Everyone has a daily routine, more or less. I maintain a highly regimented schedule in order to save energy for thinking and free up time for family. Though you may prefer a more flexible schedule, this chapter will suggest three general strategies to make your daily routine as productive as possible:
• Use your daily calendar proactively to manage your time and set your Targets.
• Follow standard routines to minimize the mundane aspects of life so you can concentrate on what’s most important to you.
• Get eight hours of sleep each night and exercise regularly so you stay alert and sharp.
In chapter 1, “Set and Prioritize Your Goals,” I helped you create a to-do list that reflects your most important Objectives and Targets. But how can you make sure that you are accomplishing these highest goals every day? The key is to create a daily calendar that drives home your most critical Targets. That’s why I use a two-column calendar. Take a look at the example below; on the left are my meetings, conference calls, and other appointments that are scheduled for specific times. Also on the left-hand side (at the bottom) are some other Targets that I would like to get done today, at some point.
Many people fill in only the left-hand side when they compose their calendar. They collect all of their daily obligations and assigned tasks and consider their calendar complete. But that is only half the battle.
The right-hand side is where I finish the job. Here, I write notes about each item on the left side—what I want to achieve during each of my appointments and the importance of each unscheduled Target on the bottom of the page. This ensures that I am achieving my Targets through every meeting or phone call and that I am not wasting a lot of time on low-priority tasks.
I have seen many creative solutions for daily calendars; they all work effectively so long as they satisfy two conditions. First, your calendar must record all of your daily commitments in one place in a way that you can easily see the purpose of each appointment and the importance of each assigned task. Second, the calendar must be mobile: you must be able to carry—or have electronic access to—your calendar during the whole day, so you can easily add new items or revise your existing schedule.
Personally, I type the left-hand side of my calendar on Microsoft Outlook, then print out the pages and write the right-hand side in longhand. That way I can easily revise my goals throughout the day using a pen, instead of tapping on my BlackBerry’s keyboard. Other people manage their calendar exclusively on their computer or smartphone, through Outlook or products such as Google Calendar. It doesn’t matter—do whichever works best for you.
The Left-Hand Side: Meetings, Phone Calls, and Other Assignments
Take a look at my schedule for the day. Note that I have not filled up every hour—there are several blocks of “free time” in my schedule. Of course, I’ll use some of that time to complete the two Targets at the bottom of the page, but I’ll still end up with a good amount of unscheduled time throughout the day. Those gaps are crucial to a successful schedule: they give you time to make calls, write notes, or even think!
Many executives line up meetings and conference calls for every hour of the day. That is a big mistake—you need time to digest what has happened and develop strategies for the future. Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, put it succinctly: “Part of the key to time management is carving out time to think as opposed to constantly reacting.”1
Google, the Internet giant, provides a great example of the benefits of unscheduled time. Through a policy called “Innovation Time Off,” it allows its employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever they want, even if it is unrelated to their current assignments. By fiddling around with their burning curiosities during their “free time,” Google’s engineers often figure out an idea for a new product—such as Google News and Gmail, both of which were dreamed up during their 20 percent time off.2
Google’s experience with employees’ free time matches my own experience. Some of my best ideas have come during unscheduled times when I am reading an article or calling a friend. For instance, when we were struggling with how to design the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, I decided to phone a former tax partner of mine at a Washington, D.C., law firm and casually mentioned the difficulties that we were having. He suggested that I look at a recent IRS letter ruling, which offered an imaginative solution to my design problem.
I find that periods of free time should each be at least thirty minutes long to allow adequate time for thinking. You should try to schedule these gaps at least twice a day. Their timing should depend on when you typically have your most fertile mental periods. Some executives are particularly creative in the early morning; others usually get their inspiration in the evenings.
Intentional gaps in your schedule also allow you more flexibility to deal with new opportunities or problems as they arise during the day. For example, suppose a local radio station asks me at 7:45 a.m. for a short comment about a current event. That can be squeezed into my schedule at 11:30 or 11:45 a.m. with minimal disruption to the rest of my schedule.
Or suppose that Sally Smith, the chief technology officer (CTO) candidate I’m recruiting, has called to say that she is stuck in traffic and will be thirty minutes late to lunch. If you give yourself some margin of error in your schedule, you can deal with the host of unforeseen situations that inevitably occur without wiping out your whole schedule.
There is a real danger, however, that “free” times can quietly be filled by assistants or coordinators. So it is crucial to make clear that this empty part of your schedule is as important as any other meeting or phone call. As the great Danish composer Carl Nielsen said about his music, “The rests … are just as important as the notes. Often, they are far more expressive and appealing to the imagination.”3
The Right-Hand Side: Focusing on My Highest Targets
The left-hand side of the calendar is a fairly straightforward list of tasks to complete today; the real action is in the column on the right-hand side, which contains my handwritten notes about each event or obligation.
Next to a meeting or phone call, I write down my purpose for the event—what I want to get out of it. This ensures that I am focused on the purpose of each meeting or call while I am engaged in them. At the end of each appointment, I cross out the tasks I have accomplished and add “to dos” to my calendars for future dates, if necessary. That way I don’t lose track of significant issues or projects.
Let’s go back through my daily schedule to examine my notes in the right-hand column of my calendar.
• The weekly meeting of my senior staff at 8:30 a.m. will serve its usual functions, such as letting senior staff briefly share new information that needs to be discussed by the group. But I want to remind myself of my key Target for this meeting: discussing the deficiencies in the existing compensation system and building a consensus on what needs to change.
• During the global videoconference at 9:30 a.m., each region will report, as usual, on any activities requiring global coordination. But again I want to direct my attention to an additional Target: to expand the regional metrics to include rough estimates of lost revenues when quality problems temporarily close a plant or delay a product launch.
• Riding a stationary bike is a simple way to get in a quick workout (more on that in a bit). Other people like swimming or squash or running outside. It all depends on what you prefer and what equipment is readily available. If I were a serious athlete, I could use this space to write a specific goal I have for that workout (e.g., a running pace or a target heart rate). But I’m just trying to burn a few calories and work up a sweat, so I don’t need to write anything down here.
• At the noontime lunch, I am trying to recruit an outstanding candidate to fill the vacant CTO position. Although she has been interviewed by my direct reports and the head of Human Resources, I know that my personal touch is needed to land such a talented person. Closing on senior appointments is one of the key functions that a senior executive—and only that executive—can perform (see chapter 10, “Managing Your Team”).
• I want to remember that the 2 p.m. phone call with the Washington lobbyists is not just for updates. The House Ways and Means Committee is considering a technical provision that would impose a special tax on our industry. Collectively, we need to decide whether I should personally speak to the committee chair or whether that should be left to staff-to-staff negotiations.
• The review of a new product from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. is partly a way to recognize the efforts of the development team. But I also want to make sure to ask the team whether they think the company should reevaluate how it uses social media to promote new products.
• The 5:30 p.m. meeting with a newspaper reporter involves a set of public relations issues where I as the CEO have to take the lead. There have been press allegations that an employee in one of our units has siphoned money out of a company account. Having read our internal analysis of these allegations, I have decided to announce decisive actions to strengthen the company’s internal controls.
• As to the 7 p.m. dinner at home, I have reminders about events significant to members of my family—for example, the first practice of my daughter’s field hockey team and my son’s midterm exam in history.
• I’d like to call Patty at some point today to ask whether the board should discuss putting forward a new candidate for director at the next meeting. I really need to get this done soon—if it’s being discussed, the board staff will need to write a fairly detailed memo due in a few days. So I write “high-priority” on the right-hand side.
• By contrast, there’s no huge rush for me to finalize a topic for my next speech. It would be great to get it done today, but tomorrow will work just as well. So I write “low-priority” on the right-hand side.
After dinner, I will talk about the day with my wife and catch up on some reading. I will review my daily calendar—crossing out all the Targets that I have accomplished and moving others to future dates. I will also add notes to my appointments on tomorrow’s calendar. In that manner, I try to keep focused on my key Targets, revise my schedule in light of recent experience, and avoid letting important items fall through the cracks. Once you get into the habit, as I have, such a schedule review should take no more than fifteen to twenty minutes each day.
As an exercise, create a daily calendar for your next workweek. For each day, take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left-hand side, list your phone calls, meetings, and other scheduled events, as well as all your unscheduled tasks that still need to get done. On the right-hand side, write down your purpose for each appointment—how each meeting or phone call will further your Targets. Then approach your meetings and phone calls over the next week with those purposes in mind. Also write down the level of importance for each of your unscheduled Targets. Then determine how much time you’re really spending on your high-priority—and low-priority—unscheduled tasks.
Try to keep as much of your daily routine as simple and automatic as possible. That allows you to spend more time on your work, family, and friends, and it helps you avoid fatigue. Over the past twenty years, various researchers have shown that making conscious decisions (“Which shirt do I want to wear?”) as well as engaging in self-control (“I’d better eat the carrots instead of the cookies!”) tire out your brain, much as a muscle fatigues from exercise.4
I like to keep my morning routine as simple as possible. Every day I wake up at 7:15 a.m. and leave the house between 7:50 and 7:55 a.m. During those thirty-five to forty minutes, I shower, dress, eat breakfast, and read a few newspapers. How? By preparing the night before and staying with the same routine. In the morning, I am very boring and proud of it.
Before I go to bed, I lay out my clothes for the next day. This is quite simple because I own five summer and five winter suits, all of which are gray or blue. I have shirts and ties that go with each suit (according to my wife). I also have two pairs of dark shoes to alternate. For me, dressing is a mechanical routine with little to think about.
I get dressed after shaving, showering, and brushing my teeth. Then I eat the same breakfast every day: a banana and a bowl of cold cereal with skim milk. The cereal is always Cheerios or Life—no complex choices. I started eating bananas at breakfast after a pro tennis player, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, stayed at our home during a Boston tournament. He ate a dozen bananas each day to keep his tennis muscles from cramping up. I hoped that eating bananas would improve my tennis game, but that has not actually happened.
For some people, my morning routine sounds incredibly unappealing or impossible, and that’s fine! Indeed, professionals in certain industries, such as advertising or media, may devote more attention to dressing in style to be successful. Professionals who take care of younger children or older relatives may not be able to follow such a rigid routine in the morning. Others may simply enjoy having a greater variety of breakfast foods. I’m not suggesting that you need to follow my rigid routine to the letter; the point is for you to decide what you consider mundane in your own life and keep it as simple as possible.
Regardless of your menu preferences, having a healthy breakfast is important for your productivity. Several researchers have done experiments randomly dividing subjects into two main groups: those who are given breakfast and those who are made to fast. The results have been clear: skipping breakfast significantly diminishes cognitive performance.5
My recommendation about lunch is similar: keep it simple and routine. I don’t eat lunch at restaurants unless I have a specific reason—for example, recruiting a new employee or networking with colleagues. Instead, I usually eat a simple lunch in my office—typically a chicken salad sandwich on whole wheat bread with a diet soda.
If I am eating lunch with a fellow employee, I offer him or her a sandwich or salad. Even when I have a lunch meeting with one or two outside visitors, they often prefer a simple sandwich or salad in my office because it is private, quiet, and quick—and they often are trying to keep their own weight down. Again, if this lack of culinary variety offends your nature, introduce more menu choices and think of other mundane aspects in your life that can be simplified.
Soon after lunch, I always try to take a thirty-minute nap. That’s enough to make me feel refreshed and more alert for the rest of the day. Without my nap, I get tired and less productive by late afternoon. Friends of mine like to nap later in the afternoon. The exact timing doesn’t matter; take a short nap whenever is best for you.
During the day, two biological forces fight each other. The “homeostatic propensity for sleep” encourages you to doze off based on how long you have been awake. Opposing that propensity is the circadian rhythm, which tries to keep you awake during daylight hours. However, the circadian push for wakefulness does not fully kick in until the late afternoon. Until then, your body naturally descends into a lethargic state of low energy.6
There have been many studies, with randomized controlled trials, on the efficacy of napping. Their conclusions are remarkably consistent: napping significantly increases alertness and productivity on a variety of measures. According to those studies, the first ten to twenty minutes of a nap are the most beneficial, suggesting that even very short naps can help you maintain energy into the afternoon.7
Some people claim that they just can’t take a nap. Here’s my secret formula: close your office door or find a quiet place, shut off your cell phone, take off your shoes, put your feet up on a desk or a chair, and cover your eyes with a blindfold. This formula is designed to create a feeling of being suspended in a sheltered cocoon—which helps me doze off.
Other people say that they are afraid to take an afternoon nap because they fear that they will sleep for several hours. This is an easily solved problem—set the alarm on your phone (or alarm clock) to ring thirty minutes into your nap. After a few weeks of these alarms, you will automatically start to wake up just before the alarm rings.
Unfortunately, many employees don’t think they can take a short nap without attracting the ire of their superiors. But enlightened managers should allow short naps so that their workers will be more alert later in the day. In a poll, 40 percent of workers said that they would take a nap if they were allowed to do so and a space were set aside where they could doze off.8 Letting subordinates nap would both endear the boss to the employees and increase their productivity in the late afternoon.
A long commute can be a challenge at the end of the day. Currently, the average U.S. commute is roughly twenty-five minutes each way,9 though the commute is longer for those who live in the suburbs and work in the city. A long commute is a perfect time to ruminate on new ideas or mentally review what you got done during the day. If you drive yourself to work, that’s about all you can accomplish safely. For those of you who ride mass transit or carpool to work, you have a few more options: you can read, make phone calls in an appropriate place, or send emails on a smartphone.
As a regular habit, I leave work in time to get home by 7 p.m. and have dinner with my family. These dinners have greatly enhanced my family life. Before our children left for college, my wife and I enjoyed chatting with our children at dinner, reviewing their day’s activities or discussing current events. And I believe that our family was much stronger for those dinners—even when our children inevitably replied that “nothing” had happened in school that day.
Try to go home for dinner nearly every day at a consistent, reasonable time. It is simply too easy to stay late at the office night after night to complete a few tasks, even though there is no real crisis. Over time those extra hours at work will really wear you down and irritate your family. If you need to finish work in the evening, you can do so after spending quality time with your spouse and children.
Luckily for me, my wife was able to provide me with extensive support throughout my career. She was also the primary caregiver for our children. Although men are taking on a greater role in household chores,10 many women share Liz’s experience: even today, women generally shoulder more child-rearing and household management responsibilities than their husbands.11 I’m the first to admit that dual-career couples face a much tougher road than I did. It would be impossible for me to try to address the challenge of work-life conflict in just a few words. So for help managing the tension between the requirements of your work life and the demands of your life at home, turn to chapter 14, “Balancing Home and Work.”
A very important part of my daily routine involves getting enough sleep and exercise, both of which are easy to brush aside when work gets busy. But skimping on either of these key activities will seriously harm your productivity. In effect, sleep and exercise are investments of time that pay returns in the form of improved health and higher productivity throughout the day.
Get Enough Sleep
I’ve met a number of executives who claim that they can operate well on four or five hours of sleep a night. But I’ve noticed those same executives closing their eyes at afternoon meetings or losing the line of argument in debates. In my observation, it is a very rare person who maximizes his or her productivity by skimping on sleep. The vast majority of people need close to eight hours of sleep a night to do their best work.
My personal observations are confirmed by several types of scientific studies. For instance, one study led by Professor Hans Van Dongen at the University of Pennsylvania restricted subjects’ sleep to six hours per night for several nights.12 He and his colleagues found that those whose sleep had been restricted performed much worse on three tests of performance, relative to a control group that was allowed to sleep eight hours each night.13 Furthermore, the gap between this “full-sleep” group and the restricted-sleep group grew larger every night.
Of particular interest, the “restricted sleepers” thought that they were adapting to cumulative sleep deprivation, yet their performance was actually suffering. Several times a day, researchers asked the subjects to rate their sleepiness using a well-known metric called the Stanford Sleepiness Scale. According to their self-assessments, their performance declined a little bit on the first day but then stabilized. However, their actual performance declined and did not stabilize; instead, their performance decreased quickly and continued to worsen after each night of restricted sleep.14 This conclusion strongly suggests that most executives who swear “I need only five hours of sleep” are deluding themselves. Though they may think that their bodies have adapted to less sleep, they will probably be dragging their feet by the end of the week.
Some studies have used games to show that missing one night’s sleep has a significant adverse effect on innovative decision making. One game provided players with new information and required them to make “business decisions” taking that new information into account. As the game progressed, the players received more complex information and faced decisions that required more flexible thinking. Those who missed a night of sleep did a much worse job of adapting their business strategies than the control group did; the sleep-deprived stuck to their existing strategies despite learning new information. At the end of the game, most of the players who had missed a night of sleep went “bankrupt,” while the control group managed to stay profitable.15
A second game involved a gambling scenario in which subjects drew a card from one of four different decks of playing cards. Each deck had a unique distribution of risks and rewards: some held out the potential for high payoffs with low chances of success, while others offered relatively low risks and low rewards. Players who were sleep-deprived were more likely to choose a card from the riskier decks, even after they were shown to be profit losers.16
All these studies point to the same conclusion: try to get around eight hours sleep each night. How can you make that happen on a regular basis? Try to sleep during the same hours each night (e.g., 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.); this routine will help you develop a sleep rhythm. Don’t have dinner after 8 p.m., or you may have digestive problems when you get into bed for the night. Install effective window coverings to keep your bedroom very dark. Take extra care to eliminate blue light coming from cell phones, clocks, and so forth, as blue light is especially disruptive to the hormones that make you feel sleepy. Last, keep a pad of paper on the nightstand next to your bed. I sometimes cannot fall asleep until I have cleared my mind by jotting down reminders of things to do or ideas to explore.
Even if you follow all these strategies, there will be nights when you get little sleep—because of work, family, sickness, or simple insomnia. After a poor night of sleep, do your best to recover as soon as possible by taking long naps or sleeping more than eight hours the next night. However, a single full night of sleep is usually not enough to completely recover.17
Exercise Regularly
Like a good night’s sleep, physical exercise is essential to your personal productivity. Many studies find that regular exercise improves productivity as well as health. For instance, one study found that midday exercise enhanced the mood and efficiency of employees and also reduced their health care costs through fewer sick days and lower medical expenses.18 These benefits only require a modest amount of low-intensity daily exercise.19
Researchers from the London School of Economics used a cutting-edge experiment to offer new evidence that exercise makes people happy. In that experiment, volunteers downloaded an app to their smartphone. At least once a day, their phone would beep, and they would report their level of happiness along with whom they were with and what they were doing. After aggregating the data, the researchers were able to determine when the volunteers were happiest—what times of day, in what activities, and with which people. Exercise ranked number two on the list of happiness-inducing activities—just behind sex.20
Your employer can encourage daily workout regimes by offering access to gym facilities and allowing employees to exercise during the day. Ultimately, however, it is up to you to make time for a regular workout. So figure out what type of exercise appeals to you—say, running, swimming, or Pilates. And choose a time of day that makes sense for you, such as early in the morning, around lunchtime, or after work. Being busy or lacking equipment is no excuse for missing exercise: a friend of mine blocks off forty-five minutes in the middle of the day to walk up and down the stairs of our office building. However, if you follow this particular workout regimen, lobby for the installation of showers. Or at the very least do your coworkers a favor by buying and using an air freshener.
Some take a different approach to exercise: they go out and purchase a fancy piece of home equipment or an expensive gym membership. Though such purchases do work for some people, they will not magically lead to an exercise regime. In many homes, unused stationary bikes and NordicTracks stand as proud monuments to lofty goals long ago set aside. Regardless of your equipment, exercising on a regular basis requires great discipline that you must teach yourself.
One helpful approach is to get support for regular exercise from other people: for instance, a running group, a yoga class, or a personal coach. Such support puts peer pressure on you and makes exercise more fun.21 That is why I am so enthusiastic about playing in a regular game of doubles tennis. It provides a both vigorous exercise and warm camaraderie, though it is hard to organize more than twice a week.
1. Use a daily calendar with notes on your Targets to remind you of the purpose of every appointment.
2. Do not schedule every hour in the day; you need time to react to the unexpected and to think strategically.
3. Prepare for the next day every night: review your schedule and lay out your wardrobe.
4. Maintain a simple and repetitious routine for mundane daily tasks.
5. Take a short nap in the afternoon to raise your effectiveness later in the day.
6. Have dinner regularly with your family, unless you are traveling or facing a crisis.
7. Get eight hours of sleep each night on a regular basis.
8. Recover from a poor night’s sleep by sleeping longer than eight hours the next night.
9. Exercise regularly, preferably doing a modest amount of exercise nearly every day.
10. Find a group of people, such as those on a sports team or in a workout class, that can offer support for your exercise routine.