Clinton Skakun

Burnout occurs through a few different sources. When I was still in high school, working between projects and school at the same time was  a little stressful and demanded that I get up early enough to kick start the day … and work late enough so I wouldn’t have to even later the next day. Those days are kind of a blur and needless to say both grades and projects suffered. Certain activities get really addicting, there’s always that “just one more day of this crazy coding and I’ll have something ready” months, which seem more like weeks, fly by and it seems as if you’re moving backwards. Sometimes you are. Finally you realize that no matter how hard you work you’re still in the same place as last week, and the week before. Unless you change something.

Your body will only allow you to stare at a computer screen for so long until your eyes turn to chock and your memory slips like a skipping disk. In the case of burnout, you probably blank out in the middle of conversation or zone out when someone asks you a question. Basically, when you burn out, your mind is just overworked. Maybe you have a zillian things to do in a few days time and as the days go by your interest diminishes.

I’m not a big advocate of the 4 Hour Work Week type of thinking. Sure life isn’t all work. But when you find yourself broke, don’t look for a “4 Hour Work Week”, just work towards your dreams and choose your hours as you go. Being committed to your dreams means doing what it takes, it takes more than a few hours a week and it often means raising the bar. Too many people are looking for a fast and easy way to be entrepreneurs. It doesn’t often happen. Even Tim Ferris, author of 4 Hour Work Week, had some major lessons to learn early in his entrepreneurial career.

There are a few things you can leverage to decrease burnout and get more done. They don’t mean that you’ll never be tired again, but you’ll be able to operate at a much higher level and get more juice out of life. My explanation for burnout is running your engine and never changing the oil. The first one is to simplify, organize and eliminate. Much of burnout is just inability to focus well on everything from things that aren’t important to average importance. Don’t decide to start a business, go to college, work a full time job and become an author all at the same time. Decide what’s good in your life and what’s great and choose between the two. You can’t have one or the other and be a success. Will Smith calls it, paraphrased … “being focused, not being in 100 different things at the same time, mastery takes laser like strong focus.” For example, I said no to learning to play guitar, to going to college and to a number of other things. All of these were “good” but I chose to focus on the “great” which was worth much more to me … Say no to more people more often. Schedule your time and set priorities. Don’t give your direct phone number to every client(especially if you have a large client base). Be like an executive at a large organization: checking every activity, finding ways to cut out steps, measuring the gains and the costs, outsourcing to save time and money–innovating to run at a higher level with lower maintenance. Put weight only on the valuable tasks. Put time where it’s valued. Three hours of social networking won’t be the best return on your time. Checking e-mail every 15 minutes will turn a 8 hour day into a 16 hour day. Get rid of access projects and worthless activities.

The second is to take care of your health and rest often. Things like smoking, consuming too much sugar, not taking breaks from staring at a screen for long periods of time or sitting at a desk all day will eventually take its toll on your health. Maybe you don’t exercise enough, maybe you don’t take the weekends off, maybe you don’t socialize enough. This is all vital, not only to your physical health but also to your mental health. Studies show that Americans are one of the most sleep impoverished people in the world. On top of that we don’t get enough oxygen, not breathing deeply enough and not going out side and we don’t drink enough water. And…we literally eat shit, called fast food. It’s an amazement our minds can still function! High productivity calls for high energy, high energy comes from putting the right things in your body.

Scheduling the weekends off to do something fun is something we should all consider non-negotiable. First thoughts are always, “I can’t afford to miss two days of work” … hey, you can’t afford NOT to! Great ideas come on the weekends, the ground work is done on the week days. Keeping the big picture in mind is key to knowing whether your actions are worth doing. And that brings us to number three…constantly reviewing the destination.

It’s easy to just work away like a crazed ape, burn out and crash, and then find out that what you were doing had nothing to do with what you were trying to accomplish. Setting goals is simple, even though most people never do it. If you can manage to join the minority that sets goals, you’re closer but it’s not enough: you actually have to follow through. The second mistake is that people follow through but fail to assess their actions and end up in the wrong direction, or fall short. Constantly tracking yourself is critical in knowing how far you are. Every night ask yourself, what did I do today and how much closer am I to my destination?

You must have reasons enough to trigger that drive inside of you. Some people live off that drive alone. If you can find strong enough reasons to do something you’ll most likely do it with a lot of passion.

In 4-Hour Workweek Tim Ferris gives us an idea on how costly interruptions truly are. He says that for every interruption, it takes us 45 minutes to get back to complete focus on what we were previously doing. How much are you paid per hour? Is one interruption worth 1 hr’s worth of work. (See your self washing a load of bills down the toilet everything you let an interruption get a hold of you) For most of us there are 24 hours in a day, most of 24 hours are devoted to sleeping, working and taking care of interruptions.

I’ve compiling a brief list of ideas, inspired by Tim Ferris and others, you could use to reduce interruptions and spend less time working:

1. Your business phone should always be on voice mail. Contact these people when you decide to check your voice mail(preferable once a day)
2. Clients can call your cell when it’s an emergency. Interruptions are good when it’s for a good reason. Although, handle it like an interruption. (It’s all in the introduction: “I’m quite busy right now./I have an appointment in 5 minutes How can I help you?”–gets them to the point vs. “Hey bro! How’s life?”–life stories are long). Sometimes what people “think” are emergencies are actually very trivial. Instead of listening to them for half an hour, ask them to send you an outline in an e-mail or fax it to you. Once again, use the “I’m actually VERY busy right now and don’t have a pen and paper in front of me to write on. Could you e-mail it? I’ll take a look at it when I get a moment…” Be gentle, but don’t let anyone screw with what you’re currently doing.
3. Check your e-mail/Twitter/FaceBook/voice mail/rss once a day. Unless you’re using these things for reference material for a meeting. Overall these things are 2nd priority, work to your current clients are 1st priority. If you’re 50 clients want to chat with you every day, get them to e-mail you or leave a voice mail message. Most of the stuff in my “inboxs” could sit for 2 days and still not kill me. And on top of that they might never kill me, so why frantically check it every 10-20 minutes. One word: STOP.
4. Avoid meetings unless you have an outline to follow AND a limited time. Some meetings are called for the sake of setting meetings, it’s a waste of time unless you have a purpose(there’s a novel idea!). Every meeting should have a prerequisite outline or summary before you dive in. Answer the question, “What do we need to discuss?” Also, meetings should stay within the 20-30min range. Meetings aren’t for personal chats, try to stay on topic. To avoid wasting time, effective communication should play a roll. If one person is too vague or not quite clear on what he or she is saying, ask questions to clarify, encourage other people to ask questions, etc.
5. Discernment between Work from Play Entrepreneurs who work at home or don’t have shifts have to work on this. Make sure you’re not spending work time playing and play time working. I find it easy to “go and do something” in between gaps of work, thus making the work day longer.

Could you cut a 8 hour day down to a 4 hour day by merely focusing on work and procrastinating the interruptions? Sure you could.

1. Build a completely reliable system of trust and clarity that promotes your ability to relax. Create an empty mind to the whirlwind and a open mind to creative and higher thinking.

A large distractor and productivity killer is having open loops in your short term memory(think of it as your RAM). Another thing that will happen is, when ideas come to you you’ll have a potentially large chance of forgetting them, if you just rely on memory. Ever get that where you had one good idea after another, assumed that you’d remember it, and when the time came to use that idea you couldn’t remember it? We can assume everyone has at one time or another. When you constantly try to store your task list in your RAM(short term memory), it drains the resources you need in order to focus on hard tasks and to stay focused for a long period of time. It also depresses your ability to think on your feet, think creatively and feel relaxed while you work. The ultimate goal for your system should be to store everything in an external storage(note pad, PDA, your computer), one that you can trust will alert you and keep you updated on what you need to be doing, thus freeing your mind of the massive task of trying to remember a simple list and allowing you to focus entirely on the task at hand AND giving you room to clear your mind and relax(with out the “gotta remember this, gotta remember that, but what was it again?”).

The word “system” doesn’t refer to any particular technology. It basically has to be a convenient, easily assessable(and even enjoyable) system that you can update and review on a day to day, hour by hour, minute by minute basis(or however often you need). This can be on your computer, hand held device or just on plain old pen and paper. If you don’t have 24/7 access to your system use something simpler. I use a pen and paper, basically because I can use it anywhere and any time of the day. Use all the resources you need: Filers, calenders, simple sticky notes, what ever works best for YOU.

Now here’s the important part! As said above, the system must be completely reliable and your conscious and subconscious mind must trust it, or else it wont work. YOU CAN’T TRICK YOUR OWN BRAIN. If you end up thinking, “oopps, forgot to add next weeks’ supper with the family, ohh well I’ll remember.” Suddenly you’ll mistrust your system, your brain will be working constantly to remind yourself that you have a supper to attend on this certain date. And since this part of your brain often doesn’t have a concept of time I’ll will constantly remind you. (ironically you might end up forgetting when that reminder is needed.) So what’s wrong with this? It ruins your ability to handle large amounts of tasks and, at the same time, complete those tasks. In short, it screws your ability to get things done. This is a must. It doesn’t matter what your system really is, as long as it works very well for you. Make sure you write down everything you want to get done, projects, next actions, someday/maybe lists, urgent little things, priorities.

How will you know when your system is reliable? When you don’t feel you need to think about anything other than what you’re currently doing. If you’re still rolling something over in your head, put it in your system(unless it should be done right a way) and trust your system to remind you of it later. You will continue this until you’ve achieved clarity. You won’t believe how much of a difference it will make. Ever feel you need to be right-here-right-now but cant stop thinking about everything going on in your day/week/month? That’s because you feel you will lose it OR you aren’t clear on IF what you’re thinking about is even important.

If you need to think something through, write down in your system: “think Calgary Tower re-design through, solve [this] problem and decide next action.” (WARNING: you can confuse the crap out of you with vague, ambiguous phrases. Do yourself a major favor, ALWAYS be concise and clear, specify an “action” you must take and “why” and for “who” and “what” and “where” and “when” it needs to be done.)

There are a few key points to your system:

• It NEEDS to allow you to relax, it needs to put your mind at ease. (“How much you can relax is dereclty related to how much you get done.” – Unknowen)
• It NEEDS to be updated whenever needed to continue to be reliable and trustworthy.
• It must alert YOU.(the word “alert” means your review as well, not just a buzzer that goes off.)
• It should be simple, fun, and it should be 24/7 accessible(i.e. you jump up in the middle of the night remembering something you need to do Wednesday, DON’T “remember” it tomorrow, you might not)

2. Work on your own tenancies to be anti-productive.

“90% of everything you do is mental and 10% technical/physical, to have true control over the 90%, your mind, is to have control over destiny”
The best of us procrastinate and put off until the last minute, eventually causing the minor insignificant issue to escalate into an enormous, sometimes dangerous and costly problem that we are “forced” to deal with or else, our heads! Yeah, urgency has its own emergency system of telling us when we’ve put off for too long. Why do we put off when we know how it could kill us tomorrow? Because it wont kill us today. And because today we have our own pile of emergencies to handle and fires to put out. Fires will start and emergencies will happen, although most of the emergencies could be prevented with a bit of smart planning, some thought and some quick small action before hand. We really don’t have time for this crap. When there’s only time to put out fires and no time to run the store, we loose money. And if we don’t put out the fire, we loose money. The best question would be: how do we run the store, make money, and put out fires when they happen without diverting from priorities? The answer is quite obvious, practice prevention! Do the thing today while it’s easy, do it this week instead of next week. You’ll find that when you do today, what you putting off is now history and it feels like it was done and gone last month instead of a few hours or days ago. It’s almost effortless. This one simple practice can make you rich and free up lots of time.

The funny thing is, people who spend ALL their time on short term pleasure also spend lots of time getting rid of following, succeeded short term pain. The future comes faster than you think, thinking one week into the future is like preparing for tomorrow … or the next minute.

A few keys for killing procrastination and making your mind work for you:

• Do harder things impulsively, over calculating often brings hesitation and uses more energy.
• Ask yourself in the morning, what are the hardest 3 things I could do this morning? As the day goes on, you’ll thank yourself.
• Create a 1 day rule, do urgent things within the day they occur(or 1 week rule for harder or more time consuming tasks)
• Improve communication with your self, “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your communication, with yourself and others” – Tony Robbins

“If you believe you can or can’t, you’re right on both accounts.” – Henry Ford

3. Separate the truly important from the *sarcasm* merely urgent

Ever wonder why people say, “I don’t have any time”? Any time for what? What’s your purpose for your time and how do you find value from time? We can talk about time management, actions, tasks etc etc but unless we truly know why we’re taking that action, the action lacks purpose. We might as well sit on the couch and watch TV. It’s stupid to put so much effort into DOing without knowing what it’s leading up to or what caused the decision to take the action.

Motivation basically comes from emotion. If you have the right emotion you will take action to either avoid pain or gain pleasure. It only makes sense, right? Have you ever done something for no good reason that didn’t cause you pain or pleasure? Probably not. Link anything in human motives to an emotion. Whether it’s fighting in a war, driving to work, having sex, or running a mile a day. There’s either a long term, short term gain or both involved.

Why do you need more time? Maybe, to spend more time doing things that feel meaningful to you. And you’re emotional about what you want to accomplish either short term or long term. (e.g. you go to ‘John’s Booze Mart’ to buy a 26 or Bacardi, drinking may mean pleasure to you or else you wouldn’t bother going there in the first place.)

Basically the meaning we put on actions, and how we determine how much time they’re work, the priority level, stems from this:

Your mission in life … then
Your goals and dreams, filtered by your mission … then
Your planned actions, filtered by your goals and dreams, filtered by your mission … then
What you do right NOW, determined by your planned actions, filtered by your goals and dreams, filtered by your mission … then

The value of what you put on NOW is decided by what is deeper down. It’s hard to know what an action is worth unless you know how it relates to the truly important.

This is the truly important. Don’t confuse the important with the urgent, things like paying bills, washing the floors or updating your facebook status(unless, of course, these things lead up to your actual goals). When you learn how to measure actions between importance and urgency you will understand what deserves more attention.

4. Rest your mind, Review your lead and lag measures, sharpen the saw and see the big picture.

There are those who like to spend every waking moment on doing something and getting a little more work done. It’s great to push the limits and to strive to a little harder. It’s also harder to stop once you get into the addicting groove of work. People who tend to overwork tend to burn out every so often. Try not to do this to yourself, there’s more to life than work. If you neglect the big picture, how will you know when you get there? Will you just continue to fill your void of boredom with more work?

“If you don’t know why you’re doing something, you can never do enough of it.” – Unknown

“Work for the sake of work is a form of laziness, how many lazy people try to become more productive?”

“Dedication is often just meaningless work in disguise” – Tim Ferris, Author of 4-Hour Workweek

Some things that are completely crucial to your focus and mental health:

• Review the big picture Friday or Saturday morning, plan the next week, organize, get everything off your chest. The only thing you should think about is how awesome the coming week’s going to be. Don’t stress about things you have to do and make sure they’re in your system.
• Enjoy the entire weekend, or one day if you have demanding work. Don’t think about anything business unless you absolutely need to.
• Talk to people you haven’t talked to in a long time, hang out, splurge a little at the mall, do something different.
• Since you have nothing on your mind, a flood of creative ideas will probably hit you. Make sure they are kept down on paper, otherwise just forget about them all together.

Have you ever spent the entire weekend catching up on work, just to find yourself on Monday morning wishing you could just take a day off and have some free time already? There’s an old saying, “Too much work and not enough play, makes Jack a …” yeah you know… life’s too short to not have fun. Your brain needs to understand that there’s a bigger world out there than that little problem you’ve been bashing your head out over for the past month.

“Life could be more enjoyable if we stopped taking so many un-serious aspects of life too seriously too often and just sat back … and to live and let live now and then! The variety offered to us in this short time on earth gives us opportunity to explore and to grasp a deeper sense of what life is, to explore, experience and continually be inspired and to eventually act in abundance and give back” – Westly Hartell

5. The Art of Elimination!

Some of the best thins in life, leave. Use the art of elimination to create a more productive life:

• The enemy of the GREAT is the GOOD! Get rid of the GOOD, make room for the GREAT!
• Use Pareto’s 80/20 principle to eliminate the 80% that only yield only 20% results and focus on the 20% that yield 80% results.
• Use the Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the alloted time. Give work less time to fill: “The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource. The reverse is not true.” – cited from Wikipedia 3 hours can be more than 12 hours.

“One does not accumulate, but eliminate. It is not the increase but the daily decrease. The height of cultivation runs to simplicity.” – Bruce Lee

I have to admit when I first picked this book up, I didn’t know what to expect from it. There are all kinds of tid-bits about productivity on the Internet, and thought I knew a thing or two about time management already. Liking the idea of learning “the art of stress free productivity” I dove into it.
Photo Credit: mslindz

What caught me in the beginning was the methodology Allen uses that focuses on clarity, keeping organized, and creating a system that puts your mind at rest and allows you to relax while working. What makes this book PRICELESS is the one concept I learned at the very beginning: the more you tasks you think about the more open-loops you have tugging at your brain, the more more open loops you have the less productive you are. The only way to get rid of open-loops are to be able to forget about them, by inserting them into a system(like on paper, a computer, physical space, what-not)

There are five core principles that Allen discusses in his book:

1. Collect – Get a load off your chest by capturing the instructions you need to remember, that you can return to, into what Allen calls “baskets”. A basket can be any number of ways to store and track your tasks. Paper, PDA, a physical space, e-mail, journals, or whatnot. What ever works best for you. Allen explains that in order to stay organized and updated your baskets need to keep reviewed once a week. This gives you a chance to update and empty your baskets.

2. Process – Do it(if it takes under two minutes–two minute rule). Delegate it(someone else can do it better if you can’t). Defer it(maybe it’s not something that needs to be worked on now). If an item does not require action NOW, file it, throw it away or give it a “maybe” for later.

3. Organize – There are different types of tasks: Next actions, projects, waiting for(stuff you’ve delegated), someday/maybe(e.g. “eat snails in Fiji” or “Add on to the house”).

4. Review – Do a weekly review on everything in your system. If you let things slip, you’re system gets out of date really fast, and that won’t maintain the quality of stess-free productivity you’re striving for.

5. Do – Probably the simplest part, now that you know exactly what you should be currently doing, DO IT.

These are the basic principles that the book covers, however, the book goes way deeper and gives more concise information on how to use the principles and apply it to your personal and business.

“Get everything out of your head. Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up – not when it blows up. Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you’re doing (and not doing) at any time.” – Allen

If you haven’t read this book, READ IT!