I don’t have time!

Four things to battle the most famous lie on the planet

There’s an old joke among geeks — that most frequent lie in the world is probably ‘I have read and understood the terms and conditions’.

I don’t think that’s true. I don’t have time tops the list. People have probably been making this excuse ever since the First Procrastinator. I know I say this often enough for it to be prayer. O God of Productivity, hear us.

Why don’t we have time? 24 hours is a lot. Subtract six hours of sleep. 18 hours. That’s still a lot. To quote a cliche, it’s the same amount of hours per day given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, et cetera, et cetera. Add Elon Musk and Steve Jobs if you will.

I’ve been studying my own daily cycles, and I believe the reason is simple: we goof off. We spend time worrying about needless things. We check Facebook. We check Whatsapp. We refresh our emails. All the to-do lists in the world aren’t helping because it’s so easy to be distracted.

There’s a way around this:

a) Don’t curb distractions. Plan for them.

I’m fairly active on Facebook, and as it turned out, I check Facebook a whopping 32 times a day on average (I have a little plugin that tells me every time I switch to that tab).

I tried to guilt-trip myself into stopping / blocking. Didn’t work. To be honest, I enjoy being on social media and I don’t intend to stop. So I’ve allocated one hour a day to checking social media and replying / ranting back. Or YouTube. Or Hearthstone. Or whatever else I feel like that day.

Even better: examine your daily work cycle. When are you least productive? For me, it’s always the hour after lunch. Plug the goof-off time into that unproductive zone, and hey: everybody’s happy.

Inner peace.

b) Things always take longer than you expect, so set intelligent deadlines.

In my head, a post on Icaruswept (where I blog) takes about 2 hours to compose, because that’s the fastest I‘ve gone. It doesn’t mean I’m going to be anywhere near as fast all the time. In reality, the average post (about 1,400 words) takes about 3–4 hours to do.

This habit of mine constantly leads to late nights and schedules thrown. To quote Jack Kornfield, the trouble is you think you have time. Now I automatically stack a 1.5 multiplier onto my own personal estimates. It helps keep things sane.

c) Stay away from the phone

Here there be WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Instagram, Pocket …
Here there be monsters.
I’ve gone so far as to shift to Windows Phone; the lack of apps prevents me from using it for anything other than basic communication and photography. I don’t suggest going to that extreme, but just put the phone away when you need to get things done.

d) When something is out of your control, switch to something that is.

This advice is from people wiser than I am. It’s something I personally have trouble doing, but many people, both alive and dead, have advised me to focus on the things that we can control and let the rest unfold as they may.

This includes waiting for someone’s response, verdict or work. Because, to quote Gandalf, all you really can do is decide what to do with the time that is given to you. Do what you can, then back off and do something else.

Going ahead, I’m going to do my level best to implement these 80% of the time. I suggest you do, too.

20% of the time we’re going to fail. That’s acceptable. To err is human.
But to be productive is divine.