THE POWER BREAKFAST

As we have already discussed, breakfast is an extremely important time. It provides an intake of nutrition after ten to twelve hours of fasting, and sets the stage for the expenditure of energy to come. A real breakfast is important, yet for many, it is sacrificed because there is “not enough time.”

The nutritional importance of breakfast is discussed in Chapter 12, and finding time for a stress-free breakfast is discussed in Chapter 13. The bottom line, however—a point that bears repeating briefly—is that spending time in the morning to have breakfast in a relaxed manner while reading the newspaper or watching TV has greater value to your body and mind than the nine minutes of extra sleep that the snooze bar offers. Even if there are young children in the house who need help preparing for school, a quiet breakfast, perhaps enjoyed before they wake up, provides a stable platform upon which the stresses of the day can be dealt with and managed.

For those people who simply cannot do this—who simply cannot get up early for breakfast—there is another solution, and that is to have portable nutritious breakfasts available for quick takeaway. And this is best achieved through the use of Cool Time meal plans and shopping plans.

MEAL PLANS

By 4:00P.M. on any given day, the majority of North American working people still do not know what they’ll be making for dinner that evening. This presents a multilayered problem.

• Mental energy wastage: For a start, it means spending mental energy and attention at work trying to think of what to have for dinner. This may seem trivial, but given the small number of items that short-term memory can hold, it robs you of focus and productivity, which simply adds to your workload.

• Disturbing your significant other: Having to call your other half at work to engage a conversation along the lines of “What do you feel like for dinner tonight?” “I don’t know, what do you feel like?” leads to even further distraction and stress. There are a million recipes available on the Internet, but few of them seem practical by late afternoon.

• Time-consuming detours: Once you finally decide on what to eat, inevitably there will be a need to stop off on your way home to pick up something, and this happens on personal time. Each little detour robs you of twenty to thirty minutes, which adds up to a great many hours over the course of a month. There are better things to do with this time, but it is time that is not perceived as “real” because, as we discussed in Chapter 3, it is uncontrolled and spontaneous.

• Fast food as last resort: So as four o’clock becomes five o’clock, the difficulty and frustration of deciding what to have for dinner increases, thanks to the efficient work of a hormone known as ghrelin, which is released into your system from your stomach, and which has little patience. It is not interested in rational thought. It just wants to be fed. The solution appears in bright yellow and red signage from every street corner: Fast food. But as we have seen, fast food is not the best answer. Though major fast food companies have changed their menus in response to health-conscious customer tastes, the cooking oils, dressings, and other ingredients required to ensure a tasty and consistent product are no match for home-prepared meals.

Meal plans provide an excellent, time-sensible alternative to meals that come with a trademark after their names. One hour per week is all that’s needed to plan seven dinners, lunches, and breakfasts, and to eliminate all the time wasters listed above. A week-long meal plan provides an opportunity for the family to enjoy balanced meals together. Time that would have been spent in stopping off at the store is now time that can be spent doing other things. Best of all, family favorites make meal planning easy. There will always be meals that can be repeated each week or so. Meal planning becomes very easy very quickly.

THE SHOPPING PLAN

For most people, grocery shopping is not the most interesting part of life. It is, however, a necessary activity and a time-consuming chore. But once you have created your week’s meal plan (see above), the Cool Time approach to grocery shopping guarantees to cut the in-store time in half by creating a grocery list that prints items out in the order they are to be found on the store shelves. This means one circuit through the store. No doubling back, no wandering around. It may seem a little strange at first, but it is really nothing more than a project plan for the trip to the grocery store.³⁰

The store map: First, map out the layout of the store on a piece of paper. Maybe you can do this during your next grocery shopping trip, or maybe you should make a special visit. (Remember the catapult analogy, page 184. Some things require investment before the dividends appear.) The map should identify all the specific zones of the store, including the aisles, the fresh fruit and vegetables section, the bakery, and the dairy section.

Next, envision how you might walk through the entire store, visiting each section only once, and give the sections corresponding numbers. For example, if fresh fruit and vegetables were in one corner, that might be section 1. Then above fresh fruit and vegetables is the bakery, which is section 2. Then there’s aisle 1. The top of aisle 1, farthest from the cash, would be section 3, and the bottom of aisle 1 would be section 4. Then, if you were to turn your cart and head back up aisle 2, that would be section 5. The top of aisle 2 would be section 6, and as you turned to head back down aisle 3, that would be section 7. On it goes, up and down the aisles, until you reach the dairy, which is almost always placed at the back of the store. On your list, dairy might end up as section 20.

This looks like a lot of work, but the first time you observe your grocery shopping time shrink to one hour from two, you’ll reap the benefits.

Now you have a map that will allow you to walk the entire floor area of the store in a logical, linear sequence. (This is essentially the same technique as e-mail, discussed in Chapter 10. It’s about never having to do double work on mundane tasks.)

The next step is to work on your grocery list. Enter the items you typically purchase over the course of a week or a month into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. (The nice thing about using an Excel spreadsheet rather than paper is that you can add more items as you think of them, and sort them later.) Create four columns. (A sample Excel shopping list with hundreds of food items is available at the Cool Time website, at www.cool-time.com)

• Enter the word “Needed” as the first column header. This will be used later when you decide what to buy this week.

• The second column head is “Item.”

• The third column head is “Sequence.”

The number in the Sequence column next to each food item corresponds to the section on your store map where this item can be found. For example, avocado is a fruit, so it is located in section 1 on your map—Fruits and Vegetables. However, baking soda is located in section 8, at the bottom of the third aisle, near the checkouts. Yes, it takes a couple of trips to get this right, but the payoff is enormous.

When it comes time to do the actual shopping, review your weekly meal plan and enter how many of each item you need this week in the Needed column of the Excel spreadsheet. Next, read through the entire list in case there are other things needed for the household, the pantry, or the emergency kit. For items that are not needed this week, leave the corresponding cell in the Needed column empty.

When you’re ready to print, choose Sort from the Data menu, and then sort by Sequence. Your shopping list will then sort in ascending order according to the numbers in the Sequence column. Why? Because this will give you a shopping list that presents your groceries in the order that you will encounter them as you walk from one side of the store to the other, up one aisle and down the next.

Finally, filter your list to show only the items that have a number in the “Needed” column. To do this, choose Filter and then Auto Filter from the Data menu. Then click on the downward-pointing arrow at the top of the “Needed” column, and choose Non-blanks. This will give you your list for the shopping trip, and will show only the items that you plan to buy this week. All the grocery items that you do not plan to buy will have no number in their “Needed” cell, and will be hidden during the filtering activity. The last thing to do is to print your list.

This is your Cool Time grocery list. You will now be able to move from one side of the store to the other, up one aisle and down the next with no time wasted. It will get easier each week as you update and refine this list, and the time you save can be spent on things more interesting than shopping for groceries.

And by the way, if you think this list is the product of someone who is just a little too obsessed with managing time, I can assure you that’s not the case. In fact, it was devised as a solution for parents of infant children, a group that included me. Small children have even less enthusiasm for grocery shopping than adults do, but are more vocal at expressing their displeasure. Anything, therefore, that can help fit a week’s shopping into the limited window of a child’s patience is a stress reliever as well as a time saver.

CHECKLISTS

In Chapter 11 we discussed the importance of checklists as a tool for effective Cool behavior, since keeping track of the various items or activities that contribute to a successful project should not be entrusted to short-term memory.

Anywhere that checklists can be used around the house, they should be. Not only do they remind you of all of the items needed, they also allow for correct timings to be assigned, which increases the accuracy of preparation or travel times.

Every day, at train stations across North America, hundreds of people, a few dozen at a time, run across station parking lots desperately, hoping to make the train that is scheduled to depart in less than a minute. Where do they come from? Why do they do this to themselves, getting hot and stressed, risking injury and lateness? How did they misjudge the travel time to the station? Usually it’s because of a casual and overly optimistic estimate of the time actually required to get to the station, based on a distance measurement taken one day when traffic was light and weather was good, when there were no accidents on the roads, and no ice to scrape off the windshield.

Cool Time travel checklists take such factors into consideration. How long should breakfast take? How long to get dressed? Do I have my important personal effects with me? How long will it take to get to the station tomorrow, based on this evening’s weather forecast? As a family and as an individual, you can enjoy a healthier, safer life if you create and maintain checklists for:

• Getting to work on a good-weather day

• Getting to work on a bad-weather day

• Preparing the kids for school

• Packing for vacation

• Dealing with a power outage

• Dealing with an emergency such as coming home late (Who will feed the dog? Which neighbor can I call with a special request? Who will pick up the kids?)

• End-of-day checklists—take out the garbage, water the plants, lock the car, etc.

Checklists don’t turn people into obsessive-compulsive list-keepers. Instead, they approach common tasks head on—tasks that will have to be dealt with anyway—and places them within a sequence and context that frees up more of the day for other life activities.

TIDYING

Given the short amount of time we have between getting home and going to bed, tidying can be as threatening as it is tedious. But we can use the principle called carryover momentum (Chapter 6) to help make tidying harmless. Carryover momentum states that one of the best ways of dealing with large tasks is to break them up into smaller, regularly scheduled activities, such as one hour a day, every day, at the same time of day, for a week or more. This not only gets things done cumulatively, it also tackles the procrastination problem of waiting for a single large block of time in the hopes of completing the entire task at once. To apply this principle to the chore of tidying, consider that, for those evenings when you’re at home watching TV, small amounts of tidying can be easily factored into commercial breaks. Given that the average one-hour television show is actually fifty minutes long, that leaves ten minutes per hour available for tidying the kitchen and living room without cutting into your favorite show. It’s simple and very effective. Every time your show goes to break, everyone does a little bit. The show comes back, and so do you. Over the course of one, two, or three shows, your living room and kitchen are returned to order, but not at the expense of your leisure time.

TWENTY MINUTES OF READING PER NIGHT

As a final Cool Time suggestion, remember to allow yourself twenty minutes a night to read something unrelated to work. Something you enjoy—not reports or memos or e-mail on your PDA, not something you feel you should be reading—something you really enjoy. Let those final twenty minutes before you turn out the light be a time to relax in a world far removed from the workaday world. This allows the body and mind to continue its work releasing the chemicals of high-quality sleep, setting the stage for continued excellence the following day.