HALF TIME THOUGHTS, EPISODE 09: NEVER ENOUGH TIME
There are twenty-four hours in every day, everywhere.?
No matter who we are, what we do, or where we live, that’s how long it takes Earth to make one rotation.
Whether those hours are daylit or cloaked in darkness depends on where we find ourselves on the planet and how far Earth has traveled around its annual orbit. For some people and for performing certain activities, that’s an important factor.?
But for those of us privileged to live with reliable artificial light, even the changing seasons place little constraint on how we spend those twenty-four hours.
So isn’t it remarkable how much difficulty we find in allocating them?
Why is there never enough time to get everything done?
Since the amount of time available doesn’t change, are we unrealistic about what can be accomplished or simply terrible at getting things done in the time allotted?
Great Expectations
How long does it take for a kettle of water to boil??Or for your oven to heat up?
Whenever I need either of those things to happen quickly (and many others like them), they seem to take twice as long as I hope.
And since I’ve done both a thousand times, you’d think I would know better.
I’m pretty good at estimating how long it will take to drive to a certain destination, albeit with a generous amount of handwaving to allow for Houston traffic.
I’m also good at allocating time to tasks like writing this article (about two hours of drafting and editing, plus a half-hour to find the feature image and upload everything to LinkedIn).
But I’m much less accurate when it comes to what I’ll accomplish in the next month.
My longer-term to-do list is frequently the source of disappointment when I realize that several of the things toward the bottom have slipped, again.
It’s not just that they took longer than expected.?More often, it’s that they never got started at all.
Putting them on this month’s list was unrealistic.
Or was it?
Did I completely misjudge how much time I would have available, or did I somehow mismanage the time and cause them to be left undone?
Whenever I get serious about time-writing, I arrive at the same conclusion.?My productivity varies wildly from day to day.
On a prolific day, I spend several hours in a state of flow, churning through tasks – whether work or home related – like a machine.
On less-prolific days, I get pulled in a multitude of directions and end up losing bits-and-pieces time when there’s an appointment coming up and I deem it not worth starting something new.
Some of this is just bad planning.?Some of it is the result of unanticipated delays or inbound requests from others.?Some of it is just, well, life.
That combination of inefficiency and unpredictability causes the top tasks on my list to take longer than I would like. The ones at the bottom never stand a chance.
Which leaves me with three potential strategies…
Strategic Time Management
I’ve been experimenting with three solutions to my perpetually bow-waved task problem:
Each of them has its warts.
Promoting overlooked tasks to the top of the list certainly gets them started.?But it also means other, usually non-negotiable, tasks suddenly become urgent and bully their way into my day.
The promoted tasks get parked while I knock out the things that must get done, and I wind up only a little better off than before.
This approach chips away at the neglected tasks, but it’s still disappointing – and increases my stress level when I feel the non-negotiable tasks looming.
Being more realistic about how many tasks I can get done is practical, simple … and utterly depressing.
Telling myself that those things at the bottom of the list simply won’t get done feels awful.?They’re often personal things that yield to work and household priorities, which screams of work-life imbalance.
I hate to accept that my life is so full of client work, business development, networking, personal development, administrative tasks, household maintenance, and food preparation that I can’t reasonably expect to finish a personal project or two.
Which leaves me needing to become more efficient with my time.
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Which is scary because I’m already an efficient person by nature (my wife periodically refers to me as a robot and asks me not to expect the same level of performance from others).
I wonder if this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.?An inevitable, no-win situation.?The more efficient I get, the more I expect to get done.?The more I expect to get done, the more I must focus on efficiency.
Perhaps that will be true at a certain point, but I’m not there yet.
I still make choices every day that cost me time.?Some of them are deliberate, calculated choices to be unproductive and have fun.?Others are lapses in judgement when marketing trickery lures me into clicking deeper and deeper into the Web.
Still others are valuable, serendipitous opportunities to have a conversation, read an article, or stop to smell the metaphorical roses.?Those are times when I learn things that make me a better person.
Delivering Value, Not Checkmarks
There’s a fourth way to look at this problem.
What if I stopped viewing my to-do list as a series of checkboxes and instead began focusing on the value my activities deliver?
Intentionally prioritizing things that create value – for others, for my company, for my family, and for me – has several advantages over the other solutions.
First, it causes me to question the worth of tasks I usually take for granted.?What’s on my list that adds too little value for the time it takes??How can I remove it?
Second, it causes me to prioritize things differently.?Some of those languishing tasks will create significant personal and family value, so they deserve higher priority.
And third, it makes me realize how much time I waste each day on non-value-creating nonsense.
Doom scrolling through LinkedIn comments that are predominantly written by trolls.
Deleting hundreds of unread, unwanted emails when I could enlist a service like Unroll.me to unsubscribe from most of them.
Re-reading my article for the tenth time when it’s already past the point at which further improvements will make any difference to readability or relevance.
We all have our foibles.
I realize this is more straightforward for me because I work for myself (albeit, in partnership with my wife).?
One of the reasons I love running my own business is that it gives me greater control over my time.?I can choose to work at whatever time I like, on whatever days of the week I like.?Consequently, I can also do non-work things at times of my choosing.
But running your own business screws with your to-do list as well.
This isn’t the kind of work where you clock in at eight and clock out at five.?There are no “not in my job description” excuses here.?When shit needs doing, guess whose list it’s joining?
Our secret weapon is boundaries.
Physical, temporal, and emotional boundaries that stop work from climbing off the balance and telling life to find itself a new friend.
What that also means is work doesn’t get to skip the value check line.
Even when you run your own business, some things add more value than others.?Those tasks need to compete for time with non-work tasks without necessarily taking an express elevator to the top of the list.
Fear of failure makes things seem more critical than they really are, while imposter syndrome pushes for unrealistic (and unnecessary) levels of service and productivity.
In most cases, the business isn’t going to crater if certain tasks take an hour or a day or even a week longer.
Time to Wrap Up
If you are in complete control of your day and you always get everything done that you plan, congratulations.?This article isn’t for you and probably hasn’t made much sense.
For the rest of us, there are a few ways to tackle those perennially postponed projects that languish too far down the list to get any attention.
While deliberately choosing to work on things that have been neglected and working relentlessly to become more efficient can both be helpful, I think the real key to improvement lies in judging tasks on their worth.
How you calculate worth will be highly subjective and personal.?But intentionally focusing on tasks that deliver more value on whatever scale you’ve chosen – while eliminating or delegating the ones that don’t – is a path worth pursuing.
And if, like me, you’re alarmed at the prospect of deprioritizing tasks for a business you run, ask yourself whether the doomsday scenario playing out in your head is realistic.?Be brave and tip the balance a little.
There are plenty of hours in the day to work hard, play hard, exercise, eat well, and rest well.?Oh, and to deliver a whole lot of value.
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash
Collector, creator, and disseminator of good ideas.
3 年I suggest the use of systems vs goals. A system would be to set aside a certain amount of time at the same time every day for each category you want. Then, you could prioritize inside those categories. That way you make progress on each. Things that aren't critically urgent go into the queue until the next category's period. I do something like this most weeks. (Some weeks are unavoidable chaos.)
CIO consultant helping companies solve complex business problems and optimize their use of information technologies
3 年Good write-up. As a very broad comment, I think the premise that you should be productive about something (business, personal, whatever) all the time is not valid. Any creature that can only survive through constant effort is not as fit for the environment as ones who can survive without requiring that much effort. So, the dead time that some people feel is wasted is not the problem. It might can even be viewed as a KPI for being fit (assuming core things are getting done). Your option 4 of realizing that things you try to convince yourself are valuable may not actually be valuable is likely the path you take subconsciously when you avoid doing things that are on your list. It is a natural human survival instinct to balance things out. Or, maybe not. ??