Time. Don’t we all wish we had more? It’s our most valuable asset and yet so easy to waste in ways that don’t make us feel good or help us.
Welcome to March! It’s been a while since I’ve talked about time management here, so I thought we’d revisit some ideas about time management and contemplate the idea that the average person has a lifespan of 4000 weeks. (If you read nothing else this year, I strongly recommend Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.) If that fact doesn’t light a fire under you, I don’t know what will.
Time is literally our most valuable personal resource, as our presence on the planet can be measured in years, weeks, and minutes. And we don’t know exactly how long we have, a point underscored by the COVID pandemic and other catastrophes, as well as mundane life events that receive less press. We all have a limited amount of precious time, which makes managing that time imperative if we want to spend more of our lives in ways that feel meaningful.
Too often, I talk to people who are spending their time doing things that don’t feel meaningful: meetings, email, household drudgery, more meetings. (Have you ever had a conversation with someone and you’re like, “How are you?” and they reply something like, “Oh, you know, I’m just so busy these days.” as if busy is an emotional state of being? Yeah, me too.) Sometimes our days and lives are spent almost entirely doing things we don’t want to do for other people. And we spend too little time doing the things that we love that really make the human experience joyful.
We all wish we had more time, but oftentimes aren’t sure how to spend it. We long for unstructured time to do whatever we want (ah, that naive childhood dream that adulthood is all about doing whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it), but then when we have it, there’s so much of it and it doesn’t have any guardrails and it’s all so intimidating and so we end up doomscrolling. (This is also why I think people really struggle with the concept of rest. I mean, what are you supposed to *do*?)
Wasting time also anesthetizes us from a lot of things that we’d otherwise find intolerable: toxic workplaces, burnout, poor personal relationships, general misery, feelings, and a plethora of other unpleasant things. I think it’s opposite, workaholism, is also attempt to anesthetize ourselves to these same things, but using overwork and exhaustion as emotional airbags.
So how do you manage your time in ways that allow you to live in ways that feel real, authentic, and meaningful? What’s the happy medium between wasting time (which can often be procrastination, which I wrote about last month) and working so much and so hard to avoid your feelings that you’re too exhausted to consider whether you’re actually living the life you want to be living?
Managing your time better isn’t some panacea for everything that ails us. But I think time management can bring into sharper focus what’s working for us, what isn’t, and what you prioritize and what ultimately doesn’t matter. Regrettably, time management, like so many other adulting skills (like laundry, meal planning, and academic writing) isn’t something that anyone bothers to teach us, leaving us to figure things out for ourselves. Or not.
I also think we often confuse time management with emotional management. The pandemic, with the emotional, social, and economic upheaval that came with it, brought into sharp focus how we use our time to deal with emotional discomfort. (Here’s an article from the BBC about this.) So much of what we think is “poor time management” is really an attempt to deal with emotions we don’t want to deal with. We procrastinate, self-sabotage, and generally flail about in life because we’re trying to avoid our feelings. (I mean, I get it. I don’t want to deal with my feelings either.) I’m feeling anxious about writing; so I’ll put it off until later. Taken to its logical extreme, managing time poorly generally results in your writing projects all catching fire at once. Now it’s a conflagration! A crisis! The irony here is that so many of us are really good at crisis management (usually due to histories of trauma that we had to figure out how to manage). Managing our time in ways that don’t create crisis conditions may not feel normal and you yourself might light your life on fire through poor time management in order to generate a crisis that you can respond to and feel in control. (Whew. I see myself in this paragraph and I don’t like it.)
I think it’s critical to identify what’s most important to you. And I think this is unique to everyone. My priorities aren’t your priorities and vice versa. People talk about them in different ways. One person I know talks about them as heart-centered priorities, which I think it's really lovely. What do you want more of? Conversely, what do you want less of? You might want more time to spend with friends and family and more time to follow your intellectual passions and write your book. You might, for example, want fewer meetings and housework.
Thinking about how those priorities shake out into urgent and important. I think separating the wheat from the chaff, the important from the urgent, can really help. Email also always feels urgent. Someone has sent a message! But mooooooost emails, in the long run, aren’t really that important. Yes, this is the classic priority matrix, also known as the Eisenhower Matrix. Separating things that are urgent from important will get you so far managing your time (obviously, the urgent and important things take precedence over the things that are merely urgent, merely important, or able to be delegated, or just plain deleted). If too many things start falling into that ‘urgent and important’ quadrant, you might try limiting the number of things that you let yourself put there. If you could only put three things in that quadrant, what would they be?
Here’s some old advice that actually works (for most people): track your time. Where is your time currently going? If you track your time, you might discover that even though you think you’re spending all your time on X, you’re actually spending more time on Y. In part, how you spend your time is a matter of prioritizing. What can you do to narrow the gap between how you want to spend your time and how you actually spend your time? Time tracking lets you see where and how you can bring those two things into better alignment. You’ll also be able to see where, for example, you can get some writing done. (Many people have told me that they’re too busy to write, which usually means that they’re busy coming up with things to fill their time with that aren’t writing.)
One time management trap I think a lot of us fall into is the idea that we have to do everything ourselves, even if doing everything has left us exhausted, overbusy, and overwhelmed. And I think for this same reason, a lot of us loathe to delegate anything to other people. (For women in particular, it’s the myth of “having it all,” of being able to do everything perfectly ourselves without help.) But here’s the secret: if you want more time, you’re going to have to delegate some things to other people. In this day and age, you can outsource almost anything to anyone. What have you been doing that someone else could do? Some examples: I’ve been ordering groceries online and getting delivery (even before the pandemic) to my house. (And yes, there are definitely some complicated politics around paying other people to do things for you. Do what you believe is right and if you’re going to outsource something, pay and tip really well.) I sometimes order some ready-made homemade freezer meals from a person in my city. I’ve hired a bookkeeper. If you’re drowning, it’s wise to reach out for help. What are some things in your life that someone else could do?
Something I’ve been doing lately is batching my tasks. For years I thought that this advice somehow didn’t apply to me and of course it totally does. Batching just means doing like items together. So if you work with clients, maybe you’re doing all the tasks for Client A and then shifting your attention to Client B instead of switching back and forth between them and breaking focus every few minutes. Batching tasks lets you turn your full attention to something, single tasking rather than multitasking. For example, I batch content creation. I take a few hours a week to sit down and write blog posts, emails to my list, and social media posts. I also batch email rather than answering it throughout the day. I’ll also batch personal administrative chores: making dentist appointments, paying bills, filling out forms, meal planning, etc. I work in 45 minute blocks on the tasks I batch together. Sometimes things take one block and sometimes they take three or four blocks over several days. But batching has seriously cut down on the time that I’m flailing around wondering what I need to do. It’s personal admin time? Okay, here we go! Batching has also reduced the amount of time I need to do each task because I’m more focused.
One caveat: this boring-ass time management advice doesn’t work for everyone. A lot of people I’ve worked with over the years have told me that standard time management techniques and tools just don’t work for them. Many of these people are neurodivergent in some way. (So many middle-aged women I know have recently been diagnosed with ADHD because no one thought it applied to them/us as children because everyone thought that ADHD only presented in little boys who had trouble sitting still in school.) Lots of people have told me about the different ways that executive dysfunction affects them and how they use their time because of their struggles with organization and focus. If this is you, take heart. There’s nothing wrong with you; your brain just works differently and perceives time in different ways. People with ADHD, for example, have trouble with long term planning, meeting deadlines, and anticipating future rewards.
I’m not an ADHD expert coach, but I know people who have reported managing ADHD better through receiving specific coaching in this area. Some people with ADHD that I’ve worked with in the past have suggested:
Making time visible by using several analog clocks
Scheduling not only appointments, but tasks (like managing your to-do list on a calendar) to create intention and specific times to accomplish them. Too often, to-do list items languish because there’s no time attached to them, which also reduces overcommitment.
Accountability check-ins with colleagues or bosses to avoid procrastination (You might have an accountability buddy or a coach.)
Setting clear deadlines (internal or external)
Planning daily.
I would feel negligent if I didn’t mention this important time management principle: schedule enough time for rest. A lot of us are sleepwalking through life because we’re not getting enough rest because we’re trying to do too much. What can you do less of these days so that you can rest more? Get rest on your calendar and take it seriously as a commitment.
I’d love to hear how you’re managing your time these days. What’s really working for you? Is your time going where you want it to go? How are your emotions influencing the way you do and don’t spend your time?
