The Productivity Pro® Blog by Laura Stack - Time Management, Getting Things Done, How to Be More Productive

My older child, Meagan, just entered 6th grade (middle school in our district), which involves moving from class to class.  We bought the requisite list of supplies, including the exact type of binder the teachers wanted to organize school papers.  I was unable to find the brand listed in the stores, so I ordered it from the Internet.  I thought, “Wow! This is going to be a fabulous binder.  I can’t wait to see what the fuss is all about.”  When I received the binder, I was confused.  It had no sections, no pockets, no tabs, no dividers, nothing.  I wondered “How in the world is she going to keep the papers separate for the six different classes she’s taking?”  I tried to explain to her the binder wasn’t going to work, but she was insistent on using the exact type specified.  I kept my mouth shut and my eyes on the binder during the first week, observing as she attempted to organize all the various papers.  She eventually came to me, sheepish, and asked me to help her.  “Mom, all my papers are mixed up in a big pile, and I can’t keep anything straight.”  We ceremoniously emptied the binder and put it in the playroom.  We went shopping and looked for a binder with six different sections built in and soon found the perfect solution.  The lesson of course is not to assume that other people know what’s best for your child.  To help them succeed, you must guide their choices and be educated yourself on the different options and best way to organize them.  Once the system is in place they are pretty good at using it.

Designate a specific homework time.  Many children come home to no structure.  Yes, I agree it’s important to allow a child to relax and unwind a bit after a long day, but it could be a mistake to allow your child to put off homework until after dinner.  Instead of spending time with the family, playing, doing chores, and doing personal maintenance, children end up underestimating how long homework is going to take and stay up late, cutting into their bedtimes, causing chronic sleepiness and inattentiveness during class the next day.  I let the children have a half-hour to play with the neighbors, watch television, talk on the phone, whatever, but then it’s right to homework until dinner.  Usually they are done before we eat and can spend the evening relaxing without having assignments hanging over their heads.  Teach them the old mantra, “Work before play.”  Be aware of what projects were assigned and the due dates, and make sure they are cracking at them bit by bit, so they won’t attempt to complete it all last minute and pull an all-nighter (which usually includes you).  Help them identify all the steps needed to complete long-term assignments and work on them in manageable chunks.

Get the kid’s day started. Pack (or have your kids pack) lunch boxes if they don’t buy at school; make sure the clothes are selected down to the last hair bow and shoes; lay out breakfast dishes; fill up the backpacks (don’t forget homework, permission slips, lunch money, show-and-tell, gym clothes, musical instruments, etc.)

Put library books in their own tote. How many times have you taken your child to the library to check out books, accidentally combined them with their own books, forget they were on the bookshelf, and owe lots of money when you finally discovered and returned them? Simple solution: Keep a separate tote for library books. The next time you go to a conference, keep the cheesy bag you get to carry around your materials. Take it to the library with you and immediately put your checked books inside it to transport home. Train your kids to always replace library books after reading them into the special book bag. Meagan has a separate compartment in her school backpack just for school library books that need to be kept separately and returned. Using these methods, you’ll never again have to rummage through a hundred books on your kids’ shelves to find the borrowed ones.

Don’t make lunches for your kids! Every month, Meagan brings home the school lunch menu and hangs it on the refrigerator. The cooks at her school are diligent in creating a balanced meal, including protein and vegetables (their lunches are healthier than mine).  Each night, she looks at what’s being served at school the next day. If she wrinkles her nose at the offering, she packs her lunch that night and puts it in the refrigerator. Generally, though, she likes what’s being served and buys her lunch. She has a spending account I fill up once or twice a year, so I never waste time looking for change in the morning. Meagan simply gives her account number to the cashier and takes her food. When it comes right down to it, the cost of purchasing at school (national average: $2.00 per day) is minimal. When you factor in the cost of the food (juice boxes, deli meat, pre-cut and washed vegetables, apples, etc.) plus the time (ten minutes a day equals 50 minutes a week) and hassle to prepare it (priceless), the extra few bucks a week spent in hard cash is worth a panic-free morning.

Children have a difficult time conceptualizing proper systems and are bewildered by what tools to use to make their lives easier.  However, if given the proper tools, children are great at using the systems you establish for them.  Here are some tools and ideas you could put into place to help your children organize their environments and feel in control of their surroundings:

Make the playroom easy to play in. Now that you’ve pared down the toys you keep, design a plan for these toys to actually get played with. If your kids can’t see a toy, they don’t think to look for it, and will soon forget it exists (and you’ll probably discover forgotten treasures in the sorting process). Take advantage of any available vertical wall space in a dedicated playroom or on one wall of a bedroom by installing adjustable shelves. Leave more room between the floor and the first shelf to accommodate large items. Place the other shelves about 18 inches apart. For the odd areas under the windows, purchase bins, carts, and storage units from Target. Once you have your organizing equipment, group the toys in a logical order based on type. Invest $30 in a high-grade labeler so you can print and stick custom labels to the edge of the shelves, indicating what goes there.

We have large bins (we actually toss the lid, because they are hard for children to open and aren’t very useful) for the following:

·        Construction equipment

·        Large animals

·        Dress up

·        Balls and outside toys

We have medium bins (no lid) for the following:

·        Toy weapons and vehicles

·        Superhero accessories

·        Hot wheels track and accessories

·        Musical instruments

·        Legos

·        Books stacked vertically as in a bookshelf (I find bins keeps books from falling over and out of bookshelves and they can be sorted by type)

·        Blocks

·        Dinosaurs

·        Stuffed animals

We have small bins for the following:

·        Plastic play dolls and animals

·        Scratch paper

·        Stickers

·        Markers

·        Crayons

·        Colored pencils

·        Craft items

·        Blocks

·        Pegs

·        Puppets

·        Electronic games

·        Electronic books

We have two large rolling carts with three drawers each. One contains:

·        Large superhero characters

·        Medium superhero characters

·        Small superhero characters

The second set of drawers contains:

·        Small superhero pieces (discs, small plastic weapons used by superheroes)

·        Sets of small items in individual Sandwich Baggies (Ninja Turtles with their own things, Wrestlers with their folding chairs and champion belts, etc.)

·        Lace up sets

We used to have a third set of drawers in a rolling cart that had Barbie dolls, Barbie clothing, and Barbie equipment. But when Meagan announced she was too old for them, I secretly bagged up her well-worn dolls and put them in the crawl space. When she’s 16, I will give her the chance to keep her old Barbies (I hope). If not—OUT! We keep larger toys, such as spacecraft, electronic games, and musical instruments on the shelves. Puzzles and games are kept in the box the toy came in. Don’t toss the original box and substitute bags with twist ties or less durable options.

Keeping toys in bedrooms. Many homes don’t have a separate “playroom,” and children keep toys in their rooms. The key is to take advantage of unused vertical space. Select one wall away from the bed and install shelves from the floor to the ceiling. Store toys that are played with frequently (such as favorite dolls or superheroes) in plastic bins and store them underneath the child’s bed. Use a chest at the foot of the bed for a bench for tying shoes, with a lid that opens to conceal additional toys.

Organize entryways. Make it easy for your children to keep their shoes, gloves, and jackets organized. We installed cubbies vertically up a wall in our mudroom, which is right off the garage, and assigned the highest to the tallest child. As each kid walks through the door, sunglasses, mittens, and hats are immediately deposited in the cubbies. Each child also has three hooks for jackets, coats, and backpack. Shoes are placed underneath the cubbies, so they are out of the way.

Teach them to be consistent.  Think about all the annoying little things that are constantly strewn about your home or an item your children can never find.  For example, if your children are constantly losing their shoes, they don’t yet have a proper routine.  Establish a shoe landing pad, right as they enter the house, and teach them to take off their shoes in the same place, every time.  If things end up on the living room floor that belong upstairs, simply because your child doesn’t want to climb the stairs to put things away, allow them to use a stair step or basket as a temporary place to accumulate items that need to go up.  Then next time they head upstairs, they can just grab the entire pile or basket.  The kids know to put their school papers or nifty artwork on my office desk for safekeeping. They’ve learned that if it’s on the kitchen counter, it’s eligible to be tossed, so if they want Mommy to look at it, they put it on her “safe zone.” If you don’t have a place for everything, they can’t learn to put things in their place. 

Handling transitions

My three children started school and have experienced many "firsts" over the last few weeks: new schools, supplies, teachers, classes, friends, clothes, and schedules. This is a universal time of change for all parents of school-age children. And though much has suddenly changed in our children’s lives, much has stayed the same in some: disorganized bedrooms, poor time management, lack of discipline, and stress. As parents, it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of settling our children into the new school year and making sure they’re comfortable that we forget about the ongoing struggles our children endure the rest of the year.

According to John Stamm, Ph.D., and Bill Stockton (Psych Savvy: Children and Organizational Skills), "School failure and unhappiness in the school setting can be often traced to poor organizational skills." Evidence shows that children having trouble "dramatically improved their school performance because of assistance in becoming better organized." There are several important areas where you can help your children get organized and keep their home and school lives running smoothly, setting them up for success later in life:

My boys Johnny and James are six and five years old, respectively. Since the time they were young, I’ve encouraged them to be self-sufficient and "help daddy" or "help mommy" get themselves dressed, wash themselves, put their dirty clothes in the hamper, and so on. Now that they’re able to put on their pajamas at night and brush their own teeth, I can get other things done while they’re busy, and then we can all spend more rest or play time together.

Transitions are the most difficult times of the day for them: from nighttime to morning time; from workday to evening; and from evening to bedtime. These transition periods are called "witching hours," and they are fraught with stress and chaos. Every person, every household, has a witching hour (sometimes more). Even though transition times are only a small portion of the day, they can pack enough punch to spill over into the rest of it. However, with proper planning, you can flow through these high-stress periods more easily.

From workday to evening.

We have affectionately dubbed ours "the 5:00 melt-down hour." We’ve been working hard all day. The kids have been stimulated at school. When we pick them up, they have a million things to talk about. Dinner needs to be made and the table set. The kids start to fight. Meagan talks to me a mile-a-minute, as ten-year-old girls do. I can feel my blood pressure rising. Before long, I’m short-tempered and hungry. My ears are ringing from the sudden rise in decibels. "Will you kids just be quiet?" I shout, which makes things worse. Sensing my stress, James starts teasing Johnny, and Johnny begins whining, to which John responds by sending everyone to his or her room. What a great way for the night to begin!

Rest assured that this is the normal scenario in households across America—yes, even in The Productivity Pro’s house—trust me. But you can plan for this witching hour and do something about it once you know what the patterns are.

Because John is the chef in our family and is busy cooking dinner at our witching hour, it makes sense for me to pick up the boys from daycare. With Meagan having returned on the school bus, it also makes sense for her to drive with me and download her day so she isn’t competing for attention with the boys at home. Since they’re hungry and cranky when they get home, it makes sense to pick them up at 5:00 instead of 4:45 so they can eat a snack with the class. Once we get home, Meagan sets the table and helps John while I take the boys to another part of the house, connect with them, and keep them occupied. Once John rings the dinner bell and we sit down to eat, our entire household mellows out.

From evening to bedtime.

Perhaps bedtime is your battle, trying to do baths, brush teeth, read books, and get everyone ready for the morning. When it comes to bedtime, a consistent routine is the best way for kids to transition from awake to asleep. Don’t wait until they say they’re sleepy—it may be too late! Start their bedtime routine at the same time each night, and use a checklist to remind and guide them through the process. Set aside at least 30 minutes every night so you don’t have to rush. Even before your kids can read, you can use a checklist using pictures and stickers. Our kids each have two checklists of activities they must complete—one for the morning and one for the evening. We simply have to say, "Do your checklist," and most of the time (many times with encouragement and reminders like "where are you on your checklist?") things get done without repeating the message ten million times—and getting frustrated doing so.

You can even put timed deadlines on each one activity so they know where they should be in the one hour of time designated to get out the door. At first, give rewards for making the deadlines. After a while, start to use penalties: e.g., miss more than two deadlines and you lose your television time.

Here is a sample checklist to get you started and modify to meet your needs. This list was created when my daughter was in first grade (obviously, they change as the child gets older, although some older children still need reminders to flush!).

If you’d like to have electronic copies of these checklists, visit www.TheProductivityPro.com and look for "Free Stuff" under the "Resources" menu.

When your children get to bed easily, maybe, you won’t feel too rattled to relax. You might even think about tackling the mountain of bills and filing you’ve been putting off.

From nighttime to morning.

Perhaps your witching hour is first thing in the morning, trying to get everyone out the door. Assuming I’ve set myself up for a great day (see #5), I want to get my morning off to a great start. If I have scheduled to be in my office all day, my morning goes something like this: get myself ready first so I’m not shouting directions and moderating disagreements from inside my bedroom; toss the comforter on the bed; focus on the kids, making sure Meagan is up and get the boys dressed for school (John usually drives them to daycare in plenty of time to participate in the school breakfast—healthy, faster, and cheaper); have my breakfast and coffee; take a few steps around the house and tidy up; toss in a load of laundry if something can’t wait until the weekend; put my husband’s stray papers into the newspaper bin (a subject of another conversation); unload the dishwasher. Then I’m ready to begin my day!

Understanding your transition times, figuring out your patterns, what happens when and why, and then scheduling and planning for them will make a big difference in making your witching hour disappear.

I asked my newsletter subscribers the question:  “What is the best strategy you use to organize your kids, help them manage their time, or teach them to be productive?”  Here are some of the better responses:

One thing that I taught my children to do while they were still young "and trainable" was to choose the clothes that they were going to wear to school the next day, the night before.  In this way, everything was clean & pressed, there was no running around asking for their favorite shirt, etc.  Needless to say, I follow this routine myself to this day which I notice is also #54 in your book. ( I don’t know if my children follow this anymore)

Of course everyone has had a "job chart" on their kitchen wall for the chores their children are responsible for each week.  As a single parent, my children probably had many more items than a 2 parent family.

• Emptying the trash can & bringing it to the outside container
• Making their beds
• Cleaning their rooms
• Fixing easy meals (after an automobile accident, my children cooked all of our meals for a month)
• Vacuuming
• Laundry (my children were taught early on to sort clothes by:  colored, whites, and flimsy)
• Bringing in the mail (lived in rural area and they had to go to the mailbox on the street)

Hope this helps.

Lorraine

To have them break a large school assignment into small, manageable parts and monitor their progress. For example, my 6^th graders are required to read a minimum of 1000 pages by 08 November. They first thing we did was move the due date to 01 November, and then calculate how many pages per week were needed to meet the requirement. Then we wrote the number of pages they should have read by the end of each week in the planner that the school provides. Also, by moving the due date and continuing to read until the actual due date, they will do more than what is required to “get by,” which is an important lesson in itself.

Patricia W. (parent of three, ages 13, 11, 11)

I use a control journal and routines to help my children. They check off what they have completed and they always know what they should be doing. They have a morning, after school, and evening checklist in their control journal (It is a place to keep important things…I have one myself).

The evening checklist is especially important because it gets them ready for the next day and there is no fuss in the morning…their launch pad has everything they will need for the day, all ready to go.

I learned this from a very good resource and time saver: the Flylady. I would recommend visiting her website at Flylady.net. She has transformed my life.

Basically, it boils down to this: routines save you.

Kristie L.

My daughter is very active and all her activities come with their own stuff.  So in addition to her school back pack which she un-loads and re-loads each evening, she has an activity bag for example right now it is soccer season so she has a bag that is always ready to grab and go for soccer it has her ball, cleats, shingaurds, etc… and when she comes home from practice or a game it gets un-loaded and re-loaded.  No more searching for things when we are trying to get out the door!

Gordon

We always used a family calendar on the wall in the kitchen, so they could add events as well as look and see if any family activities were going on before they committed to something.  It was like having a mini-planner and getting them started on time organization.

Marilyn K.

I was teaching a full-day seminar in time management. One of the participants complained several times that "This is so hard!" or "There’s no way I could do that." After a while, it was quite apparent to me and his colleagues that while he wanted to change his behaviors, he had absolutely no faith in his ability to do so. I’ve never been one to tell people that being productive is easy. Sometimes it’s downright hard! However, I do believe that once you have systems in place and have enabled yourself to be productive, it’s much easier in the long run.

But any type of change is hard. When learning new techniques, don’t throw your hands up in despair and think, "There’s no way I can do all this!" You can! You might just be stuck in a rut. You get into a certain routine and have fixed habits that are hard to break. You know you’re not performing up to your ability, but hey, you’re getting by, so it’s good enough. You have to break out of your own self-limiting beliefs.

When you believe that something is impossible to do, you don’t even try, or you do it half-heartedly, so that when it doesn’t work given your low level of effort, you do what…say, "see, I told you I couldn’t do it." "It’s impossible! I knew it was!" This is the famous self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think you can get better and be more productive, you can, and you will.

Always think, "What if"? Take stock. Think about your daily tasks and ask some important questions. "How can I do this better next time?" "How can I be more efficient?" "How can I get these results with less effort?" Occasionally, you must take the time to stop, step back, and ask yourself these questions. You can’t just keep plowing ahead without occasionally regrouping and reassessing what you’re doing or have become blind to doing.

When something is bothering you, do a bit of introspection to see what’s going on and how you might approach it more efficiently or effectively next time. If you’re in a rut, and you’ve grown accustomed to low productivity, change may not be comfortable and change may not be easy. Take an honest look at your life, determine what’s no longer working, and change it.

According to a report from Basex, the average "knowledge worker" — someone who is part of the growing information economy — loses 2.1 hours a day to interruptions. If those workers make an average of $21 an hour, that adds up to $588 billion a year — more than the gross domestic product of

Argentina

Then another article http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Technology/story?id=1549972 goes on to say, “Other companies, such as Ambient Devices, say keep it simple. You shouldn’t have to open your e-mail whenever an icon pops up on your screen. A glance should tell if the new message is important to you, much the way you glance at a clock.”

Actually, that’s a *really* bad idea.  Even glancing at an email starts your mind a-wandering, and there aren’t too many people who are disciplined enough not to open it if the subject line and sender looks even remotely more interesting than what they’re working on.  If you have the luxury of having two screens (which boosts productivity by 30%), keep one dedicated to your communications functions, and mute the sound and blank the screen when you’re trying to concentrate on a project.  Bring a kitchen timer from home, set it for an hour, and dare yourself not to check email until the timer goes off.  If you can’t, you officially have email OCD.  If you only have one monitor, either close your email program completely, or if you have to have it open to check your calendar, don’t keep your in-box up. 

Better yet, go under Tools, Options, Email Options, Advanced Email Options and turn off all the global alerts, noises, envelopes, and pop-ups when you get an email, so you won’t be tempted to check it.  Then go into your Rules and set a specific sound to play when you do get a message from a particular person such as your boss.  That way, your ears will hear the cue, but your eyes won’t go to the pop-up and distract your thoughts.  You can complete the sentence you’re working on before checking the message.

http://articles.news.aol.com/business/_a/radioshack-lays-off-employees-via-e/20060830125309990016?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Can you believe this?  Radio Shack laid off 400 workers—via email!  Talk about a major breech of email etiquette.  I was just laughing at another article I read about someone being laid off via text message on her phone, and I even thought to myself, "Oh, great, pretty soon they will be laying people off via email" and boom!  How rude.  Out of 65,000+ people surveyed on an AOL site, 93% said email is an inappropriate way for a company to lay off employees.

Let’s remember one of the basic rules of messaging: the more emotional and complicated the message, the greater the need for a rich medium, such as a face-to-face conversation with a real person.  How will this people remember this employer? Bitterly.  When better times arise, will they want to return to Radio Shack?