In 2012, I’m taking some time back for me.

I’ve been on overdrive again for the last 18 months. Largely, I poured myself into working full bore again, because I was avoiding some personal issues I wasn’t happy with. Now that I’m working through those, I’m taking back some time for me again.

Time to reconnect with what matters. My kids. My friends. Myself. My family. My girlfriend.

Time to remain interested in my hobbies. Tennis, reading, skiing, golf, and cooking. Time to start hiking…

Time to stop working around the clock. Time to start saying NO to speaking events I don’t want to do. And only say yes to the ones that inspire me. Time to say NO to coaching clients that aren’t a great fit for me. And time to stop working Fridays.  I’m finally hiring an assistant too.  Yes it will cost me some money – but I’d rather have the free time.

I’ve just blocked off EVERY Friday in 2012 as Free Time. Time to not work. So if you want to go for a hike, a run, play golf, tennis, etc. drop me a note – as long as we don’t talk biz – I’m in.  What are you doing to keep balanced ?

If this short video resonates with you, let it nag you every day, until you start getting focused.

I suggest you have ALL your employees watch it too…

I went out to my vast network on Twitter, Facebook, my blog subscribers and LinkedIn to get ideas on living a more productive and balanced life..

Here are some of their answers. I think I like the last one the best.

· It’s not about balancing work and life. It’s about paying respect to the individual relationships we cultivate: the relationship with self, the one with work and (hopefully) with the person you get to put your cold feet up against at night.

· I turn my radio off and my cell phone off so I’m 100% present and in the moment with the kids for the 15-minute drive or walk to school.

· I not only get ‘me time’– I also work to get one-on-one time with each of the kids. Even an overnight trip somewhere with each of the kids.

· If you’ve got job flexibility, avoid rush hour traffic to and from work and travel off-peak hours. Use that saved time for time with the kids before they go to school or when they come home or for exercise.

· Whatever you choose to make a priority, you will make happen!  You also lead by example as your kids will watch and learn. For example, choose stairs over escalators; choose walking over moving walkways like at the airport. When I take an elevator I play a game where I do a squat (only when no one else is in the elevator with me!) and have to stay in that position till I get to whatever floor I’ve pressed.

· Travel with a skipping rope and tubing so you can exercise in your hotel room. In 15 minutes, between those very light weight easy to pack items and push ups, ab crunches and dips you can get a very good workout without leaving your room. No need to travel with runners or worry about finding a gym or taking the time to go to they gym. Watch your CNN and exercise.

· First, I realize that balance is an illusion. Life is never in balance, so I work to manage the imbalances to ensure that first, critical issues are always taken care of (first things first) and then I work to optimize.

· I book vacations before we even know where we are going.

· Write out your priorities and think about which ones you are neglecting. Like recently my kids got very annoyed that I was constantly checking my BlackBerry so I looked at my list and reminded myself that they are top priority…so I decided that off work times and in their presence I would not look at emails.

· Start the year by booking your holidays/time-off in advance.

· I have a weekly half-day volunteer commitment. Forces me to have some mid-week time not working.

· At work, I pretend I have no personal life. At home, I pretend I’m jobless. *Grin*  Doing both forces me to be 100% present on what ever I’m doing or supposed to be doing.

· Pretend that your iPhone only works when the sun is up and not at all on weekends.  Kids and spouses need to believe they are most important things in your life.

· The iPhone is like a huge “presence” condom. It numbs the feeling.

· Do a Painted Picture for your company as well as your business.  Focus on it like you do your business one too.  Company’s come and go – family is forever, paint the family future together and enjoy the journey.

· I realized email & cell calls are never urgent.  It dawned on me that nobody has ever called me to buy $1M of stuff… I only sell when I am doing the calling…so why am I thinking their emails or calls are so urgent?

· Ask women what they’re doing – and do that.  Women tend to really get balance a lot more than men do.  Learn from them.  They get it.  And they live it a lot better – or they sure try to.

Don’t consistently work at night or on weekends.

You’ll never get it all done.  Don’t try.

It’s about working smarter, not longer. It’s about outsourcing and off shoring, not working harder.  It’s about being focused, not working 17-hour days.

Trust me, I’ve tried both.

Working too much and sparing little time for your loved ones has an unhappy ending.

Years ago, I took a course by Dan Sullivan called “Strategic Coach.”  In the course, they taught us about something they called “Unique Ability.”

My “Unique Ability” turned out to be that I use quick, intuitive ideas to help entrepreneurs reverse engineer their dreams.

In a perfect world, I would outsource, delegate, or stop doing anything except for those tasks that utilize my Unique Ability.

Here’s how Dan Sullivan defines “Unique Ability” in his Strategic Coach program:

“First, it is a superior ability that other people notice and value; second, we love doing it and want to do it as much as possible; third, it is energizing both for us and others around us; and, fourth, we keep getting better, never running out of possibilities for further improvement.”

In order to truly focus, use this simple exercise to help you start working only on items that are close to your Unique Ability:

1) Make a list of everything you do daily and weekly.  I like to pretend someone took a video of me working all day for a month and I write down everything in the movie.

2) Put all of those items in column one of a spreadsheet.

3) In column two, put one of these four letters describing your skill level related to the task:

a. I = Incompetent – meaning you’re terrible at it

b. C = Competent – meaning you’re OK at it

c. E = Excellent – meaning you’re awesome at it (but you don’t love it)

d. U = Unique Ability – follow Dan’s definition above.

4) In column three, put the hourly wage you’d be willing to pay someone to do that task as a full time job.

5) Then begin quickly delegating, stopping or outsourcing the lowest paying tasks and the tasks where I have only a C or I.

This simple system will help you quickly become more focused on doing exactly what you need to grow your company and love doing it.  Imagine if you had everyone in your company only working on areas that warranted the wage you were paying them or were at least items where you and they would rank them as E or U.

I work very hard to coach entrepreneurs on doing this every two weeks, you get the lesson for free.  Try it.

I had a call with an entrepreneur today – he said he was going to read 12 business books this year – this was my suggestion after thinking about it…

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12 biz books seems like over kill…

a) reading that many keeps our brains racing when we need them to relax a bit

b) many are repeats of stuff we already are not doing…

I would do this…

a) Read 3 biz – and pick them carefully.  Really read them.  Write notes on them.  And share summaries with your employees (and me)

b) Read these books for fun…
–Endurance – by Albert Lansing – it’s about Ernest Shackleton – awesome story – my fav book of all time – read it 15 years ago.

–Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand – consistently rates as one of the best books ever written – it’s exactly what the USA is going through today – and the Entrepreneur/Capitalist is the hero (finally)

–A Prayer For Owen Meany – by John Irving – just an awesome book – brain candy

–The Agony & The Ecstasy by Irving Stone – about Michelangelo – we’re a long way from being Renaissance Men – awesome story

Then read a book on Wine and another on something random…

Just my thoughts…

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What are you reading ?

I’m still not great at this but I’m getting a lot better…

Stop the insanity of checking email first thing everyday.  Yes, email is great.  Yes, email helps us.  However, the people getting the most done are not checking email first thing in the morning, nor are they checking email throughout the day.

You’ve heard this dozens of times, so why are you still choosing to be one of the unproductive ones?

Instead of watching the clock, watch the results.  Some of the most productive people work less hours, but their work is by far more focused.

I used to make jokes about bankers’ hours only to see how it punished those who got into the office early, worked hard, and left at a normal hour to play sports.  I had it backwards.

Many of those being praised for staying late actually showed up three hours later, worked less focused, stayed late, got less done, and inspired nobody because they had no balance in their lives.

Hide the clock on your screen and phone. Put the stupid ticking clock on the wall in the broom closet. And for one week, I challenge you to check email twice a day. TWICE. A. DAY.   Email me at the end of the week to let me know how productive you were.  Do it.

cameron at backpocketcoo dot com

pic Inside SoCal

One day a management consultant, Ivy Lee, called on Schwab of the Bethlehem Steel Company. Lee briefly outlined his firm’s services, ending with the statement: “With our service, you’ll know how to manage better.”

The indignant Schwab said, “I’m not managing as well now as I know how. What we need around here is not more ‘knowing’ but more doing; not ‘knowledge’, but action; if you can give us something to pep us up to do the things we ALREADY KNOW we ought to do, I’ll gladly listen to you and pay you anything you ask.”

“Fine,” said Lee. “I can give you something in twenty minutes that will step up your action and doing at least fifty percent.”

“Okay,” said Schwab. “I have just about that much time before I must leave to catch a train. What’s your idea?”

Lee pulled a blank 3 x 5 note sheet out of his pocket, handed it to Schwab and said: “Write on this sheet the five most important tasks you have to do tomorrow.” That took about three minutes.

“Now,” said Lee, “Number them in the order of their importance.” Five more minutes passed.

“Now,” said Lee, “Put this sheet in your pocket and the first thing tomorrow morning, look at item one and start working on it. Pull the sheet out of your pocket every fifteen minutes and look at item one until it is finished. Then tackle item two in the same way, then item three. Do this until quitting time. Don’t be concerned if you only finished two or three, or even if you only finish one item. You’ll be working on the important ones. The others can wait. If you can’t finish them all by this method, you couldn’t with another method either, and without some system you’d probably not even decide which are most important.”

He went on, “Spend the last five minutes of every working day making out a ‘must do’ list for the next day’s tasks. After you’ve convinced yourself of the worth of this system, have your people try it. Try it out as long as you wish and then send me a check for what YOU think it’s worth.”

The whole interview lasted about 25 minutes. In two weeks, Schwab sent Lee a check for $25,000—a thousand dollars a minute. He added a note saying the lesson was the most profitable he had ever learned. Did it work? In five years it turned the unknown Bethlehem Steel Company into the biggest independent steel producer in the world, and made Schwab a hundred-million-dollar fortune, and the best known steel man alive at that time.

This story has been re-written in so many books and blogs, but the aforementioned version is the one with which I’m most familiar. The beauty of this story is that it outlines one of the simplest tools for setting goals that I’ve ever encountered. I’ve found it so helpful in keeping me on-task and on-time that, in addition to using the “TOP 5” method on a daily basis, I use the same concept to stay focused on quarterly, monthly, and weekly goals, too. Although the original story may involve drafting up your top six goals each day, I use variations on the number—“TOP 5” and “TOP 3”–depending on the area of business with which I’m working. The thinking is simple: The lower the number, the more focus I hope to impart.  No matter which number you use, or which version of the story you’ve read, this is pretty darn close to exactly what happened.

And I’ve just recently begun using Teamly to totally manage my TOP 5 program daily & weekly.  Try it.  Or stay stuck in email.

Oh ya, and if this helps you grow your company, you’re welcome to send me a check for what ever you think it was worth to you too. 

Don’t keep adding stuff to your to do list.  If anything, start crossing stuff off that doesn’t need to be done.

If it won’t have an impact on sales going up, profits going up, or costs going down – stop doing it.

Instead, each morning or the night before, write down the TOP 5 things you need to get done that day.

Then start working on number one until it’s done.

Then move on to number two.  If you can be diligent and stay focused using this age-old method, you and your team will grow during any upswing or downturn in the economy.

And about the good ol’ 80/20 rule: We all know and accept that eighty percent of the results come from twenty percent of the work.

I like to use that as a way to focus myself. For example, if you only had two hours a day to get work done, what would you want to get done right away? Do you know what that activity might be? OK, do that, and that alone.

Imagine if for eight hours a day you just worked on those crucial tasks versus focusing on the numerous other items that seem to spring from out of nowhere each day.

pic goddess spiral

Put family time in your calendar first and schedule everything else around it.

I’ve always wanted to walk my kids to school. So I do. Every day I have a standing appointment from 8:45am – 9:15am when I can walk them to school. I book breakfasts, meetings and calls around that time.

Sometimes I need to use that spot, but I bet I walk my kids to school more often than you do. And I’ll remember that more than the meeting I could have had.

Ask for your kid’s school calendar from September through June like I do.  Book off time on all the dates your kids are available.  Those ‘professional development days’ that teachers get off are so random, but they make great days to play with the kids. This is way better bonding time than some school play we watch them in once and try so hard to attend.

I just got the school calendar today for the 2010/2011 school year.  I’ll be blocking off ALL the dates they are off school in this week so I’m off work on those days to play with them and make more memories.  I’m already looking forward to September.  What do you do to have more balance & time with your kids?

pic Chris Lopez