In Good to Great (Amazon), one of the things they found to differentiate great companies is that they confront the brutal facts of reality. It’s a question I’m asking myself more often since reading the book – am I being brutally honest with myself? Is this how reality actually is? Am I ignoring anything that will come back to bite me later? As a result, I’m trying to address the things head on that I find myself being less than honest about.
I think of it like (don’t ask how I came up with this analogy), you have a barn which you use to store turnips. You’re burn is burning down. Are you still out there picking turnips?
It’s sometimes easy to be incredibly productive and yet – not address the truly important thing, the burning barn. Which is stupid, because in the end, it doesn’t matter how many turnips you pick if you have nowhere to store them.
If you have a burning barn, stop picking turnips and start throwing some water on it. It may be harder, and less satisfying, and more scary. But letting it continue will ultimately be so much worse.
Sacha wrote a lovely post about her free time, and how she protects it. This led me to her reflections on overtime and the whole concept of “having too much time on your hands” by herself and by Cory Doctorow. (Incidentally, it’s great when people have large archives and link back to stuff you haven’t read).
Credit: flikr / monkeyc.net
Doing a lot, and having too much time on my hands have both been things that people have said about me lately. The having too much time was described as “prioritizing badly” (i.e. should you be working on things like that when your thesis is not complete) but I think it amounted to the same thing.
What does all this mean? Because I don’t feel like I have too much time – I’m forever rushing from one thing to the next, missing out on things I want to do because other things takes precedence. I don’t know about doing a lot, because when I compare what I manage to do to the list of things I want to do what I manage to do seems a very small amount.
Over the holiday, I plan to focus on achieving more and being happier in the process. So far, this means that I want to carve out my time to be productive and balance it with time doing stuff I enjoy – skiing, reading novels, hanging out with my boyfriend and my friends. I want to learn how to say, I’ve not achieved everything I wanted to today, but it’s time to stop work now. And stick to it.
My biggest challenge? Strange schedules at university. Lectures in the evening throw off my days, last semester working Saturdays threw my week out of kilter. Lack of schedule means that I can allow these things to derail me and then my days lose their “flow”. At the start of the semester, I was working from about 8-4, and taking a break to go to the gym or whatever, or spend time with friends, and then any extra time I would spend reading articles and books that were helpful, but not as difficult to read as an academic paper.
But then crises hit, and I work the evenings because I think I need to. Eventually my mornings disappear and instead of a regular schedule I’m rushing about, forcing myself to make time to exercise, and frantically trying to be productive in every moment that’s left. The flow is gone. I can’t pick out the rhythm from the frantic din.
I think, if I’m more strict about stopping at the end of the day, I’ll be more eager to start the day in the morning.
How about you? How do you manage an overly flexible schedule or challenges such as non-standard working hours?
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