CHAPTER 13

COOL TIME: PERFECTION THROUGH PRECISION

TRAVELING IN COOL TIME

Traveling in Cool Time means that as you head to an appointment, you do so at a normal pace. Having allowed yourself sufficient and realistic travel time, you walk comfortably and drive more safely. It allows you to enjoy a few moments of mental rest between appointments, to move at a pace that guarantees punctuality, yet that also allows your mind the time and opportunity to focus on the upcoming activity and shape its outcome.

Cool Time allows you to stay physically cool, since frustration can be a powerful internal source of heat. A physically cool self means neat, clean clothes. It means a confident, dry handshake, clear eye contact, and a friendly face. Cool Time allows you time to control your appearance.

Wherever you travel and whomever you meet, your arrival sets the tone permanently for the relationship in the future. If you are meeting someone for the first time, you will have just that one chance to make a first impression. Traveling in Cool Time means adding a few minutes to your schedule to ensure that you present the best possible image to your audience. In can make all the difference in the world.

A Cool-Time Example

Suppose you have a meeting scheduled for 2:00P.M. In Cool Time, you focus on arriving at 1:50. When people make plans with the actual meeting time as their goal, they increase greatly the chances of being late because they aim too close. As the expression goes, “If you plan to be on time, you plan to be late.”

Make a realistic calculation of the time you will need to get from your workplace to the meeting by 1:50P.M. Is it a five-minute walk? A cross-town drive? Are there slow elevators or security check-ins to factor in? Accept these constraints, don’t wish them away or gamble that you’ll hit every green light on your way to the meeting. Cool Time is about planning without misconception, traveling without rushing, and includes safe, sane driving and stress-free movement.

Cool Time is about making these elements real by entering them into the I-Beam Agenda with pragmatic reality. Though the face-to-face component of the meeting starts at 2:00P.M., the activity called “the Meeting” actually begins the moment you pull together the required materials, get up from your desk, and start traveling.

And if the phone rings as you get up to leave, think before answering . This is precisely how so many people make themselves late. Stay cool and decide before answering if the caller is one of your top-priority people, or whether your clear, proactive voicemail greeting can take care of their needs for the moment. Cool Time avoids the temptations of Answerholism. Unless the call is of top-level urgency, consider yourself officially already gone—already in the meeting. After all, if the caller had called a minute later, you would already be on your way, and voicemail would have taken over anyway.

Though the actual meeting is scheduled from 2:00P.M. until 3:00P.M., you’ve calculated, as part of your morning I-Beam Review, that Cool Time travel will require forty-five minutes, including getting up from your desk, waiting for the elevator, getting to your car, and getting through city traffic to the highway. As well, you’ll need a few minutes after the meeting for follow-up and summarizing (closure). Therefore, the meeting really lasts from 1:15P.M. to 3:15P.M. That’s what you tell yourself and those around you. The meeting is from 1:15P.M. to 3:15P. M. because it is.

With Cool Time you will stride into your meeting exactly on time, avoiding the many negative repercussions of lateness. Lateness is not a great career advancement tool. It’s disruptive, embarrassing, and professionally damaging to have to enter a closed-door meeting, find a chair, unpack, and collect yourself under the gaze of all others present. It is equally difficult to have to explain to a client why you are late for a planned and confirmed one-on-one meeting.

But arriving early doesn’t mean you have to appear until precisely the right moment. Let’s say you arrive at a meeting a full half-hour early due to clear roads. Well, now, that’s the time you can use to take those calls that came in just as you were leaving. You’re parked, you’re in sight of the building or meeting room, you’re early, and the people you’re meeting don’t know you’re here yet. Perfect! You’ve got some keystone time, private and undisturbed, to make a few phone calls or do some work. With a cellphone, a PDA, and a briefcase, even a pen, paper, and some coins, downtime becomes productive time. All you’ve done is reversed the order—travel first, then take the calls.

Maybe you could spend the bonus time relaxing—imagine that! Enjoy a few minutes of sunshine, read a newspaper, or grab a coffee. A fifteen-minute, blue-sky mini-vacation is a healthy, productive use of your time—it really is. Then, when you’re ready, make your appearance five minutes before the arranged meeting time, exactly as planned. You will soon have people saying, “You know, I can set my watch by you—you’re always on time,” which is an attribute that parlays into success very quickly in our time-conscious world.

COOL TIME IN THE MORNING: GETTING UP

Most people hate getting up in the morning, and with good reason. The warmth, the comfort, the protection afforded by our beds is unmatched. It is a place where we feel most secure, even though we are physically most vulnerable. Have you noticed that when you travel, whether for business or pleasure, your entire perspective about the trip changes when you first open the hotel room door and survey your new bed for the first time? This strange place is your temporary home, your refuge in a strange land. In our minds, all of our physical journeys—to the office and back, grocery shopping, or traveling on vacation—can be drawn on a map as lines radiating from our pillow, the epicenter of our existence. Wherever you go, in the back of your mind you will always have a plan of how to return to your pillow by the end of the day.

Getting up, then, is the first of a number of personal sacrifices and concessions that we have to make every day. It is a tormenting separation from the bliss and warmth of sleep. To prolong the comfort as much as possible, many people will spend the least amount of time necessary on dressing, preparing, and traveling to work. And if they think of it, they might even grab something to eat on their way out the door.

But getting up in the morning is one of the few things over which we as individuals have a lot of control, since there are no appointments that precede it. It’s the first event of the day. It is an exercise in mental determination—mind over mattress.

Get a better alarm clock. If you decide to buy one thing on the strength of reading this book, this should be it: an alarm clock that doesn’t alarm, but wakes gently, one that gradually raises its volume over the course of twenty minutes; one that has a small column of lights that illuminate gradually, so that the stimulation to wake up synchronizes better with your sleep cycle.²³ By contrast, an alarm clock that goes off with a buzzer or a bell in your ear is only one step removed from a bucket of ice water being poured over you. Given the limited hours of sleep we have available, being ripped from REM sleep is a great cause of headaches at least, and heart attacks at worst. Mondays are big days for heart attacks in North America, as people get shocked out of the semi-relaxation of the weekend, and are forced to recall all of the stresses they left behind on Friday.

Hit the light switch, not the snooze bar. Use light right away to capitalize on your circadian rhythm. Light stimulates the brain, which releases stimulant chemicals into the bloodstream. Turn on your bedside light as soon as the alarm rings and sit up. If you have a partner who gets to go on sleeping, use a flashlight. Nobody cares what you look like at that time of the morning. They’re either still asleep, or they’ll look the same as you. Light and color before your eyes will work at eliminating sleepiness from the inside even before your first coffee.

Make getting up worth it. Think for a moment back to the great events in your life—Christmases, holidays, and birthdays during your childhood; the first day of school; the first snowy morning; your wedding day; or the first day of a new job. You might recall that getting up on those days was a lot easier than usual. There were big things afoot, things that snapped your mind into action and pulled you up to start the big day ahead.

Now, how can we give that same luster of excitement to every day? The benefits of being up must outweigh the benefits of being in bed. Your initial reflex during that the first moment of a new day, when the alarm shatters the peace of early morning, must be one of action, not reaction. Immediately start to think to yourself, There is more to be gained from getting up now than from staying in bed, because when you believe that, it will turn out to be true. Start thinking about things—activities, ideas, plans for the day. Get your mind moving and your body will follow.

Every day has the potential to move your life forward in the direction you wish. It may not be easy at first, but everyone can find something special to look forward to in every single day to use as motivation for getting up.

• If you have a big event scheduled for today, a positive achievement that you know you can complete, then remember it! Picture it. Tell yourself that the road to that achievement starts right now.

• If you have a less positive event scheduled for today, something you dread, something that you’d rather not face, then focus on its completion. Look forward to getting it over with. Take the bull by the horns and tell yourself that by getting up now, you will be taking the first step toward completing and eliminating this unpleasant task, after which better things, or healing, can start.

• If your upcoming day and your job are mundane and you feel there’s nothing to look forward to, then identify something else to look forward to. If there is no satisfaction in your work, then focus on an activity or event after work that will make rising worthwhile. Sure, you have to go to work, but at the end of that workday is the event you’ve been waiting for. Getting up on time is the first step toward leaving work on time in order to get to your anticipated event.

Don’t blame yourself for wanting to stay asleep. It helps to understand that the desire to stay asleep in the morning is a result of the built-in chemical conflict mentioned earlier. The chemicals that induce sleep are in conflict with those that are responsible for waking us up. If you were able each night to enjoy the amount of sleep you actually deserve, the sleep hormones would dissipate naturally. But as we force ourselves daily to conform to the working world’s clocks, we must fight this constant battle.

A stress-free start to the day. One of the greatest benefits of allowing enough time to rise, prepare, and eat in a leisurely fashion is its impact over stress. By minimizing stress at the beginning of the day, you set a foundation of control, which helps combat stress during the rest of the day. Though stressful things may still happen, a relaxed start keeps the body and mind on a cool, level, and productive track.

Many people put off getting up until it’s absolutely necessary, preferring to snatch just a few more minutes of half-sleep from the advancing morning. They will argue that it’s not possible, that there’s just not enough time to get up and out that quickly, especially if other family members are involved. When they finally get up, they immediately hit a critical path, which you’ll remember from Chapter 3 is a bad thing, since every activity on a critical path is so closely tied to the next that even the slightest delay in one causes delay and stress. Breakfast is rushed, preparing is rushed, and they curse the traffic that’s making them late.

So what if you were to redefine what was absolutely necessary, and build that back into your morning routine? Suppose you were to do an inventory of the activities that go into an average morning. List them, and get a sense of the time they take. And be realistic. Avoid optimistic estimates, such as “five minutes to make and eat breakfast” or “half an hour commuting if the roads are perfectly clear,” and also allow time for seasonal surprises such as scraping ice off the car windshield or road construction. Do you have to prepare the kids for school, walk the dog, deal with busy transit centers?

This list will calculate the total amount of time required to get on your way in Cool Time, with little or no stress. It will give you a realistic rising time, a workable agenda.²⁴

At this point, many people shake their heads. You can’t predict all of these things so consistently,” they say. “Some days the traffic may be great, but other days it’s terrible. One day my kids will eat their food, and the next day they refuse. To which the answer is, “that’s exactly the point. You can predict most of these things and expect the rest. So why not allow for them in your morning project plan?”

Adding a few minutes to each morning item generally adds no more than half an hour to the entire project. Imagine getting up just half an hour earlier to enjoy a stress-free start to the day. Ultimately, you can make your entire day much, much better by giving yourself the time you need to get it started on the right foot. And that, it seems, is worth much more than a few more minutes in bed.

TRAVEL TWICE, JOURNEY ONCE

This is an adaptation of the carpenter’s maxim, “Measure twice, cut once.” There is a great opportunity for effective time management in the way that you travel. Often people forget to factor travel time into their schedules, or if they do, they don’t factor in enough. Trying to get across a city at one in the afternoon will be far more difficult than at one in the morning. These people are more prone to have accidents and experience road rage.

There will always be constraints to travel—construction, traffic jams, accidents, other drivers, the capabilities of your car, the weather. These things are out there, regardless of where you are going. Expect them. Plan for them. Allow them to happen. There will also always be impudent drivers whose behavior is outrageous, selfish, and illegal. They are also a constraint whose presence must be accepted. You cannot change the fact that they are there. It’s better and healthier to allow for them and plan around them.

Going somewhere? Call first! There is nothing worse than traveling to an appointment only to find out your host has forgotten or, worse, is not there. Things happen. People get double-booked, and mistakes can be made, especially if the original agreement to meet was made during casual conversation. Memories of this sort, just like the memories that new business leads might have of you, have a half-life. The act of scheduling a meeting should, by default, include a confirmation call scheduled for one business week prior. This call should not only confirm the appointment, but could also include asking about nearest cross-streets, available parking, security procedures, exact location of the first meeting point, and emergency contact numbers.

Check your knowledge base. This is one of the areas where a knowledge base pays off handsomely. Just prior to your meeting you can load up your mind with news, concepts, and notes pulled from your constantly updated knowledge base.

Apply your Cool Time road plan to air travel. Being required to check in for your flight an hour or two before boarding may seem to be an intrusion into your busy day, but it’s a fact of modern life and can often be a blessing in disguise. The airport departure lounge can be your private office away from the distractions of the workplace, a quiet spot to get great work done. With noise-reducing headphones, even the pressurized environment of the plane itself can be turned into a zone of quiet, reasonable comfort for either work or personal time en route.

Don’t sacrifice eating. Include time for a meal in your travel plans for all the reasons discussed in Chapter 12.

HOW DO YOU SPELL RELIEF?

Do you ever marvel at the number of ads on TV that sell stomach remedies for heartburn and other discomforts? If more people allowed more time to eat more slowly, including extra time to choose better food, there would be much less need for these products. Our obsession with speed is literally burning us up.

Enjoy the ride. Hey, a trip to a client’s office is time you can’t get back. Whether it’s one hour or six, stress-free travel time is healthier and more productive than a nerves-on-end frantic dash. Let your travel time become a small pleasure in the middle of your day rather than simply a means to an end.

In the end, practicing Cool Time is not an exercise in punctuality for punctuality’s sake. It is a shrewd tool of business, one that allows you to remain in command of yourself first and foremost, and subsequently to gain control of your surroundings and the attention of the people in them. It’s about striving for excellence. It’s the ability to walk into a meeting or interview with confidence, putting your best self forward; about recalling key facts and ideas from your experience, your research and your knowledge base. It’s about being able to focus on the right things to say; being able to strategize, calculate, think on your feet, prioritize, and impress with no need for apologies or self-deprecating jokes. It’s about maintaining a clarity of purpose, and taking full advantage of all opportunities that arise from your efforts and preparation. It’s about keeping your mind receptive to new ideas and new learning opportunities, and keeping your relationships balanced and positive. Your attitude and enthusiasm are a direct reflection of your leadership style. Cool Time is about leading a successful life.