Re-inventing my work day

 My calendar is a nightmare. A typical week is peppered with:

• ad-hoc meetings with internal team members to discuss project work;
• weekly operations meetings with multiple project teams;
• meetings with key partners and clients;
• meetings with prospective clients; 
• Skype calls and coffee meetings to build relationships / my network; 
• non-work related tasks that need my direct involvement (we've just finished renovating a house, and it's been intense)
• gym sessions;
  
• hour-long meetings with myself to protect my diary so that I can get specific work items done; and
• evening events/dinners

On a typical day I find myself battling the priorities of my calendar, whatever email communication comes in, and whatever daily events may unfold. It gets pretty intense, and i've felt the need to re-look the approach to my work day. I want to take back control and feel like I own my days!

As a business owner I have a responsibility to myself to do work that it relevant to my position, as well as collaborate with others on multiple projects. Yes these two types of work - work that is done in isolation, and work that is done in collaboration - are often in competition with one another. But you don't have to be a business owner to feel the conflicting requirements between these two categories of work. To some extent all of us need to do work on our own, as well in collaboration with others. And without adding rigour to our day, it is often the latter - work that needs to be done with others, and often is organised by other people - that wins the battle for our time.

No more. 

I came across a great article on Lifehacker about how to rethink the eight-hour work day. There are 4 great points of advice at the end of the article: 

1. Manually increase the relevance of a task
2. Split your day into 90 minute windows
3. Plan your rest so you actually rest
4. Zero notifications

When discussing this article with a colleague, he mentioned some research that revealed the work routine of high-performance executives as follows: 

Wake up at 5:30am  -  do some work  -  take kids to school/engage with family  -  arrive at work  -  do 2 blocks of 90-minutes of important work  -  take lunch  -  spend the afternoon in meetings. 

Interesting schedule. I particularly like the split between doing isolated work in the morning, and engaging with others via meetings in the afternoon. 

On further thought, I realised one of my major productivity issues is that I default to my email and project task list whenever I am wondering what I need to do next. This is great for getting quick tasks out the way, and consequently feeling like i'm making progress, but it's an absolute productivity killer for getting any significant body of work done. I need to implement discipline in the way that I engage with my email.

So, with all of these issues in mind, I have re-invented my work day according to the following principles:

1. My best work is done in the morning. So i'll do it then.
2. A disciplined daily scheduled will give me the ability to focus and, counterintuitively, give me more freedom. I will implement a disciplined scheduled. See disciplined routine below.
3. In general, notifications are unacceptable interruptions. All my iPhone notifications are switched off. I'm going to keep my email "unread message counter" out of site.
4. It is acceptable to respond to emails up to 24 hours after they have been received.
5. I'll do over 10 hours work a day, but I'm not going to do work after 6pm. This is a major consideration for me, because i'm a workaholic, but i'm going to try!

And so... here is the daily work routine i'll be trialling from 1 August. I'm using July to move towards this system because it is a major change that needs to be managed:

• 06:15 Wake up
• 07:00 Check and respond to emails
• 07:30 Use task list and calendar to plan work for the morning. Chunk up tasks into 30-minute activities. 
• 08:00 Execute on planned work items. No interruptions.
• 12:00 Lunch
• 12:30 Check and respond to emails
• 13:00 Attend scheduled meetings
• 15:00 Check and respond to emails
• 15:30 Attend scheduled meetings
• 17:30 Create tasks list from meeting outcomes
• 18:00 Home time / evening activities

Wish me luck. 

I'd love to hear how you manage your daily routine? What works and what doesn't work, and why?

3 take-aways from being flattened by a super virus

Today, I feel awesome. I can't say the same for last week Wednesday through Saturday.

I'll avoid the paragraphs of self-pity. Instead, a quick summary: I thought I had food poisoning. After 36 hours of all the regular symptoms, assisted by our shiny new bathroom, my wife reckoned it was time to take me to the hospital. I felt absolutely terrible. I was put on a drip, pumped with all the regular medical goodness, and told I probably had a super virus. Then, I spent the next 2 days negotiating fevers and chills until Sunday when I finally felt human again and forget the taste of bile.

I can't remember the last time I was this sick. I'm humbled by a simple virus's ability to suck all the joy out of my life. And equally humbled by modern medicine and my immune system's ability to fight it off and win. And I say this in the context of a relatively harmless virus, when compared against ailments such as cancer, diabetes and HIV. I'm in no way comparing my experience to those suffering from longer-term diseases. But I can confidently say that serious dehydration, crazy fevers and uncontrollable vomiting is a sure-fire way to experience poor health, albeit for just 4 days.

In reflecting on the experience, I thought on three practical things i'd like to share:

1. Know your nearest Emergency Room (ER)

You never know when you'll need to visit an ER. You can't know where you'll be when you might need one one day, but assuming you spend a lot of time at home - it's a good idea to know where your local ER is. I visited Claremont Life Hospital ER. They were great. They were also sensitive to their patient's budgets and had great nursing staff. Where is your local ER? 

2. Invest in your spouse

Obvious to most of us? Sure. For hundreds of reasons? Yes.

What I hadn't realised until this past week is that it takes an extra special effort, often in the context of some pretty unpleasant intimacy, to help someone who is very sick. My wife was hugely supportive, spent hours caring and worrying about me. That's partly because she is awesome, and partly because i've invested over 8 years in our relationship. It's these sort of investments that pay dividends at pretty important points in our lives. What I went through last week was mild compared to what I may go through later on in life. And I know my wife will be there for me. Because i'm going to continue to invest meaningfully in our relationship.

My mother recently spent the better part of 12 months supporting my father back to health when he was seriously ill. The extended experience took it's toll on her, but she dug deep... deep into the reserves that are built over the course of a 30-year marriage. She kept up her incredible support of him through some of the toughest times of their lives. That's a real dividend.

3. Appreciate good health every day you have it.

Holy smokes, i'm happy to be healthy again. I find that I rarely appreciate good health. I guess i've had it my whole life, and so I expect nothing less. I'm going to put a system in place to appreciate my health as much as I possibly can. I reckon i'll be happier for it, too.

Helen Zille's 4 Ts for improving education

I'm part of an initiative called Entrepreneurs Organization. It's a worldwide initiative comprising 8,000+ members over 130 countries and it's mission is to help entrepreneurs learn.

There are a number of ways the initiative facilities learning. One of the most effective is through events called "In the Boardroom" sessions, or ITBs as we like to call them. We arrange meetings with business leaders in their boardrooms, where they kindly share their experience of business with us. Through these events i've had the privilege of meeting Jannie Mouton (PSG), GT Ferreira (Rand Merchant Bank), Gareth Ackerman (Pick 'n Pay), Robbie Brozin (Nandos) and many others.

The most recent "In the Boardroom" session, held yesterday, was with Helen Zille - the Premier of the Western Cape. She isn't a business leader but she is, in my view, an incredible leader.

I am not particularly political, and so I didn't have an arsenal of questions for her around policy issues and the future of our country. But last year I did have a heated exchange with her on Twitter over some snide remarks she made about a TEDEducation event. I even wrote a blog post in which I probably went a little far in responding to her remarks. So I was looking forward to hearing her speak and interact with her face to face.

She gave an excellent talk in which she described the role of Government in enabling entrepreneurs, highlighting some of the local success stories and sharing her view on the importance of entrepreneurial activity to the future of the country.

Sure, she's a politician and knows how to fill up a speaking slot but her talk was, for the most part, filled with substance and thoughtful rhetoric. She was booked for a 60 minute presentation and ended up spending a generous two hours with us. She spoke intelligently on all the topics she touched on, gently defended her views on sensitive political issues, and sparred with some of us (and won!) on the issue of alcohol advertising and the need for some degree of a Nanny State.

​I was particularly interested in what she had to say about the importance of education. She explained that the way to fix education is through a focus on improving four key areas:

• Teachers
• Text
• Time Management
• Technology

​These key focus areas resonate with me in online education as much as they do in face-to-face education. Although i'd probably rewrite the list as follows (I really tried to keep the aliteration, but failed!):

• Teachers and Administrative Coaches
• Instructional Materials
• Time Management
• Technology

​Why the changes?

Teachers are expected to be competent across a range of functions. It's not fair to expect teachers to know their subject matter intimately, inspire students through creative lessons, AND be administrative powerhouses. For this reason, we separate out administrative and subject matter roles at GetSmarter. Every student is assigned a teacher and an administrative coach. This separation of roles allows the teachers to become truly great at teaching. And the administrative coaches can focus on becoming truly excellent at pro-active administration. The result of 94% completion rates for over 5,000 students last year, speaks volumes for this approach.

​Textbooks are really effective instructional materials. But in today's digital environment, instructional videos, interactive tutorial systems, and other digital learning tools are outperforming static textbooks. 

The Premier's reference to Time Management makes my heart glad. To achieve any significant project one needs effective time management. We bake effective time management practices directly into our courses so that both students and teachers have a disciplined foundation upon which they can perform on the course. It's painful to tell CEOs that they're not on track to hand in their assignment for a course, but it's effective! 

And technology. Well, this enables improvements across the role of teachers and administrative coaches,​ in the quality of instructional materials, and in better time management.

I'm feeling pretty inspired by the Premier's enthusiasm for South Africa. And I love her vision for improving the education system. 

You've got my vote, Helen.

Record, review, re-learn

Last night I was interviewed by Bruce Whitfield on his Money Show as part of his Shape Shifters segment. The show is featured on Cape Talk and Radio 702 and has a fairly large audience at 200,000+ listeners. I was keen to impress, so I spent an hour beforehand thinking through the sorts of questions Bruce might ask about GetSmarter and online education generally. This helped me keep certain discussion points top of mind. With a few minutes to go before I was on air, I felt prepared.

​Bruce is a great interviewer. And I know my subject well, so even though he asked me questions I hadn't prepared for I felt comfortable throughout the entire interview. I left the interview feeling that the interview had been a success. He asked good questions. I answered with authority, and there were playful, energetic interactions throughout. I also had a lot of fun.

​That could have been the end of my experience of this interview. But as I got to work this morning I received an email from Cape Talk with a recording of the interview. What a great opportunity to review my performance!

So I spent 20 minutes listening to the clip and wrote the following review:​

1. ​I need to stop filling the space between sentences with "ums" and "ahs". While listening to the recording I was acutely aware of how this detracted from the quality of the talk, even though I was happy that the content of the talk was good. I would never have recognised this issue if I didn't review a recording of the interview. My solution moving forward: i'm going to slow down the speed of my delivery, and i'm going to embrace the pauses. And i'm going to get recordings of all the interviews, review them to find ways to improve, and re-learn again and again.
2. ​I need to focus on delivering sound bites. I found myself telling stories, which in itself isn't bad, but I didn't finish the talk with any specific take aways. And I think these take aways are key to the message I want to send, and the value that the listeners take away from the interview. I need to think in terms of sound bites and then deliver these sound bites. My solution moving forward: i'm going to prepare by anticipating as many questions as I can, and then write down bullet point answers that could each be seen as a sound bite. Then, during the talk, i'm going to look for opportunities to seed these sound bites into the conversation.

​As I went through this process I thought of a simple summary of how we can learn from our performance in public: record, review, re-learn. 

I've got a lot to learn. And when it comes to improving my performance in interviews i'm going to follow the process of recording, reviewing and re-learning. Over and over again. I'm excited.

Here's the recording from last night's interview:​

Link here

I danced 10,362 steps at a wedding this weekend

How did I know? I was wearing a Jawbone UP. 

What is a Jawbone UP? UP is a wristband tracks your movement and sleep in the background. It works together with an app that displays your data, lets you add things like meals and mood, and delivers insights that, according to the company's website "keep you moving forward." It's a holistic approach to healthy living, and it starts with a better understanding of yourself.

​Here is a screenshot of my movement this past Saturday. I got up really early to catch a flight to Durban, hence the activity around 5am, and the dancing began around 10pm and continued until the early hours of Sunday.

I'm only using it for tracking my movement and sleeping patterns. The UP interface is perfectly good for entering meals and resistance-based workouts (activities the UP can't track) but I find this a little too much effort. So I default to the easy things to measure and all it takes is the discipline of wearing the UP bracelet.

The UP has a certain wow factor that gets people talking about it. But no sooner have I started discussing the UP with friends and family, when the inevitable "that's great and all, but it looks like an expensive gadget for geeks and I can't see the benefit" comment is made.

I completely disagree.

​The saying "what gets measured, gets managed" comes to mind. This is one of the concepts from a management philosophy called Managing by Objectives. And for the first time, the UP has given me a really easy (read: all I have to do is where a bracelet) way to measure my physical movement and sleeping patterns. It also happens to have an app that represents this personal data in an attractive, engaging way.

​Just by being exposed to this data, I can begin to draw connections between things I do, and the degree of their impact on my physical activity and sleep. Without measurement, this wouldn't be possible. And once I have the data, this can drive decision making.

So here are some of the things i've learned over the past two weeks of using UP to build my own personal data analytics:​

• ​Dancing at a wedding is equivalent to a 6km run in terms of calories burned. If I know I have a wedding coming up, I can miss one of my 5km runs in a week and still reach my physical goals for that week. I always knew that dancing was a great physical workout, but now I have more precise analytics.
• I'm pretty active during the working day. I had thought that I sit at my desk for extended periods of time, but my analytics tell me that i'm up and about at last every 40 minutes. This could be a good thing physically, and it could also be destructive to concentrated periods of work. I'm going to interrogate this further.
• On average, I fall asleep in about 4 minutes after watching a TV series episode. This isn't particularly useful, but I know that it takes me longer to fall asleep when I haven't relaxed by watching an episode. I'd like to run experiments with other pre-sleep activities like reading a book, watching a TED talk, etc... and see if these activities have an impact on the quality of my sleep.
• ​I have deeper sleep on weekends than during the week. I need more data before I can draw decent conclusions, but the early analytics are in line with what I would have expected. Quality of sleep is one area that i'm particularly interested in measuring, and UP measures deep and light sleep, with the former being the more important in determining overall quality of sleep. I work 12+ hours most days (out of choice, I love it) and every now and again I struggle to sleep because my mind becomes over active. By using data from UP, i'm going to attempt to draw conclusions about what activities cause me to sleep badly. I have a good sense for this already, and i'm going to confirm it with real data.

​The benefit to me is clear: simply by being exposed to this sort of personal data, I will draw connections I never did before and i'll improve in those areas with almost no additional effort. Add in a little extra effort, and i'll definitely see improvements.

Wearable computing is coming, and personal analytics will be an increasingly important part of our lives as we strive for continual personal improvement. The UP ​is just the first iteration of a generation of wearable devices. And as the cost of implanted devices come down - devices like those "installed" by people who suffer from diabetes, that measure blood/sugar levels, heart rate and a whole range of other personal metrics - I have no doubt that subcutaneous devices will become more popular. And as that happens, accuracy in measurement will improve.

But that's a little painful for a Monday. I'm going to stick with my Jawbone UP and see what else I can learn about my daily physical activity and sleeping patterns.