Making Time

It is very easy to get overwhelmed with stuff to do. Whether you have pets, children, customers, or just voices in your head, there are lots of demands on your attention that may distract you from your own day-to-day goals. I want to talk today about the importance of making time.

I have been writing about really interesting stuff every week for a while now. I occasionally have a fear that I will run out of things to say. Fortunately, a number of people who read these intermittent ramblings have provided both requests for future topics, and have also contributed to conversations that have inspired follow-ups. If I have not explicitly privately thanked you for that yet, here it is: Thank you very much for that.

In addition to getting ideas and contributions for subjects from people, I have also gotten a few people who have said they would like to write articles too. A good number of them generally follow that immediately with “and I do not have any time”.

I hear you. We are all very busy. Sometimes we are even productive when no one is looking. Time is one of those elusive things that you think you have in abundance and suddenly you are on a call with someone who points out that it has been ten years since you last spoke with them. That happened to me this week, oddly enough, and it was a short sharp shock to me. I may have stopped for ten minutes to let a single tear journey earthwards down my face in quiet reflection some time after the call.

I appreciate your concern; I will be okay.

Setting aside that little dramatic story, the advice that I want to impart this week is pretty simple: You have to make time for things.

That appears to be an unusual statement on the surface. I assure you it is a perfectly valid thing to do.

As I said in the beginning, we all have lots of stuff to do. It is very easy to let your day run away with you and get lost in minutiae. I have had multiple sections in my career where I was involved in reactive management to big problems. I was going with the flow and trying to decide what was important and what was not, related to what happened to be on fire at any given moment. While it is always important to get many of these things done, it is very easy to just get sucked down a rabbit hole into tasks that are massive time sinks. I have taken deep breaths before and plunged into a pile of stuff that needs tackling, only to resurface later and discover that we have moved a substantive distance in orbit around the sun from where we started. If you convert that to actual miles traveled, it can easily become depressing. This visualization exercise was one of the things that helped me wake up and take control of my schedule.

Around the same time, I discovered an interesting piece of religious wisdom: The Serenity Prayer.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference. 

You might raise a Spock-eyebrow to that. Good for you. The truth is, that is a pretty good filter for figuring out what is important. I started to realize there were a lot of things that I should just accept the way they are, and focus on things that really needed changing.

Once I made that first pass over my daily activities, I noticed that I suddenly had a lot more control over outcomes. It turns out that subconsciously it is easy to ignore something that is important and may require courage. When we are challenged about it, we can point to a soiled bag of trash with cartoon stink lines emanating from it and say “look I was busy with this!” and feel like everything will be okay.

Go ahead and laugh all you want. You probably do this as much as the next person does.

Now that you are all nodding sagely at the wisdom of the ancients, and leaping up ready to take control of your life, it is time for the big reveal. I will share with you some of my super secret tools of success!

Here they are:

Do Not Book

The first thing you should do is take chunks of your calendar and make them yours, and block it off. I mark at least one day a week with a large chunk of “Do Not Book” time for my own purposes. Sometimes it is for specific goals, sometimes it is for reactive work that has overflowed.

Communicate Your Plans

Over-communicate your time constraints to other people. Especially other people who have some rights to that time. Whether it is coworkers or family, make sure that people are aware of your time and your wish to take control of it. I am very explicit about my project time with family members on the weekend and continually have to reinforce the time that I take from them for very specific reasons. If you do have things going out of control, be mindful to communicate that to other people as soon as possible. I have found that people are more sympathetic to whatever drama is happening to me on any particular day if I give them a heads-up that things are going out of control.

Time Boxing

When you establish time for things, be very clear when it starts and when it ends. One of the worst things that we do, especially early in the day, is take too long to do a task or meeting and then the rest of the day starts falling down like dominos. Make sure that if you are doing several things that you respect all of the time boundaries. I was particularly bad at this early on in my career and was continually late for everything. It was a massive source of stress and exhaustion for me.

Establish Rituals

With the current global pandemic unfolding and the need for social distancing, I have made a commitment to limit my grocery shopping to one day a week. This had an interesting domino effect on planning out meals and setting other follow-up rituals: Every two weeks I make a weekend pot of chili or a roast, every thursday is porkchop night. Additionally, I have developed an acute sixth sense about what groceries are needed given the grazing habits of seven people. I just know when we are low on ketchup, or if it is time to double down on the eggs or frozen pizzas. Additionally, I do my writing every week on sunday.

Quid Pro Quo

The last thing that I think is helpful is to keep an accurate accounting of what you are doing. If you are going to be lost in something for a period of time, be accountable for those hours. Make sure that you apply checks and balances and that you come up with some tools for enforcing them. When you are making adjustments to your time management to account for oddities and discrepancies, be sure to communicate changes in your regular day-to-day to people who are affected by it.

Be (Reasonably) Flexible

My son is involved with a team sport and this is a part of my schedule. If there are changes in weather, or changes in game schedules, I have to be flexible to accommodate those. Establishing a work-life balance with a career and family is a challenge especially when adding in self-inflicted activities like writing a weekly article to help people professionally. When my schedule needs to change for baseball or for other things, just accept that it will change and rebalance the calendar accordingly.

Forgive Yourself

The last thing to add here is that making time is hard and be ready to forgive yourself when the Serenity Prayer gets flipped on its head. Do not fool yourself that you will magically control your calendar and make all of the time you want tomorrow; That’s Not How Any Of This Works™. You will fail time and again to completely have a manageable calendar. Do not be mad at yourself for falling down at this; pick yourself up and try it again next week.

So there you have it. Some simple things to think about for how to spend your time as well as some things I have done over the years to make that an easier process. 

Thank you again dear reader for joining me on this written voyage. I hope you continue to find some sort of value, meaning, or amusement in my writing. All three, even, if that is the case. If you have other tips or tidbits you can employ to make time, please feel free to share them. I will make time to thoroughly process your feedback!