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.

You Don’t Need to be Perfect to Get Perfectly Good Results

Recently I was teaching a time management seminar for a software company. At a break, I spoke with a group of people from the program. One of them, a woman in her 20s, said to me, “You are so good at this stuff. I’ll bet you’re like a robot.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You just get this stuff automatically, don’t you? I’ll bet you do every one of the things you’re teaching us today, perfectly.”

I laughed. I know how much that’s not the case. I know all the areas I struggle to improve. I know also how long I had to work to build up all the little habits that allow me to do the things I was teaching her consistently. I told her this.

I’m not sure she believed me.


We don’t need to do everything perfectly to have perfectly great lives

I am far from perfect. I don’t think we need to do things perfectly to get great results, at least in most areas of life. I drink a lot of coffee. I average about 4-5 cups a day. Sometimes my hands shake as a result. An interesting question, though: Do I drink too much coffee? This question leads me to the topic for this next post: not doing things perfectly is OK.

We just can’t do everything perfectly. There simply isn’t the time and resources to do so. There isn’t really a need to do so. Also, trying to do one thing optimized may interfere with optimizing another area of our life.

Speaking of coffee drinking, one thing I’ve decided not to do perfectly is diet and exercise. I want to do well in this area, and do that consistently. But I’ve decided after many trials to stop trying to do it perfectly. This is an area I’ve struggled my whole life, feeling the burden of all the “shoulds.” I should eat so many leafy greens a day, should eat more fruit, and should eat less refined sugar.


Diet and exercise can feel like an area that needs to be perfect

This area, diet and exercise, has been studied and written about so extensively, is reported about in the news and media so often, I think it’s easy for us all to feel inundated by the shoulds. Unfortunately, no amount of shoulds got me where I wanted to be. In fact, the more I told myself I should the less I seemed to want to persevere in creating an eating plan I could live with.

That’s the critical thing, as I mentioned in my last post on the 5% idea. We have to focus on building a system of habits we can live with. Otherwise any change we make is just a temporary set of behaviors getting pushed through by our willpower alone, and will likely depart as soon as our focus shifts or our willpower gives.

I experienced this cycle (willpower alone and then the behavior leaves) many times around diet and exercise. I decided to do something to end it, something I based on the 80/20 rule. You’ve probably heard of this rule: it postulates that in many performance areas, 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts. In other words, everything we do or strive to do, in my case around diet, is not worth the same amount. If you can’t do it all (which we usually can’t), choose the things that will give you the best return. That way you can invest less and reap more.


Eat, Drink and Be Healthy helped me take a different approach

So I did: I focused on choosing my 20% behaviors. I started by looking for new information I this area of diet and exercise, something that would enable me rather than bury me in shoulds. Getting new information can be a great way to get unstuck from a habit that’s not working for you. I finally stumbled upon the new information, the new perspective. It came to me in a program I taught a few years ago where I mentioned some things about diet and exercise during the course of my talk. A program participant spoke with me afterward and recommended I check out a book. The book is called Eat, Drink and be Healthy by Walter Willett, MD. What a wonderful book. I highly recommend it.

The author, the Dean of Nutrition at Harvard Medical school, takes an intriguing approach to health. First, he ranks all health behaviors in order of importance. In his food pyramid, the most important rules to follow are at the foundation of the pyramid. (This was perfect for me, as I wanted to know the 20% to focus on.)

Also, he bases every conclusion on the existing data and results of many tests. It’s interesting to note there’s not a lot of conclusive information in the area of diet and exercise. You’ve probably experienced this watching the news. One day, a study comes to one conclusion, and a few months later another study reverses it. He speaks about how not all published conclusions are founded. Turns out it takes a while to test most aspects of diet, many years often, and most of these studies haven’t yet put in the time.

My favorite part of the book, and why I thought you might find it useful, is that he breaks his recommendations into three categories:

• here’s what we know for sure is good/bad for you (based on extensive tests)
• here’s what we are almost sure of (still need some more tests to be sure)
• here’s what I believe but we don’t have the data to be sure yet

I love his approach. I get overwhelmed sometimes when reading about all the things I should do in order to have a good diet and be healthy. I love how he’s broken out the to-dos, making it easier to choose the most important ones for your goals.

So, based on his recommendations, I decided to follow the 80/20 rule and just focus on the most important things. The things I’ve chosen to focus on are first, exercising regularly (even more important to life length and quality of life than diet, based on the research). Second, I’m working to moderate my intake of saturated fats.

I may choose never to get to the rest of the recommendations. If I do go further, though, the next thing on my list would be to eat more whole grains. Even though I’ve chosen, at least for now, to try doing well on diet and exercise, and not going after perfection, it feels great to know I’m doing a good job on the two most important things.

Should I stop drinking coffee, or is it not a bad thing?

So back to drinking coffee. I may drink too much, but maybe not. According to Willet, coffee is pretty much an OK thing to drink, according to the data. He suggests not going over four cups a day, but he points out that much of the past research into the negative effects of coffee had a research problem: it didn’t separate coffee drinking from smoking, a related habit at the time. As a result, many of the negatives we may associate with coffee today are more a product of smoking than coffee.

Willet says a moderate amount of coffee is likely a neutral behavior: the benefits match the risks. Drinking coffee may cause kidney stones and a few other problems, but according to the data, it helps as well. Did you know that if you’re a regular coffee drinker, you are 50% less likely to commit suicide?

I’ll continue to drink my coffee. His conclusions about coffee are good news for me. Even if the data pointed to coffee being an overall negative, I might still drink as much as I do. I get psychological benefits. I enjoy drinking it. I enjoy making it, the daily ritual of grinding the beans. I enjoy the smell of it. I love the pick-me-up.

So where do you need to apply the 80/20 rule? Are there areas in your life that are full of shoulds? Might you benefit from choosing a few good behaviors, doing them consistently, and letting the rest go—at least for now? Think about it. Let me know what you decide.

Frequently Asked Questions about the 5% Idea

(This is part of a series on the 5% Idea. You may want to start with the first post.)

What are some helpful tools to support me in doing to 5% idea?

One critical tool is to track what you’re doing and your progress. I mentioned earlier how critical it is for us to measure or to estimate our past behavior when determining how much to stretch. From that we can determine a realistic future goal.

For my exercise goal, as an example, I have a spreadsheet that I use to track my goals for the week and my actuals for the week. I additionally track how I’m doing over time. If the week is under goal then I’ll need to push myself the next week to correct it. Tracking allows us to really look at our performance and see where we need to build, as well as see the growth we’re making.

Another useful tool can be reminders. Most habits take faster if we build them into other structures we’ve created. For example, if you have a calendar that you look at consistently every day, putting reminders on the days you like to get your habit done will make it more likely that you get it done.

Be careful with reminders, however. Most of us over-remind ourselves. Have you ever had (maybe you do now) Post-It Notes littered throughout your office? Pasted around your monitor border, on your desktop? If we overuse reminders it’s like they don’t even exist.

I advocate that if you’re going to put reminders around you, it’s better to put them where you’ll be at the time you really need to act—what I call the “drop dead point.” Many of us put reminders to ourselves at the point in time we think we should be doing this thing. Instead, put your reminder at the point in time you must do it in order to keep the habit on track for that week. (You can put this kind of reminder on your task list for that day, your calendar, or some other tool with days on it.)

So, if I were trying to make sure I flossed twice a week, I might put my first reminder on the second-to-last day of the week, or maybe the day before, so that I had one day to “miss.” (You definitely don’t need to be perfect to get the benefits of the 5% rule—just consistent over periods of time.) I’ve found that over time, you’ll come to need the reminders less and less as the habit builds up.

You can also hook your habit to structure that’s already in your life. My wife and I don’t have kids (yet?), so we’ll often watch TV together a couple of nights a week. I hide my floss among the magazines on the coffee table and that way the floss is always there and available to me at the commercial breaks. This is an example of a good, simple way to hook into the existing structure of things, to hook your habit into where you know you’re going to be. All these little changes make consistency more likely.

Should I celebrate my progress along the way as I work the 5% idea?

Most definitely! You should celebrate your 5% progress. Celebration is one of my favorite parts of life, but it’s also a great way to anchor habits.

There are several places I often celebrate, but invent and celebrate any time you want to. The first celebration point is often as you're starting to measure your past progress and establishing your baseline performance level. Remind yourself of the power of getting out of the rut and deciding to just start something new in this area, to get off the train of overstretch. Congratulate yourself for that.

You can celebrate the point of consistency, after you’ve gone for a period (usually three to four weeks for me) consistently at the level of your historical average. That’s probably the first time you’ve done this habit with so much consistency, so why not celebrate?

Finally you can celebrate along the way. As you make your 5% increase, do that consistently and then add the next increase, find ways to reward yourself. Talk up this habit with others so they can enjoy your results. Maybe they’ll want to work on something, too, and you’ll inspire them with your progress.

Can I stretch for more than 5% improvements?

Sure you can. As I mentioned, sometimes we need more than 5% or something terrible might happen to something we deeply value, like our health, job or marriage.

Just be careful about deciding to go above 5%. Remember, I chose 5% (the idea being small, realistic stretches) because we tend to overstretch. Five percent, when added consistently over time, is a significant increase to a lifelong habit. Yet, it’s usually small enough an incremental change that most we can figure out how to build our way to that next level of behavior—just a little bit more.

If you’re going more than 5%, keep in mind doing that might stretch other areas of the system called “you.” When you’re progressing at 5%, my belief is that these other areas get a slow stretch and have time to recover. It’s like building a muscle very slowly. Nothing gets overdone and the rest of the “body” of your habits gets stronger and you slowly accommodate the slightly new behavior. Stretch too fast and it messes with some other part of the system.

So, if you’re going to go for the 10 or 20% stretch, you’ll need to account for the strain that could cause to other parts of your system. You’ll want to examine other affected habits, time commitments, quirks, etc. about you.

For example, if you’re going to put more time into project work each week, you’ll need to look at some other commitments of your time (other priorities, time wasters, or whatever) that you’re going to consciously reduce. Or, you may have to look at how you’re going to produce more time for the stretch itself. Maybe you’re going to work slightly more each week. Or you’re going to get off some other project. But you’ll need to adjust where your time is going in order to make that larger stretch.

You’ll also need to build the new stretch into your environment. You’re going to need more reminders. You’re going to need to think about the structure you could add to support you. Do you start scheduling appointments with yourself for this habit so that you can ensure the time is available? You’ll likely need to think about support.

Many of us perform better when we’re supported by others or accountable to them. To make this larger stretch, you may want to sign up with someone else for the result. If you’re going to be exercising 20% more over the next month, you may want to buddy up with someone and support each other. Larger stretches usually require you to adjust the overall system more if you’d like to be successful. Five percent stretches usually don’t require the extra support or system changes—they stretch more slowly, so can sneak their way in.

What is the hardest part of applying the 5% idea?

I’d say the first big block for most people in applying the 5% idea is inflexibility. We often get stuck in our ways of approaching things. The “should” trap I mentioned earlier is a pretty big one and so often the idea of doing anything other than what you believe you should be doing is met with resistance.

Einstein said it best when he said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.” But remember, the great part of the Einstein quote is this: if you’ve been feeling stuck or “insane” in a certain area, just by trying something new you’ve got a pretty good chance to get some new results.

The other common block, as I mentioned, is being impatient. We expect results to happen faster than they do. We think a certain level of results (usually a large incremental jump) must happen, or we believe we couldn’t possibly get real results from our efforts. Maybe on a certain level it’s that we’re just not confident that if the results don’t happen quickly enough we’ll have enough incentive to keep up the new changes. Managing our own impatience can be hard.

I’ve found the hardest part of the 5% idea is just keeping your impatience in check. As I feel the urge to do more or get started faster, I try to remind myself it’s not about what I do this month, or even this year. With maintenance habits, it’s really more about where I am five years or ten years from now in this area. Another thing I’ve found helps with the impatience is trying the 5% idea on several small habits simultaneously. That way you can feel the cumulative effect of tracking and starting to move on several small things. This usually feels like more of a benefit immediately, which is I think what our brain craves—we want the shorter term gratification!

What if I’m inconsistent as I get things started? What if I have periods of up and down?

I have had these periods every time I’ve used the 5% idea, and it still works for me. I remind myself the idea isn’t to eliminate inconsistency around my habits--it’s just to reduce it to smaller intervals. So rather than: I exercise for a month, then I don’t for a month, then I do, then I don’t, I try to be more consistent each week, even if each day isn’t perfect.

I work out regularly now and have for a couple of years. But by saying I work out regularly, I don’t mean I work out exactly the same amount each week. I do have a goal for the week, though, and when I miss it, I try to catch it up as fast as I can. I’m inconsistent, but I guess I’ve developed, through the 5% idea, the habits and the mental muscle to keep small inconsistencies around exercise from building to larger ones.

Building maintenance habits is more about building your internal confidence than anything. Your success in the habit is more a product of: overall do you feel confident that you are getting consistent? When you start to feel that way, you see that this week in the habit area may be slightly different from last week, but it’s not wildly different from last week. You’re no longer pitching between working out like a madman (or woman) and not working out at all.

The key part of building a habit is to watch for the wild swings, and learn to taper them. One behavior I highly recommend is to check in weekly with the habit, to learn from your performance. Each week, I look at my performance and say, “How can I make this even more consistent next week? What small corrections can I make?”

As an example, when I find that I haven’t been exercising consistently and I ask myself why, it may be that I’ve been traveling and the travel is interfering with the exercise. OK, good, so I ask myself, how I can improve that inconsistency by just a little bit the next time I travel? The answer might be I’m going to start looking a couple weeks ahead each month at my travel schedule and plan when I’m going to exercise. It may be that I’ll work out more in weeks when I’m not traveling as a way to keep my exercise consistent. Or I might think about the usual travel exercise obstacles and think of one change I’ll make that will shrink one obstacle.

In my next post I will talk about how I handle my diet, an area where I’ve chosen not to be perfect, where I’ve chosen to be just good and do that consistently.