My Version Of Time
‘How do I manage my time?’ is a popular question almost all clients bring up at some point. And let me share my secret with you. I have no secret. From time management matrices to the Pomodoro technique to mental muscle reps, all-time management mechanisms urge you to protect your time to do the stuff that’s important. So, the real name of this game is how cleverly you can articulate what’s important for yourself and how successful you are at being that person you are being called to be in order to protect your time against the harsh onslaught of everything you’ve got coming your way.
The real name of this game (time) is how cleverly you can articulate what’s important for yourself and how successful you are at being that person you are being called to be in order to protect your time against the harsh onslaught of everything you’ve got coming your way.
In his book “Procrastinate on Purpose’ Rory Vaden throws traditional assumptions we have about time management out the window when he alludes to Parkinson’s Law ” the amount of busy work always expands to fill the amount of time we allow to be available”. Note his choice of words ‘what we allow’. Suggesting time management is a series of small choices we make every day and not one massive procedural mechanism. Let me share my time concoction and see if it can bring you some results.
After years of studying a variety of different techniques, I turned into a time management junkie. And I use the word junkie because like all addicts, I was attracted to the process without objective. The big forest I was missing for my trees was that I wasn’t really clear on what was really important to me. For three years in a row, spending time with family was a goal, and every year I would feel like I’d never achieved it. It took a lot of hard questions to face the following:
- I was addicted to work. I felt huge dollops of guilt if I wasn’t working. Ironically, most of the time I was working, I was distracted. That didn’t leave me with much time for anything, leave aside relationship goals.
- I wasn’t clear about the nature of how this time with family could look. Who did I want to be when I was with family? What was the quality of time? What was rich and important to me about it?
- It wasn’t a goal that seemed to produce any catastrophic consequences if it got pushed back. In other words, I didn’t have an answer for what would happen if I did NOT spend time with my family.
And then it happened. On May 21st, 2019, my 80-year-old mum who was ordinarily very healthy, was rushed to hospital with an emergency medical condition where the doctors were telling me they could not give me a guarantee on her survival. I remember sitting outside the ICU crying in guilt and shame and negotiating with God to let her live because I was not ready to let her go and I wanted to do things differently. Pretty selfish, in retrospect. “Please God keep my mum alive so I can fulfill a goal”. But that’s exactly what I was doing. And somehow I did get a second chance at it. My mum recovered and I had to confront this procrastination with painful tooth-pulling strength. I had to wean myself off my perfectionism on the work front; this has not been easy. I had to ask myself why I kept avoiding spending time with her and I realized that I had got into an unhealthy habit of criticizing and finding fault with my mum at every turn. This took us into an unhealthy loop of her being defensive and me being critical. That’s why I never felt like I enjoyed spending our time together. I changed that. This was very hard. But I shifted the loop to one of mostly joy. We do enjoy the occasional spat, I should add. I had to ask myself that if I had not been granted a second chance, what regret would I live with for the rest of my life? And it was too painful to bear. So I kept being fueled by that. It also taught me to review all the areas of my life and ask what regret I would live with for these areas that didn’t have obvious consequences if I continued to procrastinate. And I found the time. Here’s how I operate my time now:
Mantra 1: Time management is a problem ONLY for those who have something worth managing.
I see countless people bitching about how they don’t have time for anything suddenly become experts at managing their time when something miraculous/drastic happens in their lives. If your goals aren’t your priority and I don’t mean “oh this is important”, I mean “I’m f***ing pushed to the wall and if I don’t do this I’ll lose/regret everything” then please do yourself and others a favor and stop reading now. Seriously. If you believe in your stakes and you believe they’re high, continue, please.
Mantra # 2: Stop telling yourself and others how busy you are. And stop believing it.
Imagine you and me interviewing the President or a CEO of a wildly successful company and her saying “OMG, I’m so busy I don’t even have time to think or achieve my goals”. Here’s the thing. You will never ever hear successful people complain about being too busy. How is that? Sure, they have people to do stuff for them, but how did they get there? By making small little everyday choices to set themselves up. The reason we all love to look at Instagram handles of successful rich people or happy people is that we love to marvel at how they spend their time doing fun, joyful and leisure stuff. Here’s the news flash for you. Anyone who is looking successful, joyful, zen-like and ikigai -ish has worked bloody hard on their addictions, their self-sabotage, their purpose and why and has a forward-thinking strategy about what would they be leaving on the table if they don’t take care of these goals. Its a non – negotiable for them. Spending time with those I love is my non – negotiable. I also have to earn a living building my practice and for that, I need a fit body and mind. So there are my priorities and that’s how I work my calendar. Simple. My shift happened when I stopped expecting other people and circumstances to align around me and started owning my own circumstances. You aren’t anyone’s victim. You aren’t the outcome of some deep universal conspiracy. You are the entrepreneur of your life. Now start acting like one.
Mantra #3: Work-Life Balance is so passé. Embrace the art of focused imbalance.
Let me ask you this? If your doctor told you that you were likely to suffer a heart attack in another couple of months, relegating you to life of a dull (turnip-like) vegetable for the rest of your life would you transform your life with a 10 minute walk each day? or would you rearrange everything around a 1 hour of cardio every day and plan your meals and track your calories? After you get to the level where you are in great shape, you would shift gears to a more maintenance diet and exercise routine.
If you are a solopreneur trying to build your business would your business see the light of day with sporadic little spurts of effort, start and stop, and walking around getting triggered, feeling like a martyr that you can’t enjoy the things in your life all the time? Or would you put your mind, heart and soul into working on this day and night till you say a steady stream of income and a stable routine so you could have your processes in place? Once you had that steady flow of income, you could open up your time to spend on the other joys in your life like hobbies and other income pursuits. You will often see my Instagram handle showcasing my childish artwork (my design friends must cringe seeing it). It’s my tribute to myself for going after my goals relentlessly to be able to give myself the time to be the kid I want to be and the aspiring artist I imagine myself to be. It’s a celebration. Protecting your joy fiercely is a process of small everyday nitty-gritty tasks that you work on relentlessly to be able to afford those moments of joy.
Don’t use the term balance as a way of justifying underperformance. Use it as a way of questioning what energy you want to focus on something without apology, without distraction and bloody well get it done. We all have seasons in our lives where something has to take precedence over the other – the art is being able to have the gumption to know what you want to focus on and do it so that you can turn your attention to the other stuff sooner than later without guilt and regret.
Mantra #4: What are you going to do with all this time you are saving?
When I used to ask myself this question, I would say “I just want to lie down and do nothing”. So here’s the question I had to confront. How many people did I know who were happy doing nothing? How many people did I know who were retired and staring at the walls? How many people did I know who had a lot of money and just sat and stared at it every day? Err…none. When I think of having a big pile of cash (in my dreams), I think of doing more of what I’m already doing. Walking my dogs, traveling, having nice things to eat, spending time with my loved ones, looking great. Well, I do everything of those things now because I’m so good at being clear about what I want. So what’s left? The only thing that perhaps I don’t have right now that I can do when I achieve all my personal and professional goals is to do more on a scale and sense of impact that I can’t work out with the current system. This Ebook is an act of purpose because I can offer more and more people a chance of that conversation we need to have without being physically present. And doing more of anything is being connected with a sense of purpose. That’s why purpose is so powerful because it connects us to being alive in our lives and our actions. It’s like that river, constantly coursing through us and that’s what’s going to matter in the long run. How connected we are to this energy. Else we will run dry really quickly and all that extra time won’t matter. That’s what sad and bored people look like, btw. Just saying.
Mantra # 5 Time management is about choices. But what choices?
I’ve never heard anyone who coached with me coming back and telling me, “Oh, by the way, after I coached with you, I went back to being miserable, incapable, and unhappy”. Never. Maybe some progressed at a slow pace and some at breakneck speed, but no one regressed. That’s because once the scales are removed from our eyes, we cannot unlearn what we saw. When people come face to face with their sense of purpose and connect it with their health, their relationships and their jobs, there’s a sense of urgency to get somewhere. A change in career, more love in their lives, more entitlement to happiness and freedom. You can’t chain that up ever again. New ideas, decisions, trajectories are constantly being thrown my way. And the only compass I ever use is what I call the 5-second rule. I ask myself the following giving myself 5 seconds to answer it:
- Yes, this is in line with my sense of meaning and purpose and it really showcases my values of fearless authenticity and deep care, and connection
or
- No, this is not in line with my sense of meaning and purpose and it really showcases my values of fearless authenticity and deep care and connection
Everything else in between is meaningless and usually accompanied with the following sentences:
- What will they say if I …..
- That looks really appealing, yet another shiny object but …..
- Oh God, but it’s so hard to……
So choose well for your time. Choose in the absence of your demons. Choose in honor of your values. These choices aren’t always pretty and sunshiney, but then again, happiness isn’t always a Pantone pink.
Reference: Procrastinate on Purpose: 5 Permissions to Multiply Your Time by Rory Vaden
