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2 • Pick Your Time

Every individual runs on a daily cycle. Each of us has a time during the day or night when we are most capable of creative or imaginative thinking. Conversely, we probably also have a time when we are most capable of cold-blooded analytical thinking.

Your personal cycle is something you will have to find out for yourself. Try analyzing your normal "quiet" times—when you are taking a bath, or driving to or from work, or walking about the neighborhood. These are apt to be times when your mind is more sensitive to new ideas. And once you find your most creative time, set it aside and guard it zealously for ideation —use it for thinking about problems with a view to getting ideas.

The practice of spending a definite time just in searching for new ideas can be one of the most productive techniques you can adopt. When you really concentrate your mental energy on a problem, it tends to spark your mind into reaching further back into your memory cells and exposing a greater fund of ex­perience and knowledge to bring to bear on your problem.

It is a common complaint of business executives that they "don't have time to think." They are so loaded with detail and routine problems, which need on-the-spot or immediate solutions, that they cannot seem to clear any time whatever for long-range thinking and planning. And when these men meet someone who seems able to handle and balance a great deal more activity, and still seems relaxed and cognizant of the need for thought, the first question is usually, "But how do you find time to do all those things?"

Actually, no one "finds" time to do anything. You make time to do the things that you consider important. The same people who complain that they can't find time to think, or work on extra problems, or do extra research into the problems they have, usually waste more time in a week than they would ever need to double their productivity. Next time you hear someone complain of not having enough time, try this: Keep the conversa­tion going. Get it around to the subject of TV programs. Or baseball. Or nearby golf courses. Somewhere along the line, you will ring a bell. Some of the loudest complainers about the shortage of time are practically walking guidebooks to every television comedian, Western hero, and detective on the air. When you actually analyze all the programs they are fully familiar with, you find that they must spend a minimum of twenty hours a week just watching TV.

This is not to say that a person shouldn't have some mental relaxation or a chance to "recharge his batteries." Both of these are musts. But you can carry them to extremes. If what you really want is to get more time to think, take a long hard look at some of your extracurricular activities and make sure you are not dissipating your time in nonproductive and passive mental activity.

Your work-habits should also be looked at in a cold analytical way. There is a saying that "You can tell the condition of a man's mind by the top of his desk." From observation of many ex­ecutives and would-be executives at work, this would appear to be true. In most cases, the cluttered desks belong to people who haven't learned to appreciate the true value of systems.

Systems can be extremely valuable in gaining thinking time because, if you work them out yourself, they can take over much routine administrative detail for you. Such details as record keeping, budgets, allocations, and other purely statistical work can be put into forms of various types that can be completed and checked with a minimum of time.

Letting yourself get bogged down in petty details is another time-waster. Somebody has to take care of details, it is true, but if you are in an executive or supervisory capacity, the chances are that "somebody" should not be you. Perhaps it is your secretary (one of the biggest wastes of executive time is failure to make the most effective use of secretarial time!); or it may be a subordinate or even someone in another department. With details that you just cannot pass off, the best approach is to group and organize them. For example, get your dictation out of the way at one time during the day. Group your telephone calls so you can make several at one sitting. Plan to have any interviews or conferences at the most convenient time for all concerned, and make appointments in advance—this will cut your waiting time. Insist on punctuality for meetings—for your­self as well as others. You can easily lose an hour a day waiting for tardy people. When a meeting starts, get it started—if six men sit for ten minutes telling stories as a preliminary to a meeting, that is one hour of manpower wasted. And learn to plan and schedule your work. If you can do it daily, then do it daily and stick to your schedule. If you can make it weekly—even to the point of starting off on Monday morning with a meeting to coordinate your activities and the activities of others for the week —then schedule your time for the week and stick to the schedule.

If you analyze your activities closely and honestly, you will undoubtedly find that you can gain at least some time every day and every week just by cutting out the time-wasting habits that you have fallen into through indifference and lack of planning. If you want to gain time to think, this is the way to do it.

And if you want to make the most of that time when you get it, then learn how you work best and work that way: steer clear of mind-weakeners like fatigue, noise, and other distractions. They divert your attention and interfere with concentration. And don't be misled by stories you hear of great ideas coming out of all-night coffee-drinking or liquor-drinking sessions. For every "great" idea produced this way, there are a thousand that have come out of clear, rested, incisive minds owned by men who knew that the "only job of the body is to carry the brain around," and who, therefore, kept their bodies in good condition and their minds free of dulling fatigue. A good night's sleep and moderation in diet, exercise, and pleasures will do more for your thinking than any artificially induced stimulants.

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