Voice-recognition software: VR software transcribes dictated text into the PC, and qualifies as a Cool Time tool on two fronts. First, it is a superb replacement for typing. If your keyboarding skills are less than fluid, much time can be wasted while your fingers struggle to keep up with your thoughts. VR, however, receives and processes text at the speed of standard speech, allowing a document to be created and edited much more quickly and efficiently.

VR offers a second time management advantage through its ergonomics. By removing the need for a keyboard, the body and mind become free to move and relax. You can “write” while pacing the floor, looking up at the ceiling, gazing out through the window, or even riding an exercise bike. Your arms and shoulders need no longer be locked in the keyboard position. Your spine and muscles are free to move and stretch. Similarly, the conscious and subconscious areas of your mind are released from overconcentration, and your eyes no longer need to stare incessantly at the screen. This reduces fatigue, muscle stiffness, and the risk of longer-term repetitive stress injuries. Even if you are a swift typist, voice recognition encourages a unique creative freedom for any type of writing by liberating the rest of the body.

VR does require an initial investment of an hour or so to build a preliminary voice file, during which the software gets used to the particular timber and pace of your speech, as well as the desired volume. (A quiet dictation style, spoken into a headset mike, allows VR to be used even when working in close proximity to other people.) But this investment, like so many other Cool Time techniques, pays off quickly through increased productivity, efficiency, and satisfaction. In this case, the software continues to learn, taking note of your speech patterns and building a more personalized, accurate profile as you work. Basically, the more you use it, the better it becomes and, in turn, the better you become.

And it’s not just for writing novels. For example, it becomes quite a pleasure to dictate three, four, or more e-mail responses into a single temporary VR document, using the mouse only at the end to cut and paste the respective messages into separate e-mail letters.²⁰

THE PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSISTANT (PDA)

The PDA is mentioned earlier as an option for maintaining a calendar and contact management. It also offers a great deal more, since its processing power and ruggedness allow the use of mainstream applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel, not to mention phone and e-mail in some cases.

This means that productivity can be achieved away from the normal workplace. A coffee shop often provides an excellent getaway to get focused keystone work done with no drop-in visitors. It means that e-mails can be read and dealt with without having to drive back to the office, and even train or plane delays cannot get in the way of productivity. (Of course, such ubiquitous access to work has a dark side in terms of addiction and workaholism, which we’ll cover in Chapter 15.)

CHECKLISTS

Have you ever found yourself traveling to an appointment or to the office when you suddenly realize you’ve left something behind? Or you think to yourself, “Did I remember to lock the door?” Or just as you’re handing a product to a client or a large document to the copy shop clerk, you’re not quite sure if that crucial section was included in time? Immediately the bottom drops out of your world and your mind and body go into urgency mode as you work to figure out how best to resolve a situation that has moved beyond your control. As you try to plan your next course of action, your stress level rises, and as this happens the very parts of your mind best suited for resolving this crisis get pushed aside.

Although our day-in and day-out activities become habitual after a while, it’s easy to become distracted just long enough to let one item fall through the net. Similarly, repetition begets drudgery. Our natural tendency toward rhythm increases the odds that a critical item will be overlooked, or that you will see what you expect to see, not what is actually there.

You can turn this weakness into a strength by using checklists for anything that has a series of steps—for packing, traveling, preparing for a meeting, scheduling a project—anything in which a predictable or required sequence can be planned for and then activated.

• Checklists help ensure that everything necessary for successful project completion is accounted for.

• Checklists eliminate the need to rely on short-term and long-term memory whose talents, as we have seen, lie in things other than photographic recall of lists.

• By freeing short-term memory from the drudgery of a set sequence, mental energy is given over to more creative, strategic, profitable tasks.

• Checklists ensure consistency of action and quality.

• Consistency opens the door to delegation by turning expertise into modular, transferable components. Once a task is delegated, our own energies and expertise can be applied concurrently to a more profitable or valuable task.

• Checklists help eliminate the stress or guilt that happens when something crucial is forgotten.

• They can be edited and refined after each event as part of the process of continual improvement, making them even more useful as time goes by.

Think about all the situations in which a checklist could benefit you:

• When you leave for work in the morning, how many items (car keys, sunglasses, cellphone, etc.) do you need to have with you—items that can be easily forgotten? How many times have you had to run around looking for the car keys or your sunglasses because they’re nowhere to be found?

• Also, when leaving for work in the morning, how many things about your outward appearance need to be checked, such as hair, clothing, zippers, jewelry, etc.—things that could be easily overlooked if you are in a hurry?

• At work, whether you’re visiting a new client, going for an interview, giving a presentation, or meeting someone for lunch, there are numerous questions that need to be answered to ensure that you arrive in Cool Time, such as:

• What is the destination address?

• What is the nearest cross street?

• Is parking available? If so, where?

• What is the contact’s name?

• What is the contact’s phone number?

• Is there an alternate contact?

• What is the alternate’s phone number?

• Are there prior security or access arrangements to be made?

• Have I called to confirm the appointment two days prior?

• How can the contact reach me if there is an emergency or change of plan?

• Have I packed everything I need to take?

And what about school-age kids? How much easier would it be to get everyone to the school bus if they had all they needed?

It’s worth investing the time to create checklists, and to always have them nearby. They play a major part in establishing positive image and great rapport by ensuring that your creative mind is assigned to creative things, not procedural ones.

This is part of the reason for the I-Beam Base—to ask yourself “What happened today that I could improve upon? Is there a sequence that I could factor in, together with a project plan, to ensure that I arrive on time and totally together?”

CHARISMA—THE ESSENCE OF COOL

Think for a moment of a famous person you admire—maybe a leader like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela, perhaps a performer or a business leader. If you ask yourself to identify what you admire about this person, your answers might include looks, mannerisms, sense of self, confidence, vision, or credibility. It can usually come down to one word: charisma. Celebrities make it their business to always appear in control, living on a plane of achievement far above the ordinary person. It’s an ideal, the end result of money, power, and influence. However, it’s not exclusive to them. Cool Time techniques such as project planning and, yes, even the humble checklist, help to restore control and vision into the lives of anyone who chooses to adopt them. It’s a way to achieve the type of charisma that our heroes have.

RECORD EVERYTHING

The human mind is a remarkable instrument with a phenomenal capacity for long-term memory and creative thought. But often the smaller, temporary items, those that exist solely in short-term memory, do not get the chance to stick. It has been proven that short-term memory can manage a maximum of about seven items at a time. Therefore, if you have more than seven tasks to perform today, or seven items to buy at a store, you will most likely forget a few unless you write them down.

The strongest memory is weaker than the palest ink, so make notes. This is an expression with great significance. Making notes is never wrong, whether it’s during a meeting, an interview, or immediately afterwards. Whenever you find yourself trying to remember something, something that you had the opportunity to write down earlier, you lose opportunity and time.

• Voice recorders: Voice recorders are inexpensive hand-held devices. Some cellphones and PDAs have voice recording built in, and pretty much everyone has voicemail or a telephone answering machine. Thus, wherever you are in the world, you have access to a quick note-taking, fact-grabbing tool to capture your thoughts, ideas, and lists and hold them until you’re ready for them.

• A phone log: A phone log stores the details of each of your phone calls. Just a simple document in Microsoft Word or WordPerfect will do, in which each entry includes the caller, date, and time of day. Not only does this help keep track of the large number of calls you handle, if you wish to review every time that Mary Jones called you or was called by you, a simple Find search from the Edit menu will locate your entire chronological relationship with her.

• A project log: Similar to a phone log, a project log focuses on a single project or client. And the extra work is minimal—you simply copy and paste all of the phone log entries pertaining to the people involved in the project into your project log, along with notes on meetings, activities, and developments, so that they’re together in one file ready for review.

• Leveraging your creativity: Every day, people come up with brilliant thoughts and ideas that would pay off in marvelous ways for them. And all too often these thoughts disappear on the breeze because their short-term memories are already too full.

How beneficial it would be, then, to note down new activities and thoughts the moment you think of them—into a PDA, a voice recorder, or onto a piece of paper—to create opportunity for new thoughts and ideas to arrive.

THE KNOWLEDGE BASE

In addition to remembering names and events, we are expected to retain and use all the knowledge we acquire throughout our lives. Some professions require continuing education to be part of the job, and every year millions of people take courses or training sessions to further their knowledge and expertise. There are also books and e-mail newsletters to read, and TV shows to watch. The problem is, there’s so much information out there that it’s easy to forget much of what is taught. It’s the old 80/20 rule again. Twenty percent of what you take in will be retained as knowledge and remain accessible. The rest lurks around there somewhere, but removes itself from the grasp of short-term memory to the point that it becomes useless. But remember, the Cool Time philosophy is about using your time for maximum effectiveness, allowing nothing to fall into the cracks—not names, not events, and especially not knowledge—and the Cool Time sixty-second work space is about being able to recall all that in under a minute. That is why you need to create a knowledge base.

A knowledge base is your personal collection of facts and points, garnered from all the books, newsletters, articles, and digests that cross your path, all of it categorized and quickly accessible. Usually in any publication or essay there are just a couple of “aha moments,” those unique points around which the article is based, and these are what go into your knowledge base.

The most useful format for a knowledge base is a single document in Microsoft Word or WordPerfect, an e-document. Since e-documents can run into the hundreds of pages, there’s plenty of room for it to grow with you. Your knowledge base can have as many pages in it as necessary, each focusing on a different area of knowledge. Then, as you see a key point in an article, you can open up your knowledge base and enter the quote and its source onto the appropriate page.²¹

• By assigning a “bookmark” to each page/chapter head within the knowledge base, you can create a hyperlinked table of contents on the first page, so that if you wish to paste a new quote into your chapter on “Leadership,” you simply click on “Leadership” within the table of contents and it takes you directly there.

• If the quote you include has further details accessible at a website, or you wish to include the e-mail address of the author, both of these can be entered as part of the article to allow instant access to further useful information.

• Your knowledge base can travel with you on a PDA, a CD, or a floppy disk, so that you’re never far from its rich collection of knowledge.

• A knowledge base is best updated during the I-Beam Base period at the end of the day. Remember, this is a time set aside for continual improvement, which is what the knowledge base offers. As your day proceeds, set aside any articles of interest, highlight the best parts, copy and paste text from on-line articles and e-mails along with their URLs, and leave them all for processing at the end of the day.

• The best way to capitalize on the knowledge base would be to review one page or one chapter a day, every day, perhaps even setting up a daily reminder in your daytimer or PIM to make sure you do it.

People often respond to the knowledge base concept by saying, “I haven’t got the time or discipline to set that up, maintain it, and read it.” Well, if something is important enough to you, you will find the time. In this case, think about its value. Knowledge is power. Every fact, concept, or memory that escapes you is opportunity lost. Every fact that can be quickly retained and used is another arrow in your quiver. A versatile knowledge base is a formidable ally.