The Only Time Management Tip You Need:
Don’t manage your time, manage your choices
Time is immutable; that is, time doesn’t change over time. It remains time. Time is in front of us, behind us, and we’re living in it. How can you manage what you cannot control? While attempts have been made to manipulate it (work days, daylight savings, time slots specified for school recesses, or when to eat) and often successfully so, it still cannot be managed.
So, why bother?
Well, because we’re busy and it’s time that provides the pressure.
I’m busy. I’ve always been busy. I’m a busy person. My brain moves faster than my body so I can barely keep up with myself. I get what seems like a good idea and don’t think too much about it before I’m researching it to decide if I want to pursue it. Graduate school, career coaching, editing, indexing, getting yet another new tattoo, moving to the suburbs, waiting tables, bartending, law school (okay, I haven’t done that last one…yet). Doing the New Thing is a constant in my life. I’ve also said (or thought) the following, for decades:
I wish I had more time!
I don’t have time for that.
Sorry, I’m too busy.
I can’t right now; I’m busy.
Can we petition for an extra day of the week?
How about an hour tacked on to each day?
(In Spring): I hate Daylight Savings time!
(In Fall): I love Daylight Savings time!
I’m going to go out on a limb and think that you are nodding your head in emphatic agreement.
I’ve been teaching for many years (sixteen if we’re counting) and I like to share links with students about how to be a better student. I ask my students to craft Personal Learning Goals at the beginning of each term where they pick a habit they want to change or develop to be a better learner, to have a better learning experience in the classroom. At the end of the term, we come back together in discussion and revisit those goals. I try not to goad my students on too much because I don’t want to influence what they consider important to their intellectual development; that’s not my job. I do provide a caveat: “I don’t want to know you want to get an ‘A’ in the course. Everyone wants a good grade. That’s not a Personal Learning Goal.” Other than that, I don’t interfere with their decisions on goal setting.
Now and then, students will come up with some winners (these are all real comments):
I want to be still for five minutes a day.
I need to work on better eating habits. Less grazing and more regular meals.
I should get outside more.
I’m going to try and get to bed earlier.
Read ahead.
Ask the professor questions instead of assuming I know the answer. I always do that, and I’m wrong a lot.
But the number one Personal Learning Goal they choose? Have you guessed it yet?
PROCRASTINATION
Merriam-Webster defines procrastination as follows: To put off intentionally and habitually; to put off intentionally the doing of something that should be done.
Don’t mistake procrastination for taking a much-needed break in this fast-moving, Internet of Things-obsessed, distraction-central world in which we live. Sometimes staring at the wall with that faraway look in your eye is what you need to be doing at three o’clock in the afternoon (or morning, if you can’t sleep); better yet, do it outside and stare at a tree or a daffodil. Look, I’m not anti-procrastination; but over the years, the several hundred students I’ve worked with who say that overcoming procrastination is the number one Personal Learning Goal they have for themselves also complain about not having enough time to Get Everything Done.
Wait, what?
How can that be? So this is why procrastination’s definition contains the word, intentionally in it for both the intransitive and transitive verb version of its usage. That’s the little beast behind the word, right? We forget that to procrastinate, we mean we’re doing it on purpose to avoid what needs doing, what we’ve committed to, what’s expected of us.
In the 1970s, we used to call it being lazy.
What’s happening is that these same students who list procrastination as their habit to break don’t do fantastically in my classes. For a few years and in several sections, I did some research on who said what, how their grades were, and what they said at the end of the term. Invariably, willful procrastinators received C-averages and delivered lots of complaints about not having enough time to do their work (because they think there’s too much to do); these students never made the connection to intention, however.
Back to the point of this week’s blog: The Only Time Management Tip You Need: Don’t manage your time, manage your choices. The procrastinating students often salivate over time management tips. They love checklists. They love doing all the tasks to manage their time, despite my waving arms and statements like, how will you have time to do one more thing like craft a magic kit to manage time you say you don’t have? Those tasks that make you a better time manager just take more of your precious time away from you and if you’re a procrastinator (aren’t we all?), then suddenly you’re whisked away into a magical realm of…SQUIRREL!
Just stop it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0lr63y4Mw&t=130s
I promise you, you can’t manage time. It’s a relative impossibility.
However, what you can — and should — do is manage your choices. There’s a trick to this, and it doesn’t involve making a list or buying a book or radically changing (too much). You could get a coach (I’m all for getting a coach, natch!), and that’s both commendable and advisable, but one little trick of the brain is to arrest this moment where you allow a distraction to veer you off course and shift gears back to where you’re supposed to be. It’s not easy. It sounds like it would be, but if it were, upwards of 350 students a year wouldn’t be listing Overcoming procrastination as their number one Personal Learning Goal. They’d be working on something else. Meditation, maybe. Pursuing their dreams of being artists. Taking an extra class so they might graduate early. Plan a vacation. Sit longer at the dinner table. Enjoy a well-deserved glass of wine at the end of a productive day.
Managing choices instead of managing time is demonstrative of commitment. Commitment to yourself and others. Commitment to The Bigger Picture, whatever that may be at the time. Project managers do this sort of thing for a living (and might be mega procrastinators in their own time, who knows). When you think about time management, screw your head on differently and think about choice management. Try this: go for a day, a few days, a week, doing what you normally do. You think you have no time until you realize how much time you have.
I’m speaking from experience here — I teach, edit, index, coach, parent, and am in a committed marriage that I work at to be successful for both myself and my husband. I’m also a writer, and I’ve got four writing projects going on at once. I make choices. I don’t overwhelm myself with all the Stuff I Have To Do every single day (I’d go crazy, and I wouldn’t sleep enough, wouldn’t eat well, and I’d be sick all the time — oh, wait, I lived in that awful space before, for years).
I still procrastinate. Sometimes willfully. I sometimes wait until the last minute to do things. I don’t like myself very much during these times, but I’m not hard on myself anymore (a key stride in my self-development as procrastination is often part of my vicious cycle: I procrastinate, it depresses me, I give up and procrastinate more, I freak out and blame…you guessed it: Time).
So, work at it. Give it time (pun very much intended!). Allow yourself the space to mess up. But pay attention to how and when you procrastinate. Manage those choices. Time has a will of its own (no, it doesn’t, but that’s a fun cliché).
One last thing, because music is the stuff of life.
