Divide your time into small chunks
I take time to start working efficiently most days, as I am probably at my best in the afternoons. Work and time wait for no one, however, so we all need ways to motivate ourselves to get going, especially on a Monday morning. How many of us wake up thinking about the day ahead, already wondering whether it "will ever end? This is bad enough when we are organized, but what about the teenage mother of three in a high-rise block of flats, who views each day as hard graft simply to be endured before the next one starts; or the prisoner, waking each day knowing there are another thousand to go before any chance of release?
There is a simple way of making such long days much more bearable. I realized how it could work when I visited a mother with two small children, who was sleep-deprived at the best of times, even without her new baby. She was managing to cope with all the demands made on her by thinking of each day not as a continuous stretch of time, but as a number of small chunks put together to make up the day. She planned to get through each chunk — two-hour sections — at a time rather than thinking about the end of the day, which depressed her because it seemed a long way off. The breaks in the day were such activities as watching certain children's programmes, walks in the park or set mealtimes. These -were, in effect, arbitrary points in her day that she had set up to make each day pass more quickly.
We can all use this principle with variations on the theme to tailor it to our own situation. I put 'firebreaks'(see Tip 24) into my surgery hours so I don't have endless lists of patients waiting to see me at any one time, and I never look at my afternoon workload before I finish my morning. I think of a treat I will give myself at the end of a day and look forward to it during each break. What I always
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to avoid is thinking further ahead than I actually need to. There is little point in worrying about what you need to do in two months' time when all your attention should be focused on what is happening now. To overcome this tendency use Einstein's thinking technique (see Tip 37) to prepare for events in the future when you have finished your immediate jobs. If a major project is causing you stress, make sure the deadlines are realistic and then cross off one day at a time. Don't waste time worrying about what might happen in the future. Take each task as a small brick in a big wall and mentally tick each brick off as you finish each task.
You can think of time as something you can cut into pieces in lengths that suit you. In this way Monday mornings become much more bearable.
Think of your day in terms of a number of two-hour chunks, each to be crossed off before moving on. Do not look past each chunk before it is finished. For larger timescales, cross off daily blocks.
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