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When I was young, I often thought about why it is that a newspaper exactly fills all the pages printed in a day? There is never any space left over. And this process starts over each and every day. The same, of course, is true with magazines. Ironically, books, which seem to be on a looser schedule than newspapers and magazines, sometimes have blank pages. You would think book publishers would have enough time to make them come out exactly right. (Don't write me about this, I really do know the answer when it comes to books).

That was to get your attention. What is really amazing is that the work in a workday or the time in a project schedule is most often exactly the right amount of time to do the work required. Yes, there are extreme cases of too little or too much time, but largely, it always comes out about right.

Of course, you must make adjustments to make this work. Sometimes they are conscious adjustments; sometimes you are not aware that you made them. When you anticipate that there is not enough time, often you push the adrenaline button and speed up your efforts. However, if this becomes routine, it will wear you out and your work, not only on the task at hand, but on any other tasks in the same time period, will suffer.

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No matter how long you have been working, habits you acquired early in your career concerning time management are probably the ones you follow today. Of course, your employer, or you on your own initiative, may have trotted off to a time management course and tried to change your habits. However, this path is out of character for most people.

The people I have known who have been most effective at work tasks break their day into distinct activity blocks. Yes, once in a while they must violate these for some reason or another, but the disciplined ones go right back to their standard pattern once the anomaly is over.

What I think is a great work pattern is to take the first half hour of your day and the last half hour of your day as preparatory and clean up times, respectively. Others I have known seem to drift through the mornings and hit it hard for two or three hours after lunch. I have asked some why they did this. The answer was counterintuitive--they said that early in their careers they had always had a propensity to want to take a nap after lunch. Thus they resolved to make that the time of day when they expected the most work from themselves.

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Is the correction under way and what do you tell your clients? ... Check out the latest edition of Strategic & Financial Arguments.

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If you work in production, as a majority of the readers of this column do, there are parts of your day dictated by the rhythm of production. Yet even in a production setting, there are still portions of your day in which you have some freedom as to pace. You might want to work on these.

The point is this--"picking up the pencil," so to speak, at the beginning of the day and dropping it at the end of the day is not the only way to work. There are many variations on this, variations that can make your day more rewarding, yourself more productive and improve the quality of your work. Perhaps it is time you gave this some thought.

What do you think? Take our quiz this week to let us know. You may take it here.

For safety this week, EMTs and firefighters are taught to pace themselves and relieve each other in long sessions of emergency work. Perhaps we can use some of their ideas in our daily lives.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

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