Time Is Not The Problem. We Are.
“Time flew by” and “time dragged” are common daily phrases, yet both are absurd because time does not slow down or speed up; only our perception of time changes. Time is fixed. No matter what you are doing, the clock continues to tick at the same rate. The reality is time is never the problem. The problem is us. We are the ones who squeeze unrealistic activities into the time we have available.
I am amazed at the number of people with forty-plus tasks on a to-do list and a diary with five hours of meetings for the day. Your day is broken before you begin if that is what you are facing. Attending all those meetings and clearing those forty-plus tasks is impossible. Given that an hour is still an hour, whether you take a walk in the park or sit and read through the report you need to digest, what can you do to create a more realistic day for yourself?
Majors and minors.
Jim Rohn and Brian Tracy often wrote about majors and minors. These are important, life-improving, career-enhancing tasks (majors) versus low-value, time-wasting tasks (minors). If you spend all day running around completing minor tasks, you will feel busy and, at the end of the day, be exhausted, yet what have you achieved? Very little. Conversely, if you spent your day on meaningful tasks that moved critical things forward, you would feel more fulfilled, and that fulfilment will leave you feeling elated rather than exhausted. It also moves you from being in a reactive state to a proactive one.
How do you find your majors?
There are several ways to establish what these are. The first is to establish what your areas of focus are. We all share the same eight areas in life. These are:
Family and relationships
Career/business
Finances
Health and fitness
Self-development
Lifestyle and life experiences
Spirituality
Life’s purpose
The key to these is to define what they mean to you — they all mean something different to all of us — and then break that definition down into actionable tasks you can regularly complete to maintain these eight areas in balance. Most people will go through the exercise defining what these mean to them but neglect to take it to the next, more important, stage, breaking them down into actionable steps.
For example, if you define your self-development area as always being curious and learning new things every day, then the action step you could take every day is to read a book or watch a documentary. Once you know that, you only need to decide when you will do it. Would you do that during your morning routine or before closing the day?
For me, the last hour of the day is my self-development hour. I either read a book or watch something educational on YouTube.
Your core work
Another way to ensure you are working on the critical things is to define what those critical things are. I call this your “core work” — the work you were employed to do.
When we start a new job, there is often a job description that informs us what we are being asked to do. If you are employed in a more traditional job, your job title will give you a clue about your core work. A teacher teaches a truck driver drives a truck, and a salesperson sells. Some newer job titles are vague (intentionally), which means to establish your core work, you may need to embark on a bit of investigating.
Once you know your core work, it needs to be broken down into actionable steps, which can then be entered into your task manager or calendar as repeating tasks.
What this does.
By externalising what is important to you and defining, at a task level, what your core work is, you now have a group of activities you know are meaningful and impactful. These will always be your priority. These will guide you towards what can be accomplished and whether you have sufficient time for other, less important, things.
You can also predict how long things will take. The problem with accepting new, low-important tasks is that you are never entirely sure how long they will take. Have you ever decided to repaint your living room? You look at the space and estimate how long it will take, but because you’ve not done it before, assessing how long you need will always be a guess. It’s only when you begin, do you realise you’ve miscalculated the time it will take and rather than taking a single weekend, you now need to continue the following weekend. Not good if you are also committed to attending a close friend’s wedding the next weekend.
This is the same when you accept tasks from colleagues and customers outside your core work. Many of these new tasks are difficult to predict the time required to complete. Accept too many of these, and you’ve created a problem within your system.
Establishing your areas of focus and what they mean at a task level and your core work will indicate how much time you have available for other things. To give you an example, for me to complete my core work and maintain my areas of focus, I require around fifty hours each week. Given that areas of focus do not just concern my professional life, I have about an additional twenty hours for other things each week. I like to think of this as my flexi-time. At a work level, I require around thirty hours for core work, which means I have sufficient time for other activities if I need them.
Given that time is fixed, the only variable you have to play with is what you do in the time you have. Be masterful about what you do with your time, and everything else will fall into place. Fighting with time is a battle you will always lose.
Thank you for reading my stories! 😊
If you would like to receive all the productivity and time management content I create each week in one convenient email, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
You can also learn more about what I do here on my website