In working with my clients recently, this topic has risen to prominence again.  They feel scattered and interrupted.  They waste time in traveling (especially here in L.A., where we are sensitive to long commutes and lost hours in the car).

So, here are some simple tactics you can adapt to your own needs:

1. Create standing meetings with your clients at a regular, confirmed day and time into the future.  Allow the client culture to dictate how such meeting schedules will be created, but get them committed on all the relevant calendars.
2. Respect your own “best-times.”  If you are not a morning person, do not be available in the mornings.  Notice when you are at your best, and schedule your client contact during those times.
3. Cluster your client meetings into whole days devoted to meetings with several of them, so those days are spent in meetings and not expected to be spent on deliverables, prospecting, and other work commitments.
4. If travel time is a consideration, schedule your travel times to meetings to avoid rush hour, and leave some buffer time in case the traffic delays you.  The stress of sitting in your car worrying that you are holding up your client or a room full of people will certain affect your excellent performance when you arrive.  Leave room for the unexpected.  This means you need to slow your pace a bit, to leave that time available.
5. When booking multiple client meetings into a selected day, leave buffer time between meetings, not just for travel, but (also) so that you can pause after each meeting, make some notes to yourself or deliver some immediate follow up from the just-concluded meeting, and feel complete that you have handled the meeting and required follow up before moving on to the next meeting.
6. Re-confirm all meetings the day prior, by noon at the latest.  This can be a simple email or text note (“Confirming ….Still o.k. with you?”), or an automated calendar reminder.   But get a response.  This means you must ask for re-confirmation directly.
7. If you generally have significant follow up work after these client meetings, then cluster the client-meeting days with a “work day at your desk” day in between.  Otherwise, you will be working in the evenings to do what could be done during the next day-time.
8. Design your availability for the kind of time you need and the kind of tasks and work-product you must deliver.  Again, you are the one who must design your availability.
9. This design will respect the other issues in your work and life:  your non-work obligations (health, family, pro-bono work).  Block these commitment on the calendar as if they were client meetings.
10. Respect your own work time as if you were your own client.  Leave long spaces of time to do deep work, client work, prospecting, marketing.
11. If a client cancels a meeting with short notice, take control of the schedule:  write back the days and times you are available, with no apology (since you did not change the commitment).  Do not invade your own time that was sheltered for another client’s deliverable, or a family commitment.  Do not waste a “work day at your desk day” to interrupt that open flow of time to travel and meet with a client who changed the plan:  offer him other times that fit more closely with your schedule.
12. Schedule phone meetings with clients or prospects when you know you will be at your desk.  Tell your caller (at the beginning of the phone meeting) how much time you have before you need to end the call or be somewhere else, so everything can get done, and so the agenda can be prioritized.
13. Unless the person on the other end of the phone cannot hear that you are in a car (noise, distraction, etc.), do not hold important client meetings, or early prospecting meetings, from an environment that signals the listener that you are “fitting him in.”  You owe your clients and prospect more respect (and they will appreciate you for it). And you owe yourself more attention to your own safety.
14. If you can, pick the best time for the tedium of unavoidable administration (with your assistant and for those tasks you must do yourself).  This is often Friday afternoons, or Monday mornings.  Set aside two hours that cannot be interrupted, and settle in to handle the administration that needs to be completed.  Otherwise it will nag at you on the weekends (watch that life/work balance!), or you will not be able to find some critical piece of information later in the week.
15. Take a few minutes to enjoy the sense of completion that comes with a clean desk and an organized upcoming week.

Finally, try these tactics and adapt them to your own best practices, and then keep to the discipline they offer until they are second nature to you.  You will live a longer and happier life, and get more done with less effort.

Good luck.

So, we must rely on old technology — print.  Paper & pencil.  Typewriter.  Computer printout.  A paper-based medium to tell folks about us, particularly our medical information — so medical helpers do not damage us while in their care.  So persons on the street know what not to do.  So, when traveling abroad, we have some protection in emergencies.

You will find, when you are in a hospital, that you must recite the same information many times (like, 10 or 15 times) to different people, all of whom write it down in their notebooks.  Particularly in the hours before surgery, when you are freezing (surgical floors are kept cold to reduce infection) and sleepy (because you were up at 5:00 a.m. to get there at 6:30 a.m.), and maybe scared too.

So, write down everything, bring several copies, and hand each person the paper.  Or read from it, so you don’t forget anything. And so you don’t confuse anyone.  Confusion in the surgical suite is dangerous.

I have just such a paper filled with medical information, and I bring it with me where it will be needed.  I keep a copy in my car, in case there is an accident.

And recently I have learned to take yet another page of paper: a list of my medications on my doctor’s stationery.  I carry this especially when I travel, and always when I travel internationally.  Technically, we are supposed to carry our medications in their prescription bottles.  But that sure invites theft from my luggage along the way, in my view. And it is bulky.  So, since I carry my various herbs and supplements and medicines loose in boxes that remind me to take them (I have other things on my mind while traveling), I carry now an authorized list on doctor’s letterhead. Just in case.

Is the preparation of this paper a hassle?  Of course.  Are you glad you did it when suddenly in surgery, or delayed by some foreign government’s version of Homeland Security?  Sure.  So just do it.

I found a reference in Seth Godin’s blog to an outline that begins the process, which will help.  It does the initial thinking for you.  Feel free to add other information that occurs to you.  (Thanks, Seth.)

You’ll be really glad later.  I promise.

Live Long and Prosper: Tactics for real life is a series of articles focused on the minutiae and management of our increasingly complex lives, the administrivia we all need to deal with to live well, to control the establishments that may well control us, and to get through that checklist that prevents minor and major personal aggravations which always seem to arise under stress and emergencies.

1. “Well done is better than well said.”
2. “Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.”
3. “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
4. “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
5. “All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.”
6. “Never confuse motion with action.”
7. “Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.”
8. “To succeed, jump as quickly at opportunities as you do at conclusions.”
9. “Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”
10. “Diligence is the mother of good luck.”
11. “There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.”
12. “Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?”
13. “Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
14. “Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.”

Excerpted with thanks from a post by Thea Easterby at BusinessInsider.com.

We need to plan for this.  That means we need to plan our finances around it, and our insurance strategies.  All very dull, I know, and even meaningless to my younger clients.  But true all the same.

Here is the quote — the reporter was addressing aging Baby Boomers:

“If you and your spouse are now 65, there’s a 50 percent chance that one of you will live to age 92 and a 25 percent chance that one of you will live to be 97,” says Weatherford. She adds that you should hold off as long as you can before dipping into Social Security because you could have 30 more years of life — and expenses — to look forward to.”  (quoted from Shereen Marisol Meraji, Marketplace, 11.07.2012).

And my advice is simple, whether you are an entrepreneur, a consultant, or a normal employed person, of any age, of any health:

• Set up your retirement accounts as early in your life as possible.  Not only does this give the principal longer to grow in value (and recover from unexpected downturns), it is deductible, so you pay lower taxes.
• Build the discipline of contributing to these accounts, even a small amount at a time, consistently, out of your gross income – -before you see it, and before you can spend it.  You won’t miss it most years, and it will save you later.
• If you are not truly expert in investing your retirement (or other) monies, get professional help. Get personal recommendations to money managers from your colleagues, explore their success records, interview them, and choose one to work with whom you feel you can trust, and whose approach to the markets aligns with your own.  Review the status of your accounts with them quarterly, meet with them yearly, and understand that your investment strategy will change as you get older (it will become more conservative as you get older and your needs shift).
• Do not rely on the government, the health industry, your family, or the future generations to care for you, whether you are ill or healthy, financially secure or not.  There is no way to know what conditions will apply when we need the care, at any age.  We do not control world economic conditions, natural disasters or unthinkable tragedies.
• As soon as you can financially do it, invest in long-term care insurance.  If you are self-employed as an entrepreneur or consultant, also add disability insurance. See my recent blogpost.
• If you are a Boomer, and have long-term care insurance, investigate likely assisted-living facilities now, while you are healthy and calm, and advise your family of your first two or three choices — ones you prefer in your neighborhood, that you can live in on your annual long-term care benefits.  This will give you the quality of life you want, and save your family untold stress trying to sort this out when you suddenly, in some emergency, must make such a move.
• Find, interview and work with consultants in your neighborhood who do all the research for you and set up appointments for you to see local assisted-living facilities, well in advance of your need for them — at no cost to you (they get referral fees from the facilities).  These folks are usually very helpful and not sales-driven.  Choose one who covers your preferred neighborhoods and represents many facilities.
• Remember that neither long-term care nor assisted living is age-dependent.  You can become injured, ill, or need assisted living, at any age.

Sometimes I feel like the ant in the old fable about the ant and the grasshopper, when I was a fine grasshopper myself once.  But this strategy has worked for me, and I urge you to take the necessary steps now to protect all you have invested in your life and health and business.

Thinking on this, I looked back on the life of this woman I have known all my life, and considered her arc from the early 20th century into the 21st.

You don’t have to know my tribe to know folks living into their 90s.  Most of us will live to be 100, particularly the GenXs, if the Big Blue Bus doesn’t take us out sooner.

There are lessons in this thinking:

• We will live long, so we should prosper… to support a full and active lie.
• We should protect, pro-actively, our health and fitness.
• We should chase our dreams now, not later.
• We should set or strengthen our boundaries and not tolerate negative people and actions that diminish us.

And we should honor our elders, who have had lives, no matter how obscure, that we will never fully understand.

Still, there is some wisdom in giving yourself a break.  Even a brief break, but a real one — a full day, a week or more on the road (for fun), a weekend away.   By “real” I mean you must totally disconnect from the concerns, strategies, tactics, and successes of your early stage company, at least for awhile.  And stay off the grid (I mean it — do you even remember how?).

You can do this by setting aside time to “scrub your brain” by re-focusing on something completely different:  new people unconnected to your or your industry, a book that you read for pleasure and not learning; immersion in movies, sports, travel, surfing (the ocean not the Web), or sailing.

Even meditation can work, as it does for one of my clients – -very busy, very successful, he still spends at least an hour each day in meditation, and is rarely tired or ill.

Another client just booked a two-week trip to the rain forests of Peru to meet with tribal leaders, even in the midst of building his new business (which hasn’t much to do with Peruvian tribes).

Your reward?  Your spirit will be refreshed, your brain synapses will fire in new ways, and your creativity will re-emerge to see your challenges at work in a new way.  I promise.

The secret to refreshing your spirit is to fully surrender to your non-work activity, and to give yourself the time to truly move to a different context.  Otherwise, your brain is never scrubbed clean, never made free, and you cannot have that unrelated next new thought.

This sounds easy, but in fact, re-setting your creativity requires discipline and a kind of ego-less state.  The discipline comes in allowing the surrender.  The ego-less state allows you to stop being the center of your own universe for long enough that your context shifts and the world looks as large as it really is, and your spot in it appropriately smaller.

Try it. It works.

Then I came across this interesting article by Susan Steiner in the Guardian, which echoed my perspective. It summarizes the findings of Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse, who has written a book on her experiences with the dying and their life lessons.  I record the Guardian article here, and include the links if you should like to explore more deeply.

• Susie Steiner
• Article history

A palliative nurse has recorded the top five regrets of the dying.

Photograph: Montgomery Martin/Alamy

There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps. A palliative nurse who has counselled the dying in their last days has revealed the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’.

Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. “When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently,” she says, “common themes surfaced again and again.”

Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

“This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.”

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

“This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

“Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.”

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

“Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.”

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

“This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”

What’s your greatest regret so far, and what will you set out to achieve or change before you die?

And I have found my new message.

So, I am only about 50 pages into the nearly 600 pages of Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and I have already found my favorite part – that new message.

Mind, I have been in the technology business nearly as long as Steve Jobs, although not as long as Atari-founder Nolan Bushnell, with whom I worked some many years later, after Atari.

But there were Nolan’s words for me to live by, on page 44 of the book, revealing the simplicity of his approach to technology and design: the instructions for Atari’s Star Trek game:

1.  Insert quarter.    2. Avoid Klingons.

And he built a second company, Pixar, bringing us breakthrough animation.  His direction to the team there, “Make it great.”

And he ran both companies simultaneously:  Apple Monday through Thursday, and Pixar on Fridays.

Why do we mourn him?  Besides our actual feelings about him (whether we knew him or not), and besides all the stories we know about how difficult he could be (and how compelling his courtship of partners could be) — we mourn what he represented:  the essential entrepreneur.

Why essential?  Because he never quit his dream. Because he succeeded, and failed, and never stopped.  That is the definition of an entrepreneur.

Imagine founding a company, relinquishing its control, and being isolated and fired from it.  Think about coming back from that experience.  Think about moving on and creating a new computer for education instead.  Think about returning to your first dream, and re-building your company to a market phenomenon, without becoming bitter.

Consider the joy that it takes, and the stamina, and the perseverance, to keep on keeping on, through the highs and lows, through a lifetime of always envisioning and then creating a next new thing, whether it succeeds or not.  And then making the next one.

A colleague of mine wrote me, “…very sad day.  He worked right up to the end of his life.”

What a blessing, to work right up to the end of your life, following your passions.  You know, we used to say, “He died with his boots on.”  Used to be a mark of pride.  Who wouldn’t want to “change the world [rather than]…sell sugar water to children”?

Bye, Steve, we’ll miss you.  I hope this next adventure is an E-ticket ride too.