Creating the Time to Self-Educate and Achieve Your Goals
In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the heroine Dorothy is introduced to several comrades on her journey to the Emerald City. Upon her first meeting with the Cowardly Lion, he explains with sadness that, while he is the king of beasts, he is indeed a great coward. Dorothy, perplexed, comments that “the King of Beasts shouldn’t be a coward.” “I know it,” returned the Lion, wiping a tear from his eye with the tip of his tail. “It is my great sorrow, and makes my life very unhappy. But whenever there is danger, my heart begins to beat fast.”
Some of our great sorrows often come from our own personal failings. While the Cowardly Lion was secretly courageous all along, we all can relate to the sorrow one feels over one’s very real flaws. One of my personal shortcomings, one of my “great sorrows,” that has challenged me time and time again is my seeming inability to follow through on commitments I make to myself. I am a people pleaser, which means that if I tell you I will do something that affects you, it will be done. But when it comes to priorities that are more or less invisible (especially ones that are challenging) that affect myself? I start with gusto then quickly give up. I am also spontaneous and thus struggle to plan ahead for the things I want to get to. Where does this leave me? With goals that are never fully realized, which is a discouraging place to be.
I became so frustrated that I decided to take a long, hard look at who and where I wanted to be 6 months from now and find an actionable way to get there. Inspired by several memoirs of disciplined individuals that I have read lately (next post), I came up with the following formula for creating the space and the accountability to make my goals a reality. I hope you are more disciplined than I am, but I also hope that if you are looking to grow in a specific way and cannot seem to make it happen, you’ll find that you can.
Are you familiar with the “jar of rocks” analogy? It is a fairly straightforward and intuitive one — you go to the beach and gather several rocks, pebbles and sand to fill a jar for decoration. You put the sand and pebbles into the jar, and all looks lovely. However, once you try to put in your rocks, you find that they won’t all fit. The sand and pebbles have expanded to take up all the available space at the bottom of the jar. You pour out the sand and pebbles and start again, rocks first. Once all of your rocks are piled in, you pour in the sand and pebbles and find that they settle comfortably into all the cracks left between the rocks. We can picture the jar as your time, the 24 sacred hours you are gifted with each day. The rocks are your essential items, without which your life can’t function. Your pebbles are the priority items you want to fill as many cracks of time with as possible. Last of all, the sand, at least in my mind, is space for serendipity.
We all know what happens when those rocks get piled in last: chaos. We also know what happens when you hit your stride and get all the rocks in first but, through lack of planning or committing to the wrong priorities, the pebbles and sand are left out: burnout. Let’s take a look at how this analogy plays out when you are planning your daily allotment of time:
- Identify your essentials — What is core to your day? Work + commute, personal hygiene, eating and sleeping are essentials that cannot be compromised. Get a rough outline in your head of how much time is needed for these items. I am home with the kids, so my work isn’t confined to a set number of hours. This leaves me a good deal of flexibility in how I choose to schedule my day. Add up the number of daily hours spent on each essential to get your “essentials number.”
My formula: Sleep + Eating + Personal Hygiene + Work = 19. - Identify your priorities for growth — What is high priority in your day — the things that are not essential to survive but are necessary to thrive? Some examples would include quality time with your significant other, children or friends, exercise, spiritual growth, cleaning, self-education and hobbies. To see how much time you have for these activities, subtract the number from your essentials formula from 24. This is your number of flex hours in a given day.
My formula: 24-19 = 5 - Decide how many priorities you want to tackle every day — Based on personality, this number could be quite different from one person to another. I am a distractible Type A woman who loves variety, so I include several priorities that I am content to give small chunks of time to every day, and consequently, will grow more slowly in than if I chose just one or two that I devoted larger chunks of time to.
- Decide how much time you would ideally give to each priority — How much time do you want to devote to each of these priorities every day? This is the most difficult step in this process, but is vital for gaining traction in your goals. There are a few reasons for this difficulty:
• The time devoted to this priority fluctuates — Take the “time with my important people” as an example. On a given day, I might spend an entire evening with my spouse or I might not see him for three days if he’s out of town. I have traded the time I typically spend with him for a different priority on those three days. My time with my children also fluctuates, as some days they have school or other activities that free up my time and other days I give them more focus.
• This priority overlaps with your essential activities — You want quality time with your people? Sharing a meal is one of the best ways to build a relationship and stay connected with those you love. Handily, you have to eat, so you might as well spend that time tackling one of your highest priorities. We try to do dinner together as a family, distraction free, every night that we are home to foster that connection. People who network heavily take advantage of this all the time, hosting interviews or one-on-one discussions over coffee or lunch. Time is precious, so make it work for you as much as possible.
This concept of combining essentials with priorities (or two or more priorities together) has been the most effective method I have found in tackling each of the things I want to hit every day. Sometimes it’s not that effortful: exercise with those friends you want to see, pray while you run, do that French podcast during your morning commute, etc. Sometimes it requires more planning (not my forte), such as making your time as a family line up with your family’s interests and areas of desired growth (take your daughter to a play to feed her interest in acting, make your date night centered around a shared area of desired growth, etc.) - Create an accountability tracker — Create a spreadsheet or table to track each of your daily (or weekly, or monthly) priorities and be faithful to fill it in each day (or week, or month). My husband and I have both created these for ourselves and share them with each other to help keep on top of our goals (thank you Coda). We have a well-established rhythm by now for tackling our essentials and relational priorities with each other and our kids, so I only focused my tracker on my own personal growth. My personal goals for the next six months are exercise/self-defense, a lot of reading, and foreign language proficiency (French + Spanish). I broke down each of these tasks and put them into my daily accountability tracker. Over time, I am able to see how consistently I hit each of my goals. What I have found to be important is, whether you schedule too little or too much for your goals, stick with it for at least two weeks. If you’ve scheduled two miserable weeks where your house is falling apart and you’ve lost too much sleep, obviously that needs to change, but giving it two weeks will show whether your failure to follow through was due to a true lack of time/mis-prioritization or due to a lack of consistency in prioritizing the things you’ve decided are worthy of your focus (I’ll bet you found at least 10 minutes for social media or Jimmy Fallon or Stranger Things or whatever floats your boat). For my first two weeks of focused exercise (3 sets of 7-minute strength workouts: W1, W2, W3), I regularly wanted to excuse myself from one or two or, let’s be real, all of the exercises. However, the thought of those blank boxes compelled me to follow through, and I found that I had more than enough time — it was my will that was lacking. Below is an example of how I set up my tracker; you can see that a few categories (French and Budget Check) are blank early on, because I added them in later as I felt I had the bandwidth.
6. Reevaluate frequently— Every month or so, go over your tracker. Be honest with yourself about how faithfully you are tackling your goals and evaluate whether each of them are still top priority. I have found that once I started hitting my goals faithfully, I didn’t want to change course because I saw improvement from my consistency in following through with them.
Wishing you a warm, productive, growth-filled Spring. Happy Tuesday!
