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Personal EffectivenessHow much more effective do you think you could be if you redesigned your working day to fitwith your own natural rhythm. This may be a daily rhythm, or even one over longer periods oftime. Certainly some people like to work in quick bursts, others work more steadily.EXAMPLE 2.6 A LION OR A DUNG BEETLE?At a talk at Imperial College given by the top biographer Victoria Glendinning someoneasked how she worked. Victoria gave the analogy of the lion and the dung beetle. Thelion sits there lazily for hour upon hour upon hour, and then suddenly sees her prey andis full of energy, violently chasing and capturing it. A hurricane of energy and vitality.When the activity is finished, the lion returns lazily to sitting and basking in the sun orshade, until her appetite prompts her back into action. On the other hand the dungbeetle finds a small lump of dung and laboriously pushes it and pushes it and pushes it,until eventually it rolls over the blade of grass, and it carries on laboriously pushing andpushing and pushing, on and on and on. Victoria said she would really like to be a lionin the way she worked, working with short bursts of high energy. Regrettably she saidshe was more like a dung beetle, plodding away day after day.Habit 8: Cut yourself off: find a hideawayRe-engineering your day also may mean training others to respect your concentration time.This may not always be possible in noisy office environments. You may need to findsomewhere quiet where you can work effectively – it may even mean taking work home, orworking in a library, or at least away from the office and the distractions of colleagues. Forthis to be effective, you need to make sure your performance is being judged by outcomesand not process.EXAMPLE 2.7 XEROX AND RE-ENGINEERING THE DAYLotte Bailyn, a professor at MIT helped staff at Xerox to re-engineer their working lives.As well as changing their work schedule, it meant that staff had to learn that others mayhave times when they weren’t available. For this to be successful it also meant that staffneeded to provide times when they were available, and advertise these so that theycould be contacted.The principle is that if you remove something, such as your constant availability all times ofthe day, you need to provide something to replace it, such as office hours when you canguarantee to be available and give others your attention. For example you may decide yourbest work times are 10–12.00 am and you may hide yourself away at these times, removingyourself from the office or putting up a ‘Do not disturb’ sign, but in return you say that threedays a week you are available 1.00–3.00pm for inquiries. Alternatively, work at home one daya week – this increasingly becomes more possible for more and more people ascommunication technologies mean you can be reached if absolutely necessary, and you canconnect to your workplace by computer.Habit 9: Wait productivelyNow is the time to start using up those odd 5–10-minute slots which everyone has in theirdays and which we tend to think can’t be used productively. They can! If you have troublegetting started on tasks you dislike, use one of the small slots to face up to it. Often knowingthat you’ll only have to spend a few minutes on it is enough to get you to face up to it. Once44A free sample chapter from Personal Effectiveness by Diana Winstanley. Published by the CIPD.Copyright © CIPD 2005All rights reserved; no part of this excerpt may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the prior written permission of the Publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in theUnited Kingdom issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.If you would like to purchase this book please visit www.cipd.co.uk/bookstore.