Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead... But Gutsy Girls Do (10 page)

•  Whenever possible, package the task so that it seems critical or, even better, like a delicious opportunity. When I took over
Child
magazine, I discovered that there were only five staff members, a minuscule budget, and ninety pages to fill each issue. One cost-cutting idea I came up with: Each issue we'd fill four or five pages with a Q&A format interview with a different parenting expert. That way we'd end up with what amounted to an “article” by a hotshot in the field, but it wouldn't cost us anything. Because we were so short staffed, I'd have to do the interview myself and—uh-oh—my assistant would have to transcribe it. The reason I say uh-oh is that she hated grunt work and loved to punish me with sullenness for giving it to her. I'd certainly pay the price for this. Then I had a little brainstorm. I went out to her desk and announced to her that I was giving her her own column in the magazine. Each month I would help her generate the questions and then she would interview the expert, transcribe the tapes, edit down the results and get the by-line. She was delirious with joy. Each month I'd allow myself a sneaky laugh as I watched her transcribe for hours at her desk in what seemed like a state of Nirvana.

DON'T WORRY IF YOUR PEERS DESPISE YOU

There is a small downside to learning to focus on only what's essential. Your peers may hate you for it. They will make little digs about the fact that you seem to be one step ahead of the game and not buried under a pile of paperwork, turning it into a negative rather than a positive. A friend of mine who was a master delegator overheard someone call her the Teflon Lady because “nothing sticks to her desk.” Ignore their comments and realize that what your boss is looking at are the results you deliver.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PROCRASTINATION BUT NEVER GOT AROUND TO ASKING

It may seem odd suddenly to raise the subject of procrastination. I've been talking about how hard and long good girls work, so why would I now launch into the topic of not doing any work at all?

Well, the good girl's dirty little secret is that she
does
procrastinate, sometimes sitting on a project until the absolute last minute. And, interestingly, the reason she does this may be the same behind why she works too hard on other things. Psychologist Post, who has seen procrastination dog many successful women she counsels, says, “In many cases procrastination has to do with a fear of not being perfect or not getting it right.” Just as this fear may prevent a good girl from letting go of a project, it can also hinder her from even getting started.

The problem fuels itself. “Each day you procrastinate, the issue takes on a greater and greater weight,” says Post. In other words what seemed on Tuesday like a mildly difficult task, by Friday has begun to seem like bone surgery without anesthesia—and thus you're even more apt to put it off.

I was the world's most consistent procrastinator in my twenties, someone who had to pull all-nighters at
Glamour
just to write pieces like “How Not to Get a Single Pimple This Summer” because I hadn't left enough time. It would take me months to complete major articles, and though I could see the negative effect it was having on my career. I just couldn't change.

It amuses me to reread these words now because they seem to be written about another human being. I never procrastinate today; in fact, I always prepare early for everything. There are two things that helped me change my ways.

1. I Learned to Play Cut the Salami

To help me get over my procrastination problem, I wrote several pieces on the subject, and from a time-management expert named Edwin Bliss I learned a technique that made all the difference. It's called “the salami technique.” His theory, and there are variations on this theme by other time-management experts, is that any big task staring you in the face is similar to a giant hunk of salami—it's very unappetizing to look at. However, if you cut the salami into thin slices, it is much more appealing; in fact it will look quite attractive on your creamy white Italian platter.

The same principle applies to work projects. If you stall on a project and then attempt to do it all at once, it will become a monster. But if you cut it down into manageable pieces, the whole project will look easier.

Let's say your boss asks you to give her some ideas for line extensions of the product your division is responsible for. This kind of project has a big sprawling feel to it—and you keep hoping for a couple of open days on your calendar to wrestle it to the ground.

With the salami technique you don't wait for a few free days. Instead, you begin immediately and do a little at a time. Over the years I've found that for me, the smaller I make the steps the better—I guess you could say I like my salami sliced really thin. I've also found that a sneaky and very effective trick is to assign the first step or two to a person on my staff, and then I don't have to be the one who jumps into the pool first. For instance, if I were asked by my boss to come up with line extension ideas, I might, as the first step or slice, send a memo asking my staff to give me
their
ideas; step two would be reading over their comments. Each step requires very little effort on my part and yet I will have nicely managed to get the ball rolling. From there I might jot down my own thoughts, and next do a rough outline. The beauty of this kind of approach is that not only are the individual steps easy, but each one actually generates the next.

2. I Learned to Savor the Pleasure of Not Being Late

As I said earlier, procrastinating is a bit like bone surgery without anesthesia. There's the dread. And the agonizing. And the pain. You find yourself one night frantically going through papers, scribbling notes at eighty-five miles an hour, hating yourself. I'd be cocky as hell for days as I procrastinated, but the night before something was due I'd start whimpering.

Once I started using the salami technique, I discovered the amazing serenity and relief that comes from early preparation. There I'd be with three days before the deadline and all I'd have to do is tie up a few loose ends. Since then I've learned to conjure up that feeling whenever I'm looking at a project. I let myself think of how good I will feel if I get an early start— and how pathetically miserable I'll be if I don't. It's a little behavior modification in the hands of an amateur but it has worked beautifully.

HOW TO USE YOUR TIME BRILLIANTLY

Even once you've learned to delegate the projects that aren't essential and get momentum going on what matters, you can still run into trouble making your gutsy plan a reality if you don't know how to use your time well. Here's what can happen:

You schedule your calendar so you have time for both the basics and the big-picture stuff. But then things go a little crazy. Somebody complains, somebody resigns, a project gets derailed, and your day is shot. When your days get disrupted this way, there's an interesting phenomenon that takes hold: The housekeeping stuff somehow manages to get done. It almost has a life of its own, nudged along by the system (the accounting department calls and reminds you about the paperwork on the new computers). The big-picture stuff, however, can get endlessly postponed.

These days, everyone has difficulty making time for what matters. Peter Vaill, a professor of management at George Washington University, describes the world of work today as “permanent white water.” Most people, he says, “have this fantasy that stability is the norm and that chaos is the exception. After the new person comes onboard, after the computer is debugged, once we move to the new building, things will settle down. That's just a dream we have.”

Good girls have their own brand of trouble with their time because everybody wants some of it. People are always asking for help, popping in uninvited to talk. You may go through the day with a sense of never having enough time or of time getting away from you.

That's the wrong perspective. You have to be bold and gutsy about your time, treat it like a dog in obedience school—it must conform to your needs, follow your commands. If you don't constantly show that you're the master, it will take a juicy bite out of your thigh.

Make Time for What Matters Most

The only way you can guarantee that your big-goal time is not taken from you is to make it unassailable. One strategy is to schedule it for when you're out of the office. Some executives say they use airplane flights this way.

What I do is close my door for an hour a day (and before I had a door I actually used to find quiet places in the building or even the cafeteria).

It took me a while to feel nervy enough to do this on a regular basis—not only because good girls have a hard time saying no to people, but because we also have a fear of looking like we're being naughty, something we assume that a closed door may suggest.

The idea of closing your door for priority work became popular with time-management experts during the seventies but lately it's faced some criticism. In his research on how managers use their time, John Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita professor of leadership at the Harvard Business School, found that they are extremely fluid, responding constantly to interruptions and problems. A closed door, he theorizes, disrupts fluidity. But I believe that if you don't do it, you will spend your day like a ricocheting bullet. A few words of caution, however:

•  Your closed-door time should never be first thing in the morning because that's when people need to see you with problems from the afternoon before.

•  It should be roughly the same time every day so people come to recognize it for what it is rather than think you're sleeping off a hangover or having a nasty fight with your husband or boyfriend on the phone.

•  It shouldn't be too long (about an hour is good), or it will annoy the hell out of people.

•  Your boss has to be comfortable with it—some bosses hate it when subordinates close their doors, and if that's the case, don't.

One other option I'm fond of: the half-closed door. It shows you're alive and working but discourages those with less-than-urgent business.

Banish the Time Intruders

Each day we're all bombarded by time intruders. Sometimes time intruders are inanimate—traffic jams, broken copy machines—but 85 percent of the time they're other human beings. That's why it's so hard for good girls to handle them. Our instinct for being nice prevents us from booting these people out of our office or saying no to their requests for help they should be getting elsewhere.

This is not to say that everyone who pops into your office and asks, “Gotta minute?” is a time waster. Studies have shown that effective managers have frequent interruptions from staff members and often these interruptions provide essential information. Sometimes, in fact, the person doesn't even realize that a piece of info is important, and you stumble upon it during a casual discussion. If you are constantly finding ways to limit their access to you, or shoo them out of your office, you can end up out of the loop.

On the other hand, people will often eat up far more of a good girl's time than necessary. You have to know how to manage your time with them and not give in to your tendency to be polite and nurturing.

Try these strategies:

•  Stop being a good listener about personal issues. If you let them, people will turn you into their in-office therapist, confessing to you that their boyfriend says he can't relate to them because they've never been in a twelve-step program or describing in detail their irritable bowel syndrome. Avoid therapist behavior, such as very relaxed body language and expressions like “Hmmmmm.”

•  When someone does drop by your office, set a time frame around the encounter. “I have a meeting at one
P.M
., but I can take ten minutes now.”

•  If the person has made his or her point and now is into chitchat, get up gradually (first sitting on the arm of the chair instead of in it) and then slowly ease your way toward the door.

•  Don't
add
anything to the conversation. You have to resist the urge that good girls have—even with a nowhere conversation—to ask a question or pleasantly affirm what the person is saying. Every time you say, “Really. That's amazing,” you are guaranteed to lose a minimum of five more minutes of your time.

Be a Ballbuster with Paperwork

Just as people will take advantage of a good girl's time, so will paperwork. Some of the good girls on my staff seem to be victims of their paperwork, as if they were being ordered around by a big bully who didn't believe in ever letting them take a break. You have to be gutsy with your paperwork, treat it as if you're the boss and it's always at your beck and call.

When I was writing pieces on time management, I read thousands of tips on paper management but there were two that really worked beautifully—and unlike so many time-management techniques, these have
continued
to work over the years.

The first is never to handle a piece of paper more than once. This is a classic piece of advice from time-management guru Alan Lakein, whom I interviewed near the beginning of my career (he returned my call from an airport, between planes, reinforcing the idea that he never wasted a moment). As soon as you touch a piece of paper, make a decision about what to do with it—whether it's file it, pass it on, work on it, or destroy it—and then do just that.

The second is to categorize your work pile. I used to have one monolithic work pile. Some days it was smaller than others, but I never seemed to get to the bottom of it. When new material hit my desk, it would go right on the top of my in-box, and sometime during the day I'd try to sort through and find the most important stuff. It wouldn't be unusual for me to miss some critical memo because it had been pushed down to the bottom, left to mate with an announcement of a new Smokenders’ program available to employees.