I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know (30 page)

5. Don’t be dogged by a long personal to-do list.
Is there really no one to delegate a task to? Then deal with it as soon as possible. One of my biggest mistakes after my kids were born was that I allowed a monster to-do list to stalk me like the hound of Hell. The smartest thing I could have done was to occasionally take a personal half day and wipe everything off my list, but I never wanted to use my personal days that way. I would have been so much better off doing so and preventing that hound from relentlessly nipping at my heels every day.

6. Don’t always see stress as a demon.
Mika Brzezinski points out that stress isn’t going away, so we should “embrace it, learn how to harness it, and make it work for us.” Tell yourself you’re going to convert stress into energy to power through a project so you get it out of the way.

7. Ask yourself if you need to be working as late as you do.
Have you ever noticed how people love to brag about how many hours they work each week? There’s the sixty-hour week and the eighty-hour week and even worse. Yes, many of us have ended up in downsized conditions and have no choice but to work longer. But are you doing it simply because it’s become a habit or because other people in your office are doing it and you feel you have to follow suit? Test the waters and leave earlier. Watch the sunset at home.

8. Resist multitasking.
Many studies have shown that when you multitask, neither activity is done well or with true satisfaction. (I once tried to do a radio interview at my desk while reading e-mails and lost my train of thought!)

8 Ways to Bring on the Bliss

1. Figure out the things that give you great pleasure
(or could give you great pleasure if you were already doing them), and find a way to include them in your life. When I was the editor of
Redbook
, my life was particularly zany. My kids were young then, and I dashed home from work each day just after five, fixed dinner, supervised homework, read to the kids, and then, after they went to bed, worked for several more hours. My husband and I had just bought an old town house in Manhattan, and I was also trying to contend with renovations that had left parts of the house in shambles. My idea of “me” time back then was watching
Law & Order
reruns at 11 p.m. I felt frazzled most days.

One afternoon, my eighty-something next-door neighbor asked me to attend a lecture with her at the Explorers Club. Because I admired her fiercely and knew she lived alone, I could not bring myself to use the “no” phrase I advocated earlier. The talk turned out to be on Turkey, and as the lecturer’s slides flashed on the screen, I had an epiphany. With all the demands of my life, I’d let one of my great pleasures—travel—slip away. I made a pledge to myself to bring it back with at least one trip a year.

The key thing is to build good stuff into your schedule. Dr. Holly Phillips says that one of the activities that affords her the most pleasure is seeing her girlfriends, so without fail she has drinks with her friends on a certain night of the week.

2. Be in the moment.
When your life is packed, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking about what you need to do next or what happened just before. My yoga instructor, Angela Attia, who is also an extremely talented aerialist (and Stanford grad!), taught me something life-changing from the Tantric philosophy, the type of yoga she practices.

“We need to learn to be more present in every moment and fully enjoy whatever is there at that moment,” she says. “It’s all about bringing your mind to what your body is actually experiencing right now.” So, for example, if you eat a piece of chocolate, you want to savor every morsel of it. If you walk down the street, you want to take a moment to notice some interesting piece of architecture or simply how warm your toes feel in your new socks. “We have to keep giving ourselves reminders to come back to enjoying all that our senses have to offer us,” Attia says. “Because in between will be moments when life’s mundaneness or hectic pace takes us away from that.”

3. Ask for what you want.
I talked a lot in part I about the importance of asking for what you want on the job. But you must also ask for what matters in your personal life.

Sometimes what you need involves an intersection of your work and your personal life, such as the ability to work at home on Fridays because you have a young child. Bite the bullet and ask your boss. One of the most outrageous things I did in my early thirties, before I was an editor in chief, was ask my boss for permission to take a three-week vacation. Newly divorced, I was overwhelmed with a desire to escape from it all, and when I heard about a chance to tag penguins in Patagonia with a World Wildlife Association–sponsored program, I knew it was the trip for me. Yes, I had a pit in my stomach when I asked her if I could go, but I also presented a plan for how things would work in my absence. To my utter thrill, she consented. The next year I summoned my nerve to ask again—and that time I worked with Earthwatch restoring an archaeological site on Rarotonga, a magical island a few hours southwest of Tahiti.

Here’s the one thing to keep in mind: though the old expression is “It never hurts to ask,” it
does
if you leave your boss with the wrong impression. You don’t want him to suspect that you aren’t fully invested. It can all be in how you phrase the ask. For instance, instead of saying, “I want to be with my baby more,” say, “Having one day a week when I’m not commuting will give me extra time to focus on the big picture.” Instead of “I just love how cute penguins look in those little tuxedos,” say, “I’ve found that travel really charges me up and makes me even more creative. I know I’ll come back full of ideas.”

4. Instead of multitasking, try maximizing your time.
Sometimes it’s okay to kill two birds with one stone if one activity actually enhances the other rather than distracts from it. Book clubs are the perfect example—they’re a way to connect with friends and also be mentally stimulated. When my son was small, I noticed that he enjoyed spotting and mentally cataloguing things he saw in nature. It nudged me into thinking about myself and nature, how I had loved fishing when I was younger, and how I missed having time for outdoor hobbies. Then suddenly I had a brainstorm: I decided to see if I could interest my son in bird-watching and make that my hobby, too. It turned out he loved it, and we’ve spent many, many hours sharing this hobby.

5. Savor your job.
Sometimes you can get so caught up in complaining about how nutty your job is that you lose sight of its awesomeness. Think about how you look to others. Strut your stuff. Accept an exploratory interview with someone who wants to pick your brain, and enjoy talking about your job and what makes it so good.

6. Have a pretty bedroom.
With no stacked laundry piles anywhere. Having a beautiful sanctuary you can retreat to each night is one of the most blissful things in the world.

7. Discover half-hour power.
No matter how packed your day is, try to leave thirty minutes each day—block it out—to recharge your batteries somehow. If you don’t have kids, it could be a half hour before work when you meditate. If you have kids, read and only read before turning out the lights.

8. Go big or go home.
Bring the same zest to your personal life as you do to your job. Don’t postpone the fun—even if you have to schedule it in.

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Terrific Time-Management Tricks
 
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W
hen I was in my mid-twenties, I suffered from a really annoying problem: I was a terrible procrastinator. Though I was a hard worker, I couldn’t seem to get on top of my assignments. I was always turning things in at the very last moment, and sometimes I even pulled all-nighters to finish articles. I hated the anxiety my procrastination caused in me. So one day I vowed to tackle it.

Here’s what I did: I began reading books on time management. And I even wrote articles about it so I could speak directly to authorities on the subject. Two of my favorite experts were Alan Lakein, the author of
How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life
, and Edwin Bliss, the author of
Getting Things Done: The ABCs of Time Management.
Over the years I’ve even come up with a few tricks of my own.

If you want to get organized and use your time brilliantly, I suggest you read one of the books by those experts. There are also workshops on the subject, some of them offered online. But to tide you over, here are the strategies that have worked for me. Follow them, and I can practically guarantee that you will feel you have more hours in your day and use them more productively.

Find the time of day when you’re most “in the zone.”
I’ve always been a night owl and spent years skulking around the house when my family was in bed, reading, working, and watching a cable TV show about a vampire cop. But when I started to write my first mystery, opening my laptop at ten each night, the words came out in terrible fits and starts. After a few weeks of experimenting, I discovered that I was far more creative in the early morning. (Studies show that many people are actually at the top of their game in the morning.) So I rose early to write, and my novel began to come together. Having had that eureka moment, I also began focusing on my creative magazine projects early in the day, and saved the more routine stuff for afternoons. It made me far more efficient.

To determine when
you’re
in the zone, think about when you’re most productive and most engaged, when your thoughts begin to flow.

Assign a value to the things you do.
Lakein talks in his book about ranking tasks as A, B, or C, and that’s one way to do it. (In his autobiography former president Bill Clinton said he read Lakein’s book as a young man and still has the “A list” he jotted down then.)

Another way to do it is to ask yourself, “How freaking important is this,
really
?” In other words, will it really pay off for you at work or home? I once called a pal of mine, an editor in chief with two young kids, on a Sunday morning and was told by a babysitter that she was doing a cable TV show in New Jersey. As I set down the phone, I couldn’t help but wonder how important an appearance on a little cable show could have been for her professionally, especially since it meant sacrificing part of a Sunday with her family. She already had plenty of TV experience, so this wasn’t adding to it, and she would hardly be reaching many readers at that hour. And yet I could also see how she might have been talked into it by her PR person or said yes as a knee-jerk response.

I started thinking about how often I automatically said yes to things that were just plain stupid—because they sounded good or had once been good or someone had led me to believe they were good.

Throw overboard anything that doesn’t matter—and don’t look back.
Now that you’ve assigned a value to activities in your life, eliminate those that don’t count. You can either delegate them to someone else or just plain dump them.

Regularly review your “delegated” list and add to it.
I learned this from a successful woman I interviewed for a book years ago. She said that women know they need to delegate, but they make their list once and don’t update it. Her point: you should constantly be thinking about fresh ways to delegate or let go of something—because new options are always emerging.

Never handle a piece of paper more than once.
I think I first heard this from Lakein. Such a fabulous tip. Every time you pick something up from your in-box (or look at it on your computer) and then put it back down (or close it), promising yourself you’ll deal with it later, you use up seconds that eventually add up to minutes. Vow to take action the first time you glance at something. If it’s a letter, answer it. If it needs to be filed, file it. If it requires your opinion, give it. What this means is that you must go through your in-box and e-mail only during parts of the day when you’ve allotted yourself enough time to deal with each item effectively.

Do the math.
Periodically it’s good to figure out how much time certain activities suck up. Add up the minutes or hours. When you see the results, you may want to delegate or eliminate some stuff. Surfing the Web, for instance: 30 minutes a day equals 3½ hours a week equals 182 hours a year, which is 7½ days a year! When we polled
Cosmo
readers about their social media habits, 40 percent of those who used it were engaged for more than two hours a day. Great if it makes you happy. But could you use some of that time for other, even more valuable activities?

Slice the salami.
Okay, if I had to thank one person for the fact that I’ve been able to write mysteries and thrillers while I had a full-time job, it would probably be Edwin Bliss. In his book he recommends a tip he calls “slice the salami,” and that technique made all the difference for me. Bliss points out that we often fail to tackle important tasks not because we aren’t capable of doing them but because they seem too big and unappealing—like a huge hunk of salami.

That was the problem for me. Writing a book seemed so daunting. In my twenties I’d tell myself I was going to spend an entire Saturday morning writing, but then I’d find any reason to avoid sitting in front of my laptop—sometimes because the rug pad needed trimming! Bliss’s advice is that you must slice a big project into thin, appetizing amounts so that you won’t be put off. That’s what I finally did; rather than vowing to write for a full morning, I told myself I would work on my mystery for fifteen minutes each morning. It seemed easy enough to pull off, and I sat down religiously each Saturday and Sunday morning. Even with just fifteen minutes of writing, the pages began to accumulate. Before long I was staying at my desk longer. My new goal became thirty minutes, then an hour, then two hours, and so on.

This principle works in so many areas: projects, hobbies you hope to start, even exercise. My yoga teacher, who also teaches Pilates and aerobics, told me that in her years of experience she has found that following the Christmas holidays, people who sign up for one session a week are far more likely to stick with it than those who sign up for two or more sessions a week.