Do you often find yourself being late? 5 min late? 10 min late? Sometimes missing your train? Or storming into a meeting while taking your jacket off when the meeting has already started; sitting down when people already discussing the agenda? Apologising for delaying with reply to an e-mail or for not replying for more than two weeks?
If you find yourself doing any of the above, then today’s article is for you. And the reason I am bringing up this topic today because recently I had a coaching call with one of my private clients, a research staff at a University, on this same topic. During our coaching program that stretched over several weeks so far, he’s been constantly late for our coaching calls; about 10 min late! It was obviously not serving him very well, as I needed to cut the calls short of 45 min, because I have my own schedule and other appointments. He also has been constantly apologising for sending the coaching call preparation form just before the call while I require the form to be sent to me an evening before the call.
I brought up this problem on the latest call with this client, and part of the reason was to see if he does the same with his other commitments and activities. We’ve been working with him on attracting new opportunities into his life; and once they start coming into his life but he is constantly late for them – it’s not going to be any good!
I believe, how you do anything is how you do everything. If my client is constantly late for our calls, he would probably be late for those other new exciting opportunities we were working on creating for him. And his reply was that yes indeed he is often late, he sometimes misses his trains and he constantly needs to apologies for being late.
If it sounds familiar to you, then ask yourself a question: would it be good to make a shift and start being on time more often? And I don’t mean being on time ALL the time right from the start, I am sometimes late too – after all “I am work in progress”! But for the things that are very important to me, I am always on time or even 5-10 minutes early, just to give myself time to get my thoughts together and prepare myself for whatever is in front of me. The important things for me are the private calls with my clients, business meetings and face-to-face meetings with my clients, and other important commitments that I have.
And I would like to share with you today how I made the shift, as I used to run from one thing to the next being a bit late for every one of them. I want to share with you 3 small tips on how to start making a shift to being on time for your important appointments.
Let’s focus on those few important things that are going on in your life right now. We want you to be on time for them, and the way to making a shift is do the following thing first:
At the start of the week, look at the whole week in your diary (or calendar, or planner), or better yet do the Weekly Summit (search for Weekly Summit in my blog and download this awesome productivity tool that allows you to plan your week) (here is the direct link to Weekly Summit). You sit down and look at your week, and this is when you see all your appointments; this is also when you schedule the tasks you need to do to achieve your important goals that don’t usually involve appointments or deadlines.
For example I schedule “appointments with myself” to do some creative work such as writing and creating content for my readers. Or in your case being a scientist, it would be to schedule time to sit down and write a paper. You can actually make an appointment with yourself and write it in your diary. This way you insure that you’ll do some work on it this week.
When you look at all those appointments, start allowing some time between those appointments. For example earlier I used to schedule things from 2 to 3pm and then from 3 to 4pm, despite of it being too tight. If I needed to transfer between different locations and there was a traffic jam, and the previous appointment was late then of course I would be late for the next one. So I don’t do the tight scheduling anymore, I allow the time to peacefully transfer from one thing to the other, as well as time to gather my thoughts together. I want to be totally present for this appointment, with my thoughts being together.
In other words, your first tip is to build in the “getting there” time into your schedule.
The second tip is going to be to do something specific at the beginning of your day, and I’ll illustrate it with my own example. In the morning I usually look into my diary to see what appointments I have, what kind of plans I made. It allows me to create a picture of all these events and also to see if I have enough time to get from one appointment to the other. I also make some time to get there, making a mental note when I would need to leave to be there on time. It’s my internal preparation for the day.
The third tip is to start allowing more time for yourself to “get there”. I know people who start moving out of the flat at the time when the appointment starts. So they allow zero time for themselves to get there. If it sounds like you, or if you are constantly 5-10 minutes late, then start allowing yourself 10-15 min more to get there. If you often miss trains or late for certain kinds of appointments just start allowing yourself 10-15 min more to get there.
And if you are a bit too early – and I know people that hate to be too early and they rather be too late – it is something for you to start getting used to. We can talk here a bit about what you can do during those 5 minutes you are waiting for the start of the meeting so that you don’t feel like you are wasting your time. You can do such thing as gathering your thoughts; you can start thinking who do you want to be during this meeting deciding what proactive role you can assume during this meeting.
Those are a couple of things you can do if you are 5 min too early, but you might be just on time! So this is great to start making this shift, beginning with the appointments that are really important to you.
Your Productivity for Scientists assignment for this week:
1) Start planning on a weekly basis and schedule the time required “to get there”. Avoid the mistake of planning the appointments and forgetting to plan in the time for getting there.
2) Start panning on a daily basis, when you look at your dairy in the morning. Look at the important things to make sure you have enough time to prepare and get to them. You can run the whole process of getting there through you mind quickly and this will help you to be there on time.
3) Start allowing yourself 10-15 min more to get there.
And if you feel like that there are no such important appointments in your schedule that you need to make an extra effort to be there on time and with your thoughts gathered, if you feel like these are just appointments that happened to be in your diary but they are nothing that you want to do and achieve, then we need to talk!
I specialise in helping scientists to get clear on what they want and what is important to them, to see what is in the way to achieving it, to start working towards it and to achieve their goals. If you feel like nothing in your schedule is important to you and you can’t see a point in making an effort to be there on time then we need to talk. We can turn it around for you so that you too have important (and exciting) things in your diary that are important for you.Just e-mail me at olga@olgadegtyareva.com and we’ll schedule a 30 min skype call which is free of charge and we talk about these issues!
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