The past year I’ve been working on a book. I organized my entire life to carve out and preserve my Saturdays for this project. It is finally done (almost! Just reviews of proof pages to go); I got my weekends back just in time to work them through the review cycle, and with the worst of that done… I had the first weekend that felt open in a really long time. I feel like I’ve forgotten how to weekend, and I’ll need to figure out how to weekend again.
When I took my current job, it felt like a bit of a step down in some ways – far fewer people, far less to do. But nearly four years later, I’m responsible for an order of magnitude more people than I was at the beginning, my directs are almost all of them directors themselves. In a distributed context, it’s easy to lose sight of what that means. I try to make myself available. I reach out to new people, I hold office hours every week. But I don’t think these things go that far. I pinged a bunch of ICs as part of the review cycle and was struck by how rarely I interact with them. It’s no longer part of my job to be in the standard day to day work that’s going fine – somebody else is doing that now. I’m more elsewhere – where the problem are, working on something further out, or elsewhere in the broader engineering org.
I have always been something who thought critically about time, and considered what was a good use of time, and what was a bad one. Always wanted to maximize the time I had. These two things together – the book and the increase in scope at the day job – concurrently, meant I’ve spent the past year or 18 months feeling the most time poor I ever have. It has made me the most ruthless I have ever been about how I spend my time. It has been so acutely clear to me that any minute that is wasted, is a minute that is taken from either my personal life, or some decent, competent person who it is my responsibility to help.
There’s a cost to that, of course; I think about the Heidi/Howard case study popularized in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and how much a factor of that is “he’s busy; she’s a bitch”. But there’s also a clarity and an efficiency that I’m really grateful for. I have been more clear about what is worth my time and what is not. I have had better boundaries, had an easier time saying no. I have been less overwhelmed. I have overthought things less. I have got more done than I would have thought possible.
Coming out of writing the book, I feel like I’ve been doing a bit of an apology tour to all the people in my life who I have neglected. I’m determined to use at least some of this space to be a better friend, be more present in the communities that I’m part of. The rest of it, I don’t know. I am thinking about how I can keep the good – the clarity, the focus – but reclaim a little more spaciousness, and a little more chill. And I’m trying to remember the things I used to do before. How to weekend. How to linger. How to write about something just because it’s on my mind – as opposed to committed to in an outline. How to decide what I want – as opposed to need – to do.
In my current round of “argh what has this pandemic done to my life” I have been thinking a lot about time. Feeling too scheduled – at work, and outside of work needing to schedule every little thing (ok, mainly the gym) was really getting to me. I came across another book from Laura Vanderkam – whose 168 Hours I read ages ago and loved, and it seemed like exactly what I was looking for. The book is Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy Whilst Getting More Done (Amazon).
It’s a book about feeling like you have more time, and outlines 7 strategies to help.
1. Tend your garden. Think critically about how you spend your time and iterate on it. There are some helpful prompts for this, which I’ve started doing and appreciating.
2. Make life memorable. Mix things up and do something different.
3. Don’t fill time. Get rid of things that don’t add value, think about how to streamline things you do frequently.
4. Linger. Savor the moment and enjoy it.
5. Invest in your Happiness. Think about how to spend more time doing things you enjoy. Give yourself more treats.
6. Let it go. Where can you lower your standards? Make something easier to make it a more tractable habit to build (e.g. exercise, writing).
7. People are a good use of time. Investing in relationships and supporting activities.
This list was revelatory to me in terms of how I’m struggling with time now in a way that I didn’t before the pandemic – and it goes way beyond feeling over scheduled. The monotony of life (even as I’ve been working to break things up lately and introduce novelty), the social isolation, the time constraints that kill lingering whether it’s in the hot tub after a nice swim or over brunch.
But perhaps more than anything the lack of reflection on how I spend my time, that used to happen as part of every WTHIC. Each time I left – which was frequently – I would think about how I had spent my time and write something about it.
Some changes I’ve made as a result:
Weekly plan under the categories of: career, relationships, self.
Daily reflection on how I’ve spend my time.
Prioritizing the “non standard” thing each day (last week: swimming, floatation, movie night, physio, massage, haircut, new brunch place).
Color coding my work calendar and putting a “DNS” block over lunchtime in a different color.
Seeking out opportunities to “linger” instead of rush.
I really loved this book and thoroughly recommend it. I think almost anyone would get something out of reading it, but if, like me, you feel like the last 18 months has blurred into a series of endless zoom meetings… try it. It might give you a whole other perspective.
One of the things I really liked about How to Invest Your Time Like Money (Amazon) is how short it was. There are plenty of lengthy books written about time management, I know I’ve read a bunch of them, and some of them have been very helpful. This book though, is short and strategic.
Two key points, one of them similar to 168 Hours (Amazon) – which I also really liked. We all get 24 hours in the day. Your time budget is that 24 hours, minus necessary things like sleeping, eating etc. Whatever is left is what you have to work with. You need to be strategic about what you put in it. What are your priorities? Work, relationships, exercise, etc.
The other point I really liked was about layering, which is about fitting more in. This is combining things that use different channels – like listening to podcasts whilst walking, or talking on the phone whilst cleaning. This is what I do when I combine my workouts with watching TV.
For me this book was a <30 minute read. Well worth fitting into my time budget!
Credit: Flickr / Mike BairdMy friend introduced me to this concept recently and I’ve found it really helpful.
Rest days: complete break from work (I call them “no computer” days).
Buffer days: get through the myriad of small things that pile up.
Focus days: move the needle on Big Projects.
Some observations:
Rest days need to happen before they are more a “collapse and don’t get up” day. I have been working on a schedule of 5 days on 1 day off. Until I switched to this I would keep going until I couldn’t, and then would deem that a rest day.
Rest days should include going out into the world. These are the days when I go and see art galleries, or museums etc. Or even just driving to the next town for iced tea. It’s not enough to just not touch the computer. I also need to get away from it.
Buffer days feel unrewarding at the time but make a big difference. Buffer days are what make focus days possible. Before I would feel bad on days when all I did was a bunch of small things, and now I just tell myself “today is a buffer day, getting all this out my head and off my list helps me focus tomorrow”.
Of course not every day should be a buffer day. I try to limit myself to 1 in 5. For reasons I don’t really get, this is often the Monday (regardless of working through the weekend).
This concept forces me to be more organised. E.g. I don’t respond to email every day, but I should on the last day before a rest day.
If I’m not organised enough I’m restricted to mobile and tablet. I see this as a good thing – nothing improves my empathy as a mobile developer than being purely mobile for a period.
I love Momentum (chrome extension) for Focus days especially. I put my “focus” or milestone in the the “what do you want to achieve today” and I’m reminded of it each time I open a new tab. If I have the same thing in there for more than one day, and definitely two, it’s a sign that something is wrong.
On a Monday nights lately, I’m buzzed from skiing. I actually committed to something – an 8-week long, twice a week, race training program.
This is massive for me, as having taken a trip a month for very nearly two years, it seemed like I had lost the ability to commit to anything. And that was a problem, because it was making me unhappy. I was a strung out, nervous wreck, from travelling too much, having a stressful job (I love my job, I do, but I don’t just hang out in a micro-kitchen with breaks to take the slide all day. I work really hard).
And, I was making myself more unhappy by considering not just what I wanted, but what other people thought or felt.
So, something terrible happens and I think I don’t get to be as upset as the person who is closer to it, so I better pull myself together. It doesn’t work like that – people express their “upsetness” in different ways.
People say “oh you’re so lucky, I’d love to travel that much”, or (more annoyingly) “oh, I don’t get bothered by planes and jetlag myself, I just love it” (when they rarely go anywhere) and I feel guilty, or, angry. Because going to live somewhere for at least a month? That’s cool. Vacation? Bring it. Going to work somewhere else is often just a different commute. A different commute somewhere you don’t have a gym membership. Luckily I know people most of the places I go, but before my friend moved to NYC it kinda sucked – it’s a cool city, love it during the day, but don’t really want to or feel safe exploring it after dark, alone.
And then there’s the whole, if you’re not 100% happy all the time you should give up working for the man and become an entrepreneur thing. Which, much as I admire and support my entrepreneurial friends, is not me right now. I’m not interested in having my own company. The even more irrational flipside is, I 100% don’t want to start a company, and therefore I must be 100% happy all the time. Even if I’m not. That was getting me in a tizzy. And, the thing is, I think if you love your job you’re not going to be 100% happy all the time. Because things are never going to be 100% perfect. The raspberry panda liquorice that was so delicious, is never seen again. Product managers do their thing. Really smart people are often the most frustrating to work with. I get the highs – the raspberry liquorice, the shipping something an unimaginable number of people use, the incredible learning, the rush when you demo… and highs come with lows. I have that kind of temperament – when I’m delighted, I’m delighted. When I’m frustrated, I’m pissed. It’s easy never to get frustrated with your job if you don’t really care about it. I do, so anything less than amazing bothers me. There’s not much that’s less than amazing, but enough that from time to time I get really frustrated.
Anyway, I tell myself, all the time, that nothing changes unless you make it change. And so I took a vacation, and skiied and spa’d and relaxed. And then I came back, started working out at the new gym, upped my trainer to twice a week, and registered for race training.
Here’s the big difference – at the weekend, I do whatever it is I want to do. The weekend just gone I drove to the US with a couple of friends to buy cherry coke, and then on the Sunday I did bootcamp, 90 mins cardio, spin, and went swimming. Yes, I effectively spent the whole day at the gym – I have time to do that again now. The weekend before, on the Saturday I did spin, an hours cardio, and went swimming, and on the Sunday I did spin, 2 hours skiing, 80 mins cardio, and hot yoga. That one was pretty much a whole weekend of physical activity, interspersed with meals at my favorite restaurants in town. Awesome.
It feels like last year, every weekend I was either, on a plane, lying down because I was exhausted from taking a plane, or organizing myself because I was about to get on another sodding plane. I just couldn’t do it anymore. And the change in my energy, my stress levels… it’s dramatic.
Anyway, I guess what I learned from all this is to stop looking at how happy or sad other people are and berate myself for imagined ingratitude… and just make time for the things that make me happy. My idea of an ideal Sunday isn’t everyones… but that is 100% OK.
The other day, one of my friends tweeted about taking on too much and feeling overwhelmed. A mutual friend tweeted that he should speak to me.
I guess I’m becoming known for that taking on too much, getting overwhelmed, crashing thing I repeat ad nauseum. Hmm. I have noticed a pattern where friends start noticing that I’m taking on too much and I’m like, “naah, this is how I live!” or “yeah this week is hectic but things are fine”. And shortly after I get sick and I think, “hmm, X was right”. Vow to be more effective in future, to say no, to prioritize better.
Maybe I’m doing those things. I’m definitely trying. But each successful strategy just makes me take on more stuff, so that I’m always at capacity, and pretty often feeling overwhelmed. For example, I delegated, prioritized and then as I was feeling more chilled out about things, after the 3rd or 4th email I thought it would be a good idea to climb the CN tower. Two months away seemed ages and I figured it would be a good challenge. Of course it falls in a “hectic” week where I’m also travelling to Ottawa and a few days post-climb I’m throwing an InsufficientCateTimeException. Guzzling painkillers and being my own heater as I don’t have time to be sick right now. I say it’s just a bad week for it – but let’s face it, every week is bad. I could schedule something with a month’s notice, maybe.
Doing less is not an appealing option, though. The reality is, I love my life and I love having lots going on. I’d just like there to be more hours in the day. Then I could fit everything in, and have time to watch Desperate Housewives. For me, it’s about maintaining that balance between hectic but motivated by how much is going on – and overwhelmed. I hit overwhelmed at about 20% above impossible. Anything below 80% of impossible for too long and life becomes boring.
I think the answer is an evening a week of what I call Cate Time. Cate time involves working out alone, novels, movies, tv shows, copious amounts of tea and edamame, and not speaking to anyone (I’m always amused when people think I’m really extroverted, I’m so ambivert – it’s just almost no-one sees me when I’m on an introverted phase). I need it to function socially, and to be creative. In my feedback for this quarter one of my colleagues suggested that I start blocking off “make time” in my calendar. I used to do that. It didn’t work for me, as what I need to see in my calendar is blank space – whitespace. I need it to function, and so I make sure it’s there during working hours, or I change my working hours to find it. I just haven’t been doing that in the evenings lately.
Perhaps fortunately, a snow storm scuppered my plan for Sunday and I got a personal snow day. There was no edamame, and no gym (sore throat). But there was a lot of tea, several books, and a good amount of whitespace. Things seem surmountable, again.
Ideas
Stop borrowing from my Cate Time. It’s important. If I’m busy four nights during the week, I’m busy all week.
Crazy idea – allocate a week a month where I don’t agree to do anything that is not being a software engineer. I.e. no lunches, no events. I’ll add an event that says “DNS – Cate is anti-social this week”.
My friends and some of my colleagues have been mocking me for “outsourcing my life”. I don’t think that expression is accurate though – it’s more that I’ve been outsourcing details in order to enjoy life more (and achieve more). For me, it’s all about leverage. How can I leverage myself in order to do more?
Relinquishing Control
My dad is a wonderful person and I love him so much, but he has a terrible problem delegating. He takes on too much and agrees to do things that he should have someone else take care of, and it drives my mom crazy. I worry that I have a tendency to do this too, so I’ve been forcing myself to give stuff away to other people. I tell myself that even if I don’t think they will do as good a job as I would, at least I don’t have to do it – in the worst case, I just have to fix it and that will take less time than actually doing – because starting is the thing that takes most time. But it turns out, I rarely have to fix things I delegate.
Sometimes it’s easy. If you’ve been shopping and taken advice on what to buy from your friends, a personal shopper is not a great leap (I did this when I had only a couple of days to get the right clothes to wear for my internship in the UK between 3rd and 4th year). If you do group exercise classes, a personal trainer is not so bizarre (I’ve been training with one in order to recover from my recent injuries). Outsourcing my resume was harder, but I had to acknowledge that it did not work to my strengths and so Maureen McCann of MyPromotion wrote it and she did a much better job.
Now, I’m outsourcing details. I have a PA for a couple of hours a week and she’s mostly been taking care of insurance stuff and scheduling things. It’s great, because I gave her a stack of insurance nonsense and she’s taken care of it (if I was going to, it would have happened sometime in the last 6 months that it’s been on my desk). Also, for scheduling something often I don’t really care when it is, as long as it fits within the current commitments I have. She can pick Monday at 5, and that’s fine. If I have to decide, I’ll end up agonizing about the difference between Monday at 5 and Tuesday at 5. The truth is, there probably isn’t that much of one.
Working to Your Strengths
My teammate and I were talking about being detail oriented – and I am, in terms of programming. One of my friends gave me a little trick the other day, why would you do:
if (myString.equals("something")) { myString = "something"; }
(clue, it involves immutability). I find that fascinating – I just don’t find details elsewhere that interesting. In fact, I find them draining.
Technically, my PA knows a little bit of programming (I would know, I taught her most of it). But if I have a script to write, it would be useless to delegate it to her when I can do it, and have it working in a fraction of the time it would take her to even get started. I could delegate some research stuff, but again – it would probably take her much longer. What I’m finding, though, is the things I give her to do are the things that take me a really long time and make me stressed and/or miserable, and she gets them done really quickly. This means I can get on with the tasks that give me energy, rather than drain it.
Whilst my resume was being written, I read Effective Java (Amazon). Now which is really the more productive thing to do? By doing my own resume, I save some amount of money. By reading Effective Java, I develop my expertise in my field (it is an amazing book) – to me, it’s obvious that is a better use of my time. As a bonus, I have a better resume for it.
Two weeks ago, I was in the wilderness. Last week, I gave a talk. This week, I have a terrifying job interview. All this is on top of my internship. Could I cope without a PA? Yes. But I would be more stressed out and have less time to devote to the things that matter most to me.
Putting a Value on Your Time
It seems like people sometimes think it’s arrogant to suggest that your time is worth more than someone elses. But – we all place value on our time. If you’ve ever opted to pay more for the direct flight rather than the one with multiple connections, you placed a value on time, and perhaps the stress of trying to make connections. It literally had a $ value. At work, my time is worth a fraction of that of a Distinguished Engineer. So we’re going to meet on his or her schedule, not mine. When working, we exchange time for money. So our time has a monetary value, and it varies person to person.
When I was TAing, students would sometimes send me all their code with a description of the problem that basically amounted to “it’s not working”. As a result of this, we had a chat about “iPhone optimizing” their emails. Initially, all I want is the error message. After that, I will accept the small section of code that is the problem. If we still have a problem, it’s most likely a design issue, and I expect them to come in person to see me. Yes, I can compile and run their code, but I would maintain that is not a good use of my time, and is not educational to them. By teaching them to respect my time, I’m also teaching them to debug better. And hopefully disabusing them of the notion that I’m a compiler, which, worryingly, I had to tell more than one of them.
Why is that relevant? Because all the time we make judgments as to whose time is worth more. We just express it in a different way.
Delegating Details, Not Responsibility
I’ve been embroiled in a disagreement with Goodlife, because I want to work out with a trainer once a week just to make sure that I’m realigning myself (I dislocated my right knee, right shoulder, twisted my right ankle, and messed up my right hip – bit of a disaster zone) and I don’t want to commit to 9 months of 3 times a week, which seems to be their (utterly ridiculous) minimum. So I negotiated, or rather, I convinced my trainer who then negotiated with her manager. And then they backed down a little, to 2x a week for 6 months and they would sell any that I had over. I explained that I would be gone for about 2 months out of the next 6 and countered with 2x a week for 4 months and this was refused because they “couldn’t guarantee results” with that many sessions.
This really frustrated me, because I don’t want to delegate the responsibility for me to get back into shape after this many injuries. I just want to delegate the details of what exactly I should be doing to rehabilitate. I also see PT as a complement to the other exercise I do (kickboxing, swimming, rollerblading, body pump, yoga, cardio…) rather as the exercise I do.
Likewise with my PA, I don’t tell her “plan my life after graduation and decide where I should apply for jobs”, I give her concrete tasks like, “please deal with this pile of insurance stuff as per this form”, and “I have to be in location X for an interview on date Y at Z time for a duration of i minutes – please work out how and when I’m going to get there and where I’m going to stay”.
Things We Don’t Do
In North America, it’s normal to have an automatic car. This makes sense to me, because the car does a better job of changing gear than most people do. For the most part, we don’t cut our own hair (if we have any sense – this applies to dramatic eyebrow reshaping too), grow our own food, or produce our own electricity. It’s not productive to implement our own source control systems, or test runners. We don’t create our own crawl of the web, we Google.
Obviously this can go to far, if we say “I don’t need to know how to entertain myself, I have a TV for that”. But one crucial thing that I get from other people is confidence – I get driven forwards because other people believe in me, even when I doubt myself.
As part of this minimalism malarkey that I’m not such an aficionado of, I’ve read a number of times “Don’t outsource – if you don’t want to do something, just stop doing it”. I don’t really understand how that works, I mean what if you don’t want to do your taxes? Will that hold with the IRS?
Delegating does force me to evaluate things though. If I don’t want to give up responsibility, then I actually need to get it done. If I’m going to pay someone else to do it, it should be something that it’s really worth doing.
It also helps me with saying no, which I’m not great at doing. Someone asked me to do something the other day that I really wanted to say yes to but would have been really difficult and caused a lot of stress. Rather than saying yes and trying to make it work logistically, I just delegated it. But if someone’s asking me to do something and I’m literally going to pay someone else to do it so I don’t have to, it had better be a reasonable and worthwhile request that I really want to accommodate.
It’s not Minimizing “Work”, it’s about Maximizing “Great”
I read the book The 4-Hour Workweek (Amazon) and it is a really interesting book that helped me evaluate where I’m spending my time, but I agree with Penelope Trunk – the thrust is not about just “working” 4 hours a week, it’s about making the vast majority of what you do not feel like work (she represented that a little more negatively).
Another book I read recently is Do More Great Work (Amazon). I was working through the exercises in it, and it was great because I realized that Extreme Blue is all about Great Work.
The thing about Great Work is that it’s easy to get caught up in Good Work and not get to it. So delegating good work helps me move forward with great work. Managing my email might be good work, but it’s time consuming and rarely as rewarding or useful as a blog post or a piece of code.
Really, what it comes down to is that there are only a finite number of hours in a day. Delegating is buying a little more time and energy to make a little more progress on the things that matter most to you.
We’re having an event at WISE next week, we were hoping to have someone from SASS to come and give some advice on time management. But SASS is never open, and now we have something much better.
But when I was panicking for a speaker, thinking about maybe asking another student to speak I started to wonder if there’s any point giving time management advice.
For me, time management consists of carving out the quiet time and space that I need to create. One of my office mates and I were talking yesterday, and he’s the same way. Our supervisor, though, was saying that he needed a little pressure.
I have a friend who plans every minute of every day in this insane spreadsheet that has her working from 6am to 11pm (she actually sticks to it too), and another who discovered the need to be more organized last semester, and for him it consists of notebooks that he writes everything down in.
For me, I take a more technological solution. Everything is digital, and my calendar and todo list are always accessible via my iPhone or whichever computer I happen to be working on. My boyfriend is different again, he doesn’t seem to have a todo list or much in the way of a calendar, but he somehow stays on top of everything. Honestly, most of what I’m doing is in my head as well. However if I don’t write it down it makes me anxious. My boyfriend doesn’t seem to have that problem, though.
So I’ve started to think that we don’t need time management advice so much as a series of questions to reflect on.
Do we need clear spaces? If so, how can we better carve them out?
Do we need stuff scheduled every day in order to pressurize us?
Maybe we need a balance of both? For me, I like 2-3 days clear, the rest scheduled.
What’s the best fit for us in terms of how we store our schedule? Do we need a notebook or diary, or is an electronic device better (note, you need to remember to charge it).
How are we at balancing our time? Do we need to schedule “me time” or “organization time” or does taking breaks for these tasks come naturally?
Do we need a more regimented approach, such as “work on X for 2 hours and then work on Y for 1.5”?
Or does a more relaxed approach of, “work on X on Wednesday” work better?
What do you think? What questions do you ask yourself in order to manage your time better?
So my winter break reading consisted of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Getting Things Done, and The Power of Less (all Amazon). There’s a large amount of overlap between the first two and The Power of Less, but it’s a nice summary with some good thoughts on achieving your goals. 7 Habits is big-picture focus and GTD is more low level nitty gritty, so I think they complement each other well – I’d really recommend you read them both, if you’re looking to be more productive and effective, but in case you don’t even have the energy to read even The Power of Less I’m going to summarize some tips I’ve picked up from them.
Who are you and what are you trying to do?
One of the first things Covey asks you to do in 7 Habits is write down your different roles. We all have different roles we play – for myself, I’m not just a student, I’m also a TA, and President of WISE, and a girlfriend, and a friend, a daughter, a blogger and something else that I’ve not quite defined yet. Think about all your different roles – because you need to find time for each of them.
Write it down. And I do mean everything. Then review it, regularly.
The most helpful thing I got from GTD is the concept of making an inbox and putting every task, however small or vague or unlikely to be completed, on to it. Because it gets it out my head and allows me to focus on whatever I’m working on. If it’s something that small, like less than two minutes and you don’t think it’s worth writing down, why not just do it, instead? For paper, I have an A4 pad that I carry around with me, because I don’t have an office per se, and I don’t have much paper at all. This is where I collect things, and it gets processed on Fridays along with my email inbox and my task list inbox.
I’ve set aside time to process that inbox, as well as my email inbox, once a week. I was doing that yesterday, and it was actually kind of relaxing. Friday afternoon is good for me because it’s part of tying up the loose ends from this week, and planning the next, which is what my weekly review is about as well.
Give yourself a break.
We can’t be 100% on the ball, all the time. We can’t work every hour we’re awake week in, week out. Accept that you probably won’t achieve everything you want to do.
Go on, take a moment, it’s liberating.
Now, pick out the things that are most important. But keep the others on a “someday / maybe” list. You can always come back to them.
Find a way to pick out the things that are suitable for your energy level at that time. Label things with how long they’ll take so you can choose short tasks for when you have a limited amount of time. Doing a bunch of small tasks can be a good way to amp up your energy level (just don’t get lured in to thinking you can spend all your days like this and achieve awesome things).
Organizing in increments is OK.
Can’t get through inbox right now? Put it all in a folder “to organize” and go through it half an hour at a time, until it’s done. Take one piece of furniture at a time in your apartment to organize and then pick another one next week, or next month. You don’t need to achieve perfection before you can start being more organized! Organize what you need to to get started, live organized, and make time to clear the bits of your life that aren’t as organized up one by one.
Make time for Quadrant 2.
There’s a ton of stuff in our lives that’s important. And there’s always stuff that’s urgent. But just because something is urgent doesn’t mean that it’s important, and vice versa. Making time for the important-but-not-urgent (Covey calls this Quadrant 2) pays dividends. This can be stuff like exercising, or reading around your field if you’re a graduate student, or expanding your programming abilities and knowledge if you’re a programmer (check out this post – learn to program in 10 years). I think making time to process your tasks and review your week falls under this too. This is building your network before you need a job. Look at your life, at the things you should be doing but aren’t urgent right now. Start making time for them, and see what good comes from it.
As a graduate student, if you take a course you have to balance it with working on your thesis. It’s easy for the course to be more urgent, because everything is to a deadline. I deliberately start my assignments a while after they are issued. Yes, this sometimes causes me last minute stress if I’ve misjudged how long it will take or things come up, but if I spend that time before I start on Quadrant 2, I get huge benefits and make progress on my thesis – which is what will ultimately determine the date of my graduation. And I know I’m better at postponing the start date for something that will become urgent, than I am stopping when something is good-enough-but-not-perfect.
Also – check out this post from Study Hacks. What I took from it is that devoting time to Quadrant 2 is the difference between talented and extraordinary.
Learn how to delegate.
I’ve written before about how hard it is to delegate within group projects and student organizations. But at our last meeting for WISE I managed to delegate everything possible. Seriously. I was so happy! How did I do it? I said, these are the other things I have to on my plate and I have to do less. I also explained that I’m going to graduate, and the need to prepare for that so that WISE will keep going when I’m gone. And other people stepped up to the mark and so far, they’re doing great.
But just in case, I have a “waiting for” list on Remember the Milk. So I don’t remember what everyone else is supposed to be doing, because it’s all written down – now I can just check it periodically and chase up as neccessary. Added bonus – if people don’t step up and complete things, I can make it public...
Eliminate ruthlessly.
Is everything you do important? Really?
Yes? I don’t believe you.
There’s always stuff you can get rid of. Try it. It’s liberating. A good place to start if you read a lot – if you start reading something that isn’t useful or interesting, stop.
It’s not enough to “be organized” – you need to have your stuff organized too.
What’s the point in knowing exactly what tasks you need to complete if you can’t find the stuff you need in order to complete them? Throw out as much as you can and organize the rest of it. A filing system if you have a lot of stuff, or just a couple of boxes or binders if you don’t. Digitizing stuff and organizing it into folders works well too.
Eliminate distractions.
Email checking is a huge distraction. One of my friends thinks my aversion to email is ridiculous and tells me he just processes his as it comes in and that it takes hardly any time at all. But it’s been shown that it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to task after a distraction. He might be special, but I’m not. I check my email only between tasks, and have disabled the alerts. If I’m really absorbed in something, I can go several hours without checking it. Same for Twitter, Facebook etc. Although I have notifications on my iPhone, I don’t tend to notice them so they don’t distract me.
Wisdom 2.0 (Amazon) is full of tips on how to manage digital distractions.
Set aside time for things that you want to do.
If there’s something you’re passionate about, find time to work at it. The grind of doing stuff constantly that doesn’t inspire will kill your motivation.
Just start. The rest will follow.
This encompasses so many things.
So much time management advice says start the day with your hardest task. There’s a saying, something like, “Start the day by eating a live frog. Then the day can only get better.” It’s true.
Set a manageable amount of stuff to achieve in a day.
With big tasks it can be hard to know where to start, so break them down into manageable steps. Then your thinking has already done, so you can just get on with doing the task.
If you want to go to the gym, just make yourself get dressed and go rather than mandate what you do when you get there.
Covey takes this to the fullest extent, by suggesting you visualize what you’d like people to say at your funeral. You might find that helpful. But even if that seems like a bit much, determining what our high levels goals are can be helpful. Once they’re defined, we need to check-in periodically to ensure we’re making progress on these goals. I did this on my Planning 2010 post. It’s helpful to have them written down as a reference, so that if I’m feeling low on motivation because of the low-level nature of tasks that fill my days, I can go and remind myself of what my important goals are, and see if what I’m doing will help me meet them. If not, why am I doing it? It should be eliminated ruthlessly, as discussed above.
Summary
As I try and incorporate these things into my life, and live by them, I’m seeing the difference. But it’s tough. I struggle particularly with eliminating, and starting the day by eating a live frog. But I see them making a difference, so I hope you find this helpful. If there’s anything else you’ve got from these kind of books, resources for time management, or tips, please leave them in the comments!
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