Over at CBS MoneyWatch this week, I returned to some good old-fashioned career and productivity themes.

How to organize your crazy schedule: When you’re slammed with work, you can “triage” — a medical term that means figuring out what is doomed, what will do fine regardless, and which projects will turn out a lot better with a little bit of effort.

Why you should relive that first job search: Lindsey Pollak’s classic job search manual, Getting From College to Career, was just re-issued this week. Based on that, I argue that older folks can learn a lot from how young people search for jobs these days — whether you’re looking for a job or not.

The smart way to make a to-do list: Keep your eye on big goals. Based on those goals, set weekly priorities. Get those things on your calendar first. Then you can schedule that progress review you don’t actually care about.

But what defines a “doable chunk”?

I have been pondering this lately as I realize just how fragmented I have — through various choices — made my life. Because I work from home, I can eat lunch with my kids. That’s great, and I enjoy it, but it also means they expect it, and so even on busy days I tend not to grab a sandwich and hunker at my desk, which is what I did when Jasper was in daycare. I feed the baby every three hours. Sometimes I do school runs. I need to exercise for my own sanity (and as part of the Gladwyne Diet). But that’s another chunk out of my day. And then there’s the inevitable illnesses, doctor visits and dental visits.

Many people have trouble concentrating for more than 90 minutes at a stretch, but as a result of this fragmentation, I’m lucky to get an hour. So doable chunks need to be incredibly doable.

Fortunately, I’ve learned you can do more in fragmented spurts than I used to think. I can crank out a blog post at one time and post it at another. I can make a list of people to email for a column in one chunk of time, and email them in another. Phone interviews fit into other chunks. I’ve realized I don’t need a whole day to crank out an article or column. If I budget a whole day, I’ll probably have time to pursue other goals later on. I often edit the next day (to give me some mental space from what I just wrote). I come up with my ideas while running. Because I’ve started realizing how much can get done in small spurts, I’ve started seizing available spurts to build up my blog post surplus.

Of course, fragmentation isn’t good for some things. I’m not sure I could write a book with this schedule. I’m not making much progress on that novel. But little bits of time do add up to big bits of time and, eventually, to getting things done.

What do you do in bits of time?

(photo courtesy flickr user Images_of_Money)

Most likely such a weekend would include several fun experiences — though not necessarily peak once-in-a-lifetime experiences like jetting to Paris for a private dinner in the Louvre. I’d like to include maybe 2 runs in pretty locales, a fabulous brunch somewhere and a fabulous dinner somewhere else, a trip to an art museum, and possibly a concert of some variety. My favorite work of music is the Bach B-minor mass, but there are a lot of symphonies I enjoy as well. I totally enjoyed hearing Aretha Franklin live once too. Some fun activity with the kids would round out the weekend — a children’s museum or aquarium, perhaps. We went to the Da Vinci Science Center in Allentown, PA recently, and had quite a bit of fun.

What would an amazing — but doable — weekend look like for you? What would you have to do to make that happen? How much do you think it would cost? And what’s keeping you from doing it this weekend?

In other news:

• I have a time log you can download from this site, but there is a much prettier one over at EyeInspire that you can download here. Digital scrapbooking is not one of my core competencies!

• Heather Allard, owner of The Mogul Mom website (and longtime friend of this site) is transitioning her business into a daily email newsletter for moms who, as she puts it, are running a business, raising a family and rocking both. If you’d like to sign up, visit her site here.

That wonderful quote, courtesy of Adelaide Lancaster, has been staring out at me from the back cover of my book. It’s quite a thought. Indeed, I wish I’d thought of it, but I will take it as a blurb. For the past year, I’ve been pondering the question of what I’d do with all the money in the world. What would I change about my life? I’ve realized that the things I’d change about my personal life have little to do with money. For instance, I’ve been frustrated lately that my husband and I have found it difficult to do “date night.” He’s been traveling a lot, which means that weekends are best. But we’re new in town, and don’t have a deep reserve of sitters, and getting a sitter on a Saturday night is always hard. So we haven’t done much. But this isn’t a financial problem. We could pay a premium for Saturday night. One of us could spend a few hours of time interviewing babysitters and build up a roster of those with weekend availability. In a few weeks, and with a modest outlay of cash, I’d have solved a major problem in my life.

Guess I better get on that.

My personal life, however, is one thing. There are broader issues within (as Stephen Covey calls it) my Circle of Concern. I am, for instance, mildly concerned that I’m not sure there is anyone I really want to vote for in the presidential race this year. Is there anything I can do to bring about a world where there are lots of good people running for office? That’s obviously tougher than finding a Saturday night babysitter. But I’m inspired by groups such as EMILY’s List, even if my politics are totally different. Putting early money into candidates, or into programs that find and train people in how to run for office, seems like a way to expand my Circle of Influence. How much influence could I have? I don’t know, but since you can only give a limited amount to candidates anyway, this is not out of the realm of possibility either.

Another desire: to increase the number of people who read. I was interviewing a publishing executive the other day for a story when he made a point that I should know from looking at the sales figures for “runaway” bestsellers: namely, that most people don’t read. There are 300 million people in this country. If a book sells 100,000 copies, people are pretty darn excited about that fact. If every American bought a book — or one more book if they’re already book buyers — that would massively expand the book market. I really like the concept of books as a way to convey ideas, so I’d love to find ways to introduce more people to such joys. How much would that cost? I have no idea, but probably there are ways that earthbound amounts of money can be used strategically to help bring that about. Something to think through.

Are dollar signs standing in the way of particular things in your life?

(photo courtesy flickr user The Tire Zoo)

It’s all very motivational. But here’s the thing: there’s a lot of life between your last debt payment and having $5.7 million in your brokerage account. What should you do in the meantime? What other kinds of financial goals should you have? What should you do with your money to have a good life? What if you know that, finally, you do have enough? Then what?

I wrote my book to give people a framework to think about these questions. Indeed, the introduction opens with just such a scenario: a couple that had always been very frugal had suddenly become rich. What should they do with their money? So I was interested to see that, over at The Simple Dollar, Trent Hamm was blogging about this exact same subject. He came to the world of personal finance by trying to get rid of his debts. Earlier this week he posted that he and his wife had finally achieved debt freedom. They were in a good place financially. But now what? It’s easy to lose focus when you don’t have goals. But if you don’t have debts, are on track to save a lot, and own your house outright, what should those goals be?

I personally think a good goal should be having the assets — most notably, the income from said assets — to not have to work. I still think you should work, but wouldn’t it feel great to do so only because you wanted to? Another fun thought experiment is to figure out what you’d change about your life if you had all the money in the world, and then figure out how you can achieve something similar with earthbound resources. Then you can make getting those resources a top priority. For instance, if you want to travel more, you’d want to work to get to a place where you could take more time off from work — maybe something more seasonal or entrepreneurial — and then have the money for fabulous vacations.

What kinds of goals do you think people should have once they’ve paid off their debts? What if they’re already saving and giving to charity? What else should they do? A lucky problem to have, to be sure. But a fascinating one to think about, nonetheless.

(photo courtesy flickr user ajari)

The most read post? “The little mistake that kills your productivity.” As with “What the most successful people do before breakfast,” I now know that is an incredibly click-able title. “Little” implies that it won’t be hard to remedy. It’s practical — just like anything you do before breakfast is, by definition, limited in scope. “Mistake” and “kills” hits at that center of the brain that suffers from loss aversion. What is it that I’m doing that’s screwing my life up??? The reader wants to know. And so she clicks. And when she does, she discovers that the mistake is scheduling low-priority work or other distractions for your most productive times. I know that I can focus well in the mornings. I have a long stretch of time when I can just crank things out or plow through an editing project. Yet all of a sudden, three of my five weekday mornings are no longer guaranteed to be free. So I’m working on remedying that now, especially in the month heading toward book launch.

I also wrote that “Beta-testing isn’t just for software.” Long-time readers of this blog know that I “beta-tested” my book. I gave an early draft to dozens of test readers. Their feedback was incredibly valuable. I wound up re-writing whole chapters based on it, and cut paragraphs where people’s attention wandered. Just because you think something is done doesn’t mean it’s done until some users get to kick the tires for a while.

Finally, a classic list: “9 tasks to ax from your to-do list.” People like numbers! These nine tasks are things that people spend a lot of time on — like filing their emails — that I think don’t deserve such an investment of minutes. What tasks have you cut from your to-do list in the interest of being more effective, overall?

Please go have a look, a read and a share. Comments are appreciated, too. My traffic is slowly creeping back up from the whole BNET switchover, but it is taking time. Thanks for sticking with me.

The more I think about it, though, the more I realize how perfect parenting is for merit badges. Talk about something that requires lots of small projects, day after day, for little external validation. There’s no pay and no promotions. But why not merit badges? I could see stitching some of these myself (or posting them on Facebook in e-patch form, I suppose). A few I’d like to see:

* A badge for getting my kids to school on time on the days both boys have pre-school. After making pancakes.  And feeding a baby.

* A badge for getting my kids to sit still at the table for an entire 10 minutes at meal time and eat something from the vegetable food group

* A badge for filling the freezer with pumped milk. That definitely deserves a merit badge.

* A badge for reading “Madeline’s Rescue” for the 10th time and still reading it with feeling

What would you like to get a parenting merit badge for?

All the Money news:

• CNBC lists All the Money as one of the top 12 most anticipated business books for 2012.
• Would you do me a huge favor and “like” All the Money in the World on Facebook? 

All well and good, but a wee bit boring. What’s more interesting, as an exercise, is to dream up someone else’s budget. Since it’s totally abstract, you start to see what’s important to you — particularly in circumstances when you don’t have to make hard choices, and circumstances when you do.

So, for instance, let’s say you are a family bringing in $1 million/year — close to the mean for the 1% (though the price of entry is closer to $380,000; high incomes drive up the mean). You have not been crafty enough to get Mitt Romney’s 15% tax rate because you’re actually earning your money at a job. So we take 40% off the top for federal, state, local and Medicare taxes (you’re only on the hook for about $4000 in Social Security taxes though!) What would you do with the $600,000? You could spend 33% or $200,000 on housing, but would you? That’s about $17,000 a month — which gives us a home value of around $3 million with a 30-year mortgage and 20% down. But, of course, you could also get a much less expensive home and dispense with mortgage payments pretty quickly…so you didn’t have to keep working to earn that $1 million. How much of that $600,000 would you save? How much would you give away? If you wanted to give away 10% of your after-tax income, or $60,000, what organizations would you give it to? Which categories are you currently spending less on than you would like? Assuming someone actually has to earn that $1 million — so you can’t just take the whole year and travel — what kinds of vacations would you take? What would you do for fun? If you are not currently in the 1%, and you’re pondering this situation, is there anything you’re not doing now that you’d start?

After pondering the expansive budget, let’s go the other direction. Take your current budget and halve it. But let’s also erase your current obligations. You are starting fresh. In this situation, how much would you spend on housing, and what percentage of your income is that? Would that be doable (i.e. could you actually have a place to live for that amount) or not? Would you still save and give money away, or would those categories go? What would your weekly grocery amount be, and could you actually eat for that amount? What would you give up? Could you do the things you do now for fun — finding a cheaper way to do them? Or not?

I find these fascinating questions, because they reveal priorities. I save no matter what my household income. My comfort point of how much of household income I’m willing to devote to fixed expenses is relatively low. On the other hand, I’ve not been as disciplined about charitable giving. If you see there are categories you’d like to spend more on, over time, those can become financial goals. Or perhaps it is possible to re-deploy current income toward those priorities.

What would you change if you had someone else’s budget?

All the Money/other writing news:

• Time’s Moneyland blog mentions my USA Today column on why the third kid is a bargain
• Cafe Mom’s The Stir blog also mentions the column, and takes issue with the math 
• This past weekend, I reviewed Charles Sykes’ A Nation of Moochers in the Wall Street Journal

(photo courtesy flickr user loop_oh)

Thinking of books, I’ve been taking a close look at my own reading habits lately. I always say I would like to read more fiction. I actually read an incredible amount — it is not unusual for me to devour 2 or more books a week. I don’t watch TV much and that frees up a lot of time. The issue is that TV serves a purpose. We all need mindless time that doesn’t demand too much of our brains. We want something easy and pleasurable. And for whatever reason, fiction doesn’t seem to serve that function for me. I often like the books I pick up. I made it through Freedom this summer. But when I have a choice, I find it easier to pick up works of narrative non-fiction. Recently, I re-read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Happiness Project, rather than hacking through The Art of Fielding (which is on my Kindle, but not getting read).

We all have our preferences of course, but this is an issue for me because I would like to write fiction (like every other writer, I’m working on a novel, if you define “working” as “occasionally thinking about it”…). Part of writing better fiction is reading good fiction and seeing how it’s done. Obviously, I can and have read the classics – Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina — but let’s face it. I’m not going to be Tolstoy. I could, however, compete in the field of current popular fiction. So that is what I should be reading.

And I’m not.

Why is that? I don’t know. I welcome suggestions on novels that have been pleasurable to read and aren’t too long. I’m not looking for terribly taxing, and also nothing too bleak. I can read the newspaper for that. I want fun. Thoughts?

1. I eat less than I want to eat
2. I exercise more than I want to exercise

As result of these revolutionary, breakthrough secrets, I have lost 10 lbs in 3 months, which comes out to 0.75 lb per week.

Boy do I wish there were a faster and more pleasant way. I see why people spend money on books about crash/fad diets. I see why people claim that “diets don’t work.” They do work, they just suck so much that most people won’t keep grinding along, suffering unpleasantness just to measure progress in ounces.

When I read the book Willpower, about the science of self-discipline, a few months ago, I noted that the authors claimed that weight loss is a much harder category to exercise self-discipline in than other things. After all, look at someone like Oprah Winfrey. She’s had the incredible personal strength to rise from an impoverished childhood in segregated Mississippi to billionaire status. And yet she struggles with her weight. That does not bode well for the rest of us. Indeed, while people can develop a great deal of discipline about exercise, exercise alone is often insufficient for weight loss. Weight loss requires eating less than we want, which requires hunger. And the body reacts to hunger as the existential threat it is. Hunger feels bad, physically and psychologically.

About three months ago, when I noticed that my initial fast postpartum weight loss had stalled at a point 17 lbs north of where I wanted to be, I realized I was going to have to do something about it. So I decided to stop eating after dinner. I eat my dinner, I can have one small sweet thing (like a cookie) and then I’m done.

Of course, if you eat at 7, and go to bed at 11:30, you are probably hungry by bed time. I know I am. For the first few weeks, this idea of going to bed hungry was really difficult for me. It makes me cranky. I struggle to put my night owl children to bed, dealing with various whining and stalling techniques, or the baby’s cries (she gets to eat after dinner — and often wants to eat a lot before sleeping). So there has definitely been some feeling sorry for myself. It’s not enough that I work hard all day at my job, then care for three small kids, often on my own, nurse the baby when she wants it, fight the bedtime battles and then go back to work once they’re down. I have to be hungry, too?

But once you recognize that a certain action will require a lot of discipline, you can be a bit more detached about it. Yes, I’m hungry. Yes, it’s unpleasant, but I’ve survived unpleasant things before, and I’ll eat again in the morning. It also helps to realize that being hungry is a completely self-imposed situation, and I can change it if I want. I’m not hungry because I’m a subsistence farmer in rural India and my crops didn’t come up. I’m not hungry because it’s the end of the month and my paycheck and/or food stamp allotment is exhausted. I am fortunate enough to have a full bank account and a full pantry. Furthermore, no one who might have an opinion on the matter — not my doctor, not my husband — actually cares if I weigh 7 lbs more than my wedding weight. I’m losing these pounds solely for me. And so goes the Gladwyne diet. It doesn’t have the same glamour as the Scarsdale diet or the South Beach diet but it does, you know, work. One consolation is that over time it gets easier as the habit takes. It also gets easier as I see for certain that the scale has moved. That produces its own motivation which was lacking those first few weeks when 0.75 lbs of weight loss per week looked like nothing at all.

Have you ever successfully lost weight? How?

(photo courtesy flickr user puuikibeach)