The second piece of the REM system is the habit of checking your REM tasks daily, before your day begins. I suggest that you start a daily habit to check in with your day, think about your priorities, etc. One part of that daily habit can be to check your task list for REM tasks for that day and process all of them.

So, each day, spend a moment glancing at your task list, sorted by due date. Today’s tasks should then pop to the top of the list. And you’ll see any REM tasks you have for today, where you can open each and process them.

As an example, three days from now, that REM task I just entered about the expense report will be at the top of the by due date task list. Since it will be due that day, I’ll open it. I’ll see the reminder about J and the expenses. If she’s gotten back to me, I’ll check off the REM task. The reminder is no longer necessary. Loose end is no longer loose.

If she hasn’t gotten back to me, I might call or send another email or call someone else. And I may want to set a REM task for 2-3 days from now to take an action if that loose end hasn’t been tied.

Here are some things I’m using the REM system for

Glancing at my current REM tasks, here are some of the things I’m currently reminding myself of:

• Have I heard back from L on a question?
• It’s now time (it’s been a week after a program I delivered) to call the client up and see how things went on their end and what they’d like to do next
• Have the books I ordered from Amazon that were supposed to be delivered by this date arrived yet?
• Have I spoken recently with someone I’m trying to stay in better contact with?
• Have I done my flossing yet for the week or do I need to focus on that for the next couple days to keep my habit up? (see my earlier post on the 5% Idea)

There are certainly other ways to remind yourself to do things, such as leaving sticky notes scattered around your office or entering your reminders directly on your calendar as calendar entries. The advantage of the REM system, I think, is that it’s very consistent, which sticky note reminders may not be. It’s something you just check daily, rather than have unnecessary appointments or Outlook reminders interrupting your focus all day. So if you use one of those systems, try out the REM system and tell me if it’s an improvement for you.

The solution to my travel mistake

If you’re curious about how I now avoid the travel problem I related earlier, here’s how. I have a reminder in my REM system that looks like this: (->1m) Check four weeks ahead for travel conflicts. The first part (in parentheses) is a reminder to repeat this reminder every month, so I’m always getting it and always checking my schedule for travel conflicts (helping me to make that a habit). Just this one reminder has saved me from several travel conflicts, and that’s been well worth the price of the reminder.

So try it out. Let me know how it goes as you improve your memory for the small stuff. I hope it helps.

Manage Your Energy, Enable Your Productivity

This is the era of self-management. Most of us are aware of the benefits of managing our money. We’ve been focused on that for a while, perhaps even too focused at times. Many of us are preoccupied with managing our health and that’s probably a good thing. The principles for managing our time have been around for a while. While we may struggle with them, most of us know the basic principles and feel the impact of not using them consistently. (Do you plan your day, daily?)

So many things manage to drain our energy

Something that feels like it’s been added to the heap of all these things to manage is managing our energy. Energy has always been an issue for us, an important resource, but lately it feels like the pace of life is draining for many of us. If we don’t manage this drain we could end up brain dead or wiped out more often than we’d like.

There are many things that impact our energy, some relatively new. Technology has wonderful benefits, but email poorly managed, as an example can manage all the productivity, energy, and focus out of our day. It’s difficult, and so important, to get the most out of our energy—unless we manage this process, it will manage us.

Does your BlackBerry make you more productive?

I spoke with a friend of mine last night, a manager at a high tech hardware company. He was telling me how he no longer had a BlackBerry at work. His manager, perhaps for budget reasons, had taken back the team’s BlackBerry devices.

Never before did my friend have such peace. He was realizing how big a difference that BlackBerry, or rather its absence, made. How much it had been negatively impacting his productivity. There it was, going off and grabbing his attention, all day long. It buzzed in the meeting, at his desk, on the phone, at home, all over the place. It kept him constantly available and having to deal with others issues. And often these issues were not the most important issues in front of him.

There’s nothing wrong with mobile email, just like there’s nothing wrong with being available to other people who interrupt you– but if we don’t manage those things well, they will impact our productivity negatively. They will also impact our energy. Have you ever had a day where you felt forced or compelled to multitask as a survival mechanism? It’s a pretty draining day.

Technology, sleep, and commutes, oh my

Our energy seems to be under assault these days. When I ask seminar participants and clients what they wish they had more time for, the first answer, at least in 2007, is always “sleep.” Perhaps we’ve packed our lives to full? Maybe we feel ill-equipped to answer to the folks that want to continue packing our lives full for us?
Technology is great, but the instant availability afforded by technology means we spend more time communicating and being interrupted. And that leaves less time, focus and energy for everything else (including sleep), unless we manage the technology well.

Technology is one area you want to really look at in your life. How are you managing it? Most of us have systems for dealing with tech that are derived from our habits, not good design. It’s good to step back and redesign what we’re doing in these areas. Spending some time redesigning how you deal with say, your email inbox each day could be one of the best investments you make this year.

Commutes and traffic take their toll and can rob us of our energy. Our heavy workload and the number of things on our plate can get us into a state of mild panic. We may jump to rapid multitasking not because it makes sense given the tasks we’re switching between, but more because we feel we have to just to stay on top of things. This feeling can wipe us out and tank our energy.

Let me just restate my main point: to be productive we need time, but we also need focus and energy. Otherwise we work, but we don’t work very efficiently. Or we work, but we don’t really work at all—at least not on the things most need us that day.

Do you ever procrastinate? I do. It’s easy to procrastinate – all you need in order to put off a task is to feel that the task you’re trying to start on is bigger than you are. In other words, the task is bigger than how big you feel at the moment. And what effects how big you feel in relation to the tough task? Your energy does.

An experiment for you to try

Here’s an experiment I’d like you to try. I haven’t tried it yet (I promise to be honest with you when that’s the case), but it makes so much sense, I should have. In fact, I’m going to try it with you this week and I’ll get back to you about how it goes.

For the next five work days, track your energy (you want to see your patterns over the course of the week). Create a chart that has the hours of the day and a place to record how you feel that hour. Record on a 0-10 scale how much energy and focus you have that hour. Scoring that hour a “0” means you feel completely brain-dead with zero motivation. Scoring a “10” means you feel like you could take on any task on your list, completely focused, powerful, bursting with energy.

Consider leaving space on your chart to indicate any notes to yourself about that hour or what you learned. The objective of this exercise is to help you see what conflicts with your energy and to see what energy patterns you have in your day or week.

I once read that for most of us, our highest energy time occurs between 9 and 11 AM. There are many interesting studies that have been done around productivity during the day or the week. Where do you see your peak productivity time occurring?

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you look over your chart at the end of the week:

• When are my peak hours in a day? Is it the same time every day, or do I see a weekly pattern?
• What could I do to take advantage of the pattern?
• What tends to affect my focus and my energy level?
• What could I do to avoid or manage the things that drain me of energy?
• What are my first steps based on my answers and what I saw in the exercise?

Let me know how this experiment goes for you. I promise to share my results with you.