This week, our Ask Remabulous column is covering a topic that comes up eventually with almost every single one of my clients: working methods. It is amazing to me how harshly we judge ourselves and the way we work, even when we are getting a lot done. I am so grateful for the following letter, since I get the opportunity to encourage each one of us to breathe a big sigh of relief about how we each get things done.
"Dear Ask Remabulous,
I am having a very strange problem with my working process...
I have these methods of doing things that seem to work well for me, but I feel like there should be a better way to do them. Like lately, I am doing a lot of work late at night and getting tons done, but I can't help but wonder if I should be getting up early and working then instead?
Working for myself, I am having a hard time really embracing making my own schedule and seem to keep trying to cram myself into the old 9 to 5 model I was in before. Is it ok if I go totally off the grid with my time management and try really strange hours, or should I be trying to get something standard in place? Help!
Time Traveler"
Dear Time Traveler,
Thank you for bringing this up. We entrepreneurs and business owners sure have a guilt complex about how we use time, don't we? Here's what I suggest to make this work issue an asset for you...
image: Evil Erin.
This is one of the biggest challenges I see with entrepreneurs, especially those who work from home: embracing the best working method for them.
We often know what our best and most productive work hours are. How do we know them? Because we're working really productively during this time. Start a time management notebook, or mark out a few pages for this purpose in your business journal. Start noting down when you sat down and got a ton of work done with very little effort. Keep track over a few weeks.
When you feel like you have about a page or so of good notes on when you've been working, review it. Look for patterns. If you always get a lot done right when you get up, that is your power time. If it happens late at night, in the afternoon, whenever. But notice when you get those most done effortlessly and without distraction and try to schedule difficult tasks during those hours as much as you possibly can.
Seem easy? Well it is except for one thing... we have lots of judgment about when these times turn out to be. I myself have lately been like you- getting lots done late at night. It's hot during the day in the summer here, and the phone is always ringing. So in the summer, nighttime is great.
But what happens when we think about working this way? When we think about sleeping in a little later so we can stay up further during our really productive time? Alarm bells! We have been trained throughout our lives to follow the 9 to 5 schedule. We followed it, often starting even earlier, all the way through school, breaking only in college. Funny how it is accepted and normal for college students to sleep in and work at weird hours, but not for anyone else.
i know I got a ton of good work done in college, and I was incredibly relaxed most of the time while doing so. As entrepreneurs, most of us chose to leave the structure of a day job in order to make our own schedules, yet it continually shocks me how few of us actually allow ourselves to do it.
What if, after doing the experiment above, you scheduled the majority of your working hours when you were most productive and scheduled your off time during your least productive time. How might this change your schedule? Would you sleep in? See afternoon matinees and have early dinners with friends before going back to work? Get up really early and work until mid afternoon and quit then?
Try this as a test for a week and then assess how your productivity was. If you get much more done with this new system, then you have achieved your goal: better work in less time with less stress. If your critical self pops up, simply point out that you are maximizing your productivity, and make sure you keep a list of everything you accomplish each week. As you see it getting longer, your critical self can have fewer and fewer objections to this new system.
So many of us want our work process to look pretty and to make sense to other people- I think of it as the equivalent of looking like a closet in Real Simple magazine. But in reality, there are many ways to work and many ways to organize a closet. No harm in being inspired by an external example, just as long as we make the method fit our own lives and business.
Hope this helps... let us know how you progress!
xoxo,
Caroline
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