Using Time Maturely
Time management is about more than checklists and schedules
Key Points
· Effective time management is about honoring your life’s calling.
· Making your time serve your calling requires a specific type of maturity.
· Maturity is understanding one’s purpose in principle (e.g., selflessness) rather than socially-defined identity (e.g., parent).
Are you often frustrated at the end of the week, wondering why you never seem to make headway on the big to-do items? You may be proficient in managing your planner, but do you struggle to finish more than the minor menial tasks? If so, you might be like many others that have been frustrated by time management because you’ve not prepared yourself to effectively plan beyond the day.
To really get beyond the daily checklist, you must first have settled in your mind a clear impression of the person you want to become. Many people mistakenly settle on vague impressions of their future to serve as their guide. Consequently, their routine wanders among an inchoate set of goals that are incapable of sustaining a consistent direction, leaving them adrift, besieged by the next or present crisis, and reactive.
Goals are everything in life, and not just for stereotypical achiever-types. The objectives we set for ourselves affect our actions in critical ways — both large and small. The source of our frustrations is often not in how we do things but in how we choose to frame our actions; goals are fundamental to framing life. What many people fail to understand is the necessity of setting goals for why and how they live in addition to what they want to accomplish in a given day, month, or year.
What I’m suggesting is not an exercise in positive thinking. It is the choice to make decisions, to prioritize, and to embrace the discipline to honor those decisions. This might sound banal and obvious, but holistic goal-setting is frequently and willfully discarded in surrender to the pull of whim, vanity, or fear. You can significantly improve your quality of life and professional fulfillment by reevaluating your understanding of what goals are and how successful you are in defining them for your life. Reevaluating one’s approach to life management should start with one of the most basic issues in life: mortality.
Time is a scarce resource because we are all mortal. We are innately aware of how precious it is, and how we act on our awareness of time’s value reveals our true maturity. It reveals whether or not we are governed by an inner compass that is oriented on what is good and enduring — independent of circumstances. Those led by an inner compass intuitively prioritize their actions based on a set of fundamental dicta. These rules override any considerations of personal profit, transecting all areas of life. Living by such rules enable us to settle the first order questions of purpose — of “why”. They have a living aspect because they guide rather than dictate. So, these rules never need modification to account for circumstances.
Alternatively, our indiscipline in managing goals can reveal that we are bereft of such a compass (or the faith to trust in it). Amid the alternating storms and still waters of life, unguided individuals follow elementary rules that are too clumsy to handle all of life’s issues, leading to negative or asinine outcomes. An employee might anonymously work himself to the point of exhaustion out of a quixotic loyalty to the team at the expense of family and health. A mother might sacrifice everything for the wants her children only to be a shadow of the person she needed to become for them and for herself. Simplistic rules corrupt what should be positive qualities because they cannot answer the full complexities of life that confront us all.
Rules are overly simple if they point back to the individual as an end unto himself or to ephemeral concerns. Guiding dicta are sufficiently rich if they, instead, orient one’s choices on universal and timeless principles.
Our standing as parents, our status in a profession, etc., are all transitory issues that inform decisions in the moment. They are not immortal rules by which we ultimately evaluate our lives or weigh the lives of those that have passed. On the contrary, vain and momentary concerns like these remind us of our mortality. In extreme instances, they can persuade us to launch into frantic commitments to seemingly altruistic devotions (e.g., to be the perfect parent) or escapist flights from responsibility to live the good life.
You might wonder: “how could wanting to be there for one’s children, to be faithful, etc., be negative?” The answer to these questions brings us back to the centrality of purpose. For parents, attending to those who depend upon us and to the least of these is good. Subordinating everything to fulfill one’s parental identity, as a socially constructed-role, is ultimately bad. The former is driven by authentic altruism. The latter is governed by vanity no matter how perfectly performed. The former is based upon timeless, existential, purpose. The latter is influenced by one’s fear of personal failure as much or more than the positive aim to cherish life by caring for others. Mature individuals exercise discretion by first asking questions of principle. Immature individuals eschew investigations of principle, presuming in their purpose and clutching to the familiar.
The so-what of principle-over-role is evident when we try to set goals and prioritize for the long-term. A narrow focus on one’s role leads to checklist approaches to daily planning, at best, and it often leaves one slavishly responding to circumstances until the day is spent. This minimal capacity to plan is not merely likely. It is inevitable.
Reflect for a moment on the roles that you base your identity. By the very act of guiding your actions in accordance with *your* identity, everything becomes centered on you (in those roles). These roles are not bad in and of themselves, but they should be an extension of first principles rather than standing in lieu of them.
Roles bind us to the past and to ourselves rather than free us for the future and liberating us to serve our fellows. These social identities fixate our attention on what we have already accomplished and what we have failed to achieve — vanity and condemnation. They prescribe for us a persona that we feel compelled to nurture and defend as a manifestation of ourselves to the exclusion of others.
Putting our roles in the driver seat inevitably corrupts because your mind takes you at your word when you say: I am a/an [insert role]. At that moment, your thinking is affected by that identity as if it were your own body. Like your body, you can choose to change your identities, but they govern your perceptions of the world and yourself for as long as you subscribe to those accepted roles. The longer you feed those roles as ends unto themselves the deeper their roots will become and the harder it is for you to differentiate yourself from the ends you seek. As Louis XIV famously declared, “l’Etat c’est moi [I am the state].”
Let me apply this line of reasoning to myself, to illustrate, and you can consider how my example might play out in your own self-assessment. I can say that “I am a father” as a declaration of my role as opposed to a material declaration of biological fact. In my role as *father*, I might sacrificially provide for my children’s education, their health, and a safe and comfortable space in which to mature into adulthood. What wrong could come of that?
The problem is that my life is not that simple and compartmentalized. Time and transitions in life don’t permit me to manage my decisions along a single axis in any way that is healthy or sane. I cannot sacrifice for my children to the exclusion of all other things. If I pretended otherwise, I would make cartoonish decisions because my children’s interest is not reducible to simple quantities of time, emotion, or material things. My kids need me as well as things from me. Their needs in both aspects will necessarily change as they get older — as they progress from dependency, understudy, to colleague and friend.
Those small complexities obligate me to daily discern what is right in principle, for my kids, without dismissing the realities of the moment. I should not do for them as children what they should do for themselves as adolescents. I cannot abandon what career requires if what they need most (always a complex matter to discern) in the near future are the fruits of that career. And, so forth.
This is the transaction where roles, by themselves, fail. They ultimately cannot guide a person to fulfill the responsibilities of a complete life — for oneself or for others. Roles anchor you to the dictates of the moment rather than future imperatives when they are simplistically construed.
Without a whole-of-a-life perspective, roles exacerbate our frailties by enticing us to put on blinders. We are drawn in by the sense of empowerment that we anticipate from structuring our decisions in accordance with our roles, and, to a degree, those roles deliver on that expectation. Seeing myself as a father is centering. I can arbitrate with greater confidence among countervailing demands having embraced fatherhood as a responsibility. This is reliably true, however, only because I understand that being a father does not have a fixed material character.
I understand that there are seasons of fatherhood and that transitioning between those seasons is grounded in the universal responsibility of ushering in the next generation for their sake, not my own, and for that of society. Being a father is just my contextualized fulfillment of unconditional selflessness. It is not a role that I own or that I can possess for myself. When rooted in principle, it is only the outcome of doing what is right, as defined in the moment, for those who depend upon me the most.
Maturity enables us to understand where we are going in life and to consciously articulate where we would like to go without being encumbered by others’ expectations or relying on past successes and failures as our guides. How we plan for each day should be based on an explicit understanding of our life’s path — of the kind of person we want to be at journey’s end. As daunting (or useless) as that might sound, planning through the full arc of life is feasible for all of us that are blessed with a relatively peaceful civil society and employment opportunities. It is here that we can begin to tap into the wealth of self-management advice to get things done.
Self-management guru Stephen Covey called it “beginning with the end in mind” and made it the second habit of his popular Seven Habits of Highly Effective People franchise. Rick Warren articulated a similar imperative in his Purpose-Driven Life suite of study materials. The premise that Covey, Warren, and others have applied is that goals that are beyond the point where we can plan step-by-step but can also hold up over time are essential to living an effective and fulfilling life. As we’ve gone over here, the best foundation for those goals are principles. So, let’s return to that topic and walk through the steps that lead us to the pages of your daily planner.
Ask yourself: “what principles define the person I want to be?” Principles ought to provide a purpose and direction for one or more facets of your life. They establish the universal and unconditional normative framework for your life. What they cannot be is a simplistic list of slogans or dead adjectives.
Doing unto others what you have them do unto you sounds appealing, but it is too passive and situational to be reliable. It would be better to say something along the lines of: my life is about rescuing the full potential of the discarded of society. The latter statement is active, i.e., it focuses on what *you* will *do*. It is not defined by the actions of others or the circumstances around you.
These principles are the components of your personal vision statement. The vision statement is your rubric for cross-examining every opportunity and challenge that you encounter. To the best of you ability, take your given and desired roles and overlay them with your vision statement and consider how they intersect. Are you fulfilling all the roles that your principles demand? Are there roles that are inconsistent with your principles. You’ll have a number of necessary roles by virtue of your position in the family(e.g., son, father, uncle, etc.) and job status, but you should not be taking how you define any of them for granted.
Your roles, in the context of the vision statement, provide the framework for running your planner through the year. For each of your roles, there should be a set of goals that get you beyond your status quo. These goals should constitute all of the necessary elements for climbing the next rung in that given role, i.e., to become something closer to your ideal in that area. The pitfall to avoid is reflexively taking a conventional next step.
Remember, you should define your roles in accordance with the principles in your vision statement. Why you want to be a CEO determines what kind of CEO you expect to become, what kind of organization you serve as a CEO for, etc. If you forget to apply your principles at every stage of goal setting, you could end up taking steps down the wrong path that cannot be easily undone. It happens to us all at some point, but you can give yourself a path out. Obtain a clear vision for your life, and it will be a reliable rescue for you when you’ve lost your way.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this essay are those of the author alone and do not represent those of the US Army, Department of Defense, or any other agency of the US government.
