Do you have time for time?

Introduction

I consider my childhood to be busy. Ever since I can remember, I have been a curious person. Picking up new information was exciting for me so I chased activities and environments where that was celebrated.

When it came to school, I was a jack of all trades, master of none. I’ve horizontally broadened my horizons, rather than focusing on going vertical, and becoming an expert at a certain thing.

This is not to say that I did not have my passions, but if opportunity knocked, 9 out of 10 times I answered. Consequently, fast forward to me being 13 and participating in 7 competitions on different subjects within the same month and my body physically failing me due to exhaustion.

You would think that I would have learned my lesson, but low and behold my highschool years, where the same techniques I got accustomed with were used. However, I could not afford being as superficial in how I organise my schedule than I was before.

Rather than context switching between everything I had to do, I was offering a fair change for my brain to assimilate different information throughout the day. By this point, I was able to make assumed decisions: I developed a priorities system based on my deep work which improved my life.

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Objectives

Subject

You have probably become a leader through your successes as an individual. However, many new leaders are surprised by how much more they’re responsible for now. Beyond having more work, it’s also more kinds of work, all seeming equally urgent.

You need to think strategically on how to plan your time right, while always seeking to optimise execution every day. Otherwise, it will feel like all your responsibilities are dragging you in all directions at the same time.

Your time is valuable. To be able to correctly use your energy and skills, you need to master how to schedule your work. Time management is a deliberate practice that helps ensure you’re using all the time available to you in the best way possible.

You may not feel able to justify the effort it takes. But the rewards are worth it. It will allow you to see patterns and begin making adjustments so you can get the right work done at the right time and become more effective.

The negative effects of time management are oftentimes ignored by leaders, since they focus is on the results. You need to reshape how you define productivity, and begin looking more in depth at the processes that drove your results. Suddenly, symptoms of poor time management will become more visible such as:

• Missing personal deadlines that are not audited;

• Being easily distracted during your working hours;

• Always rushing from one task to another, not being able to prepare or assimilate results;

• Not managing to be punctual, showing up late to commitments or with results;

• Feeling burnt out.

Framework

Reading about generic problems that cause poor time management does not mean you can relate to all of them. Like everything, you are required to perform a self introspection on what leads to your bad time management.

EXERCISE:

1. You should understand how you spend your time now.

Start by logging your activities for at least a day or a week. Use a time-tracking calendar app or a spreadsheet, noting your activities in a chosen time unit (15 minutes, 30 minutes, hourly), as well as any interruptions. Keep track of unplanned activities that sidetrack you away from your initial schedule.

2. Collect your activities into categories.

Once you have completed your log, collect your activities in categories and add up how much time you have used on each. Next, analyse the data you have collected. How are you distributing your time across all activities? How much time do you spend on interruptions? As you research your findings, what are some surprising time killers?

3. Align your categories with your priorities.

Finally, take a step back and place your use of time with your priorities: is your schedule matching your highest priorities? Which activities are most relevant and have the highest impact?

4. Use a framework for improving your tim management.

Now that we have a canvas to work with, it’s time to look at how we can improve our management of time. Find the framework below on some of the most effective solutions and improvements you can start doing from today:

Final thoughts

While you might be looking at professional improvements by implementing time management techniques, its effects ripple out to our personal life as well. Your methods of handling work directly impact your stress levels, and consequently your work-life balance.

With more responsibility, our work may seem to want to take a bigger part of our lives: this statement is false. The overtake of our professional life on our personal is due to our inability to prioritise correctly, and use our time wisely.

Do you have to push more hours today? Or did you build a work style without the proper value and priorities so everything seems important now?

Applying modern time management techniques does not eliminate the risk that you are not still not prioritising the right pieces of work in your daily life. Are you busy or are you productive?

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Quality content

One of the less discussed angles of time management in leadership is on the kindness we offer ourselves in busy times. While it may feel easy to blame yourself for not managing your time right and for not embodying this machine mindset of productivity that social media fed us, I dare you to take a step back.

Time anxiety is a real thing, and it’s pressuring us to believe that “we don’t have enough time”. As such, we rush and run, and hope that at least a task from our busy lists will make us feel better with ourselves.

In today’s quality content I wanted to share with you an article about time anxiety and about the constant fear that “we don’t have enough time”. I surely found it useful, as I am suffering from this shadowing syndrome, too, in some weeks.

You have time. We all do.

This is it for today! Thank you for reading!

Razzmatazz without the matazz.