Managing Your Time: Part 1 of 3
Time management is about much more than time. It's about spending your life on what matters to you. That includes your work, but also, everything else.
Managing Your Time
Clients come to me for lots of different reasons. But inevitably, we always end up talking about time management. Almost all high performers—especially in startups—feel overwhelmed by having more to do than minutes in which to do it.
They do fewer activities with family than they’d like, neglect their health or fitness and lose touch with non-work friends. And, all the while, they’re sure that things are slipping at work.
While having this familiar conversation with a new client, I realized I had not written anything new on the subject in the last six or seven years. But the problem never goes away. And so, this is the first of a series on time management.
It’s Not About Time or Work
The first thing I really have to say is that time management has very little to do with managing time.
It has everything to do with how you look at the world. Specifically, with the relationship between your intentions or promises and your expectations about the extent to which they will be fulfilled.
This first post provides much of the foundation for the habits and systems I’ll share later. But first, we need to distinguish the beliefs and tacit assumptions that inform how we decide what to do and not do—and how we allocate our time.
You may want me to jump to the tips and hacks. That’s understandable. But I am not exaggerating when I say that, absent the context, those tips will make no difference. And I want this to give you access to a real breakthrough.
I don't just mean a breakthrough in getting more done—or in relieving the feeling of anxiety and overwhelm.
The true breakthrough is that you get to have a life you love; one that matches your commitments and concerns. In other words, a life of spending your time doing the things that you believe are most important and bring you the greatest amount of joy, satisfaction, and love.
That’s a lot to promise. And you can’t get it from changing your scheduling mechanics—or at least not without also changing your thinking.
These insights may not seem entirely connected as you read them, but they add up to a tapestry of mental models that keep us from spending our time in the ways that will deliver what we most want. So, hang in there —it all comes together.
No Free Anything
You and I know, logically, that everything takes time. Even the tiniest task – writing a check, responding with an emoji or walking the dog—they all take time. Whether the duration is a second or a week—NOTHING gets done outside of time.
But that’s not how we run our lives. We arrive at work with a to-do list that would reasonably take three weeks. Because it’s unreasonable, it isn’t what really guides our actions. But we do that because we unconsciously believe that some things take zero time.
We all know someone (or we are someone) who is constantly late. That trait is not (as we are often told) due to selfishness or sloth. It stems from a bigger-than-average dose of the “instantaneous occurrence” delusion.
For late people, things like the drive from one place to another seem duration-free. Sort of how dieters view lettuce—calorie-free. When they lock their front door and leave, they consider that they are already there…wherever there may be. Twenty minutes later, when they arrive half an hour late, they are as surprised to be late as you are aggravated by waiting.
When late people give up the delusion, they stop being late.
Before you can transform your own relationship to time, you must give up the delusion that anything is duration-free. Everything takes time. So, any day’s plan is reducible to an equation:
The math of to-do lists is irrefutable. And so, most to-do lists are actually either lies or just very improbable.
Brain ≠ Storage
Conceptually, it seems like we ought to know what is most important to do at any given moment. But that belief leads us astray.
Our brains are miraculous, but other than for trivia savants, they are terrible storage devices. This becomes ever truer as we age and have more responsibilities, relationships and associated tasks and information to manage. Remembering all the things we mean to do, must do or want to do takes a lot of bandwidth.
So, we forget things—or remember the wrong things. Frequently, we spend our time on trivial tasks instead of what is most consequential. Why? Because whatever we are focused on now takes energy, and that energy depletes the “remembering” energy.
Don’t store anything in your brain. Critically, don’t rely on your brain to remember what to do now, or what to do next week or how to use a spare 20 minutes.
That’s what electronic devices are for.
Integrity Vacuums
Of course, we do use our brains to store our intentions. And because they behave like sieves, we end up with a massive integrity problem.
We tend to think of integrity as a moral phenomenon. But it is also structural. Our words craft worlds—really. When we say we will do something it creates expectations for us and those relying on us. There are second and third order ramifications whenever we create a new intention or make a new promise. And when we don’t do what we said —or we do it late— the failure impacts everyone who was affected by the initial promise (including ourselves). That’s a structural problem.
There is often little correlation between what we say (to anyone, including ourselves) and what we do. And that creates lapses in integrity.
Perfect integrity would be when anything you or I say we will do is 100% certain to get done. That’s an aspiration—one that can guide us.
The question “Did I do what I promised?” is a question about integrity.
When we tell ourselves that we will complete more tasks than there is time to do, we are lying. We may really believe that lie. But it’s still untrue.
The delusion that some things happen without any duration of time is one cause of lapsed integrity. But so is the fact that we store things in our brains which then forget them. And finally, there’s the fact that we don’t regard most of what we say as a promise.
But what else is it? Either we mean what we say, or we don’t. Is there a middle ground?
A habit of Lying
For most professionals, there is only a nominal relationship between their intended tasks and what they complete. And it’s chronic. We over-promise and under-deliver. It isn’t due to incompetence or deliberate dishonesty, but to delusion.
Yes, we are busy all day long. But that’s irrelevant to the integrity issue. If our intended tasks exceed the available time, the whole edifice—like a structurally unsound building—collapses.
The only way to fix being overwhelmed by things falling through the cracks is to become obsessed with integrity.
Integrity makes things work. When what we say is only nominally connected to reality, and integrity lapses. That reduces our satisfaction, our relationships with others, and in very real terms, our power to make things happen—otherwise known as productivity. And when you consider the quality of your life and work, a loss of those three—satisfaction, relatedness and productivity—the costs are immense.
Integrity is binary
Either we did the thing we promised, or we didn’t. Good intentions have no currency in the matter.
By the same logic, saying that we will not do the things that we cannot do is also a matter of integrity.
Often, that’s the most difficult part of this process.
You can already see the mischief.
A to-do list that is (arithmetically) bullshit has no integrity.
A deadline that comes and goes without delivery has no integrity.
Even if you are only lying to yourself, the integrity is broken. It may be more obviously broken when you promise things to other people–but it’s more insidious when you break promises to yourself every day.
What Do You Mean “Promise”?
I can imagine someone reading that last section and protesting: “A to-do list is not a promise”.
Isn’t it?
Clearly, a to-do list is not a promise in the technical sense of a promise. But consider this before you dismiss it.
What does it cost you in energy, shame, anxiety or focus to have a to-do list that you know will not get achieved?
We give our word in lots of ways. They don’t all look like marriage vows or pinky swears. Every appointment in your calendar is a promise. Each session booked with your coach or mentor is a promise. Every item you delegate to a team member extracts a promise from them.
And everything on your to-do list is a promise to yourself.
What would your days be like if your to-do list WAS a promise? And more specifically, what if it was a promise that you reliably kept? (click to tweet)
These are all ways that we cast our word into the world –and give it away. Once we give it away, that promise—which is to say, that expectation and dependance—belongs to whoever we gave it to.
· Your friend who’s waiting at the bar.
· A soccer-playing child whose game is beginning.
· Team members waiting for your feedback.
· Customers who buy your product.
· And yourself—uncertain if you will do what you said you would do.
Manifestation of Promises
The most explicit way that we make promises is with our calendars.
When I first began training people in time management, Filofaxes (paper calendar binders) were all the rage (yes, I’m that old). On Day one of each 2-day course, I would ask everyone to open their calendars to next Thursday and share was scheduled.
Usually, the only things in the calendar were appointments: doctor appointments, meetings with the boss, regular sales meetings, or deadlines. Apart from that the calendar was empty for the day. A typical day might have nothing on it except a deadline and the time of the child’s soccer game.
That makes sense for making promises to other people about shared arrangements. If you agree to be at the doctor’s office at 3 on Tuesday, your calendar helps you keep your promise.
If you can’t make the appointment, you call in advance, cancel, apologize and reschedule. You are breaking your word and thus fracturing integrity. But you restore that integrity by cleaning up the mess and making a new promise.
The calendar functions as an external promise tracker. That’s smart, since our brains are terrible at tracking our promises.
Barren Calendars
Is that how your calendar looks? Appointments, deadlines, meetings and little else? In today’s world, having ONLY appointments may not leave your calendar empty. But if it only has appointments in it—that is, promises regarding intersecting with others—where do you track promises to yourself?
Throughout this essay I have posited several premises. Hopefully, you have been convinced of them. But let’s review them in order.
· Nothing happens outside of time.
· Your brain is a poor storage device.
· A to-do list is a list of promises to yourself.
· If your to-do list’s tasks require more time than is available, it’s a lie.
· A calendar is a manifestation of promises to spend time in specific ways.
Given these premises, if something is on your to-do list, and you honestly intend to complete it, it needs to have dedicated time assigned to it.
The mechanism for dedicating time is a calendar. And to dedicate enough time, it needs a specific, scheduled duration (or several).
That leads us to a rule.
Rule 1:
If you intend to do something, it should be in your calendar, with a generous duration of time allotted to it.
Every task. Every chore. Every project.
Scheduled.
Homework
Take every item on your current to-do list (we will talk more about those in the next issue), and schedule it in your calendar, with a duration. For small chores, bunch them together into a single duration. For big projects, schedule multiple sessions over several days, week or months.
Please start working on this.
As you do, here are some tips about the obstacles you may encounter.
1. Everything takes longer than you think –and it takes even longer than you think after applying this principle (Hofstadter’s Law).
2. You will be inclined to schedule every minute. Stick to no more than 3 hours of scheduled work a day (over and above scheduled meetings and calls). (More on that in later posts).
3. Extend your time horizon. You can schedule things out into the future –weeks, months and even years.
In this next installment, a few more insights, as well as the mechanics, and how to do it well.
The goal is to create a life (including work) that reflects your deepest priorities. But for now, focus on reaching toward integrity. That stems from the mantra:
If I intend to do it, it is scheduled, with a duration.
If I have not scheduled it, I do NOT intend to do it.
Please drop comments into the chat (link below) and let me know how it goes!
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If you read the article, what are your thoughts? Will you accept the challenge and try the homework?