Four Steps to Master Your Time
Using MAPP to Help You Get Where You Want to Go
Why Do Productivity Systems Fail Us?
If you’re like me, you’ve probably tried a number of productivity systems, courses and hacks.
I’d be willing to bet that they might have worked a bit in the beginning, but then they ended up failing you.
Why is that?
It’s because we expect these productivity ideas to magically make us productive.
It’s easy to believe in the “magic” of the productivity system.
These systems only tell us how to use our time more wisely.
They don’t give us an understanding of our time, our needs and desires or our responsibilities in life.
Without an understanding of your time, you will never be productive, no matter how many productivity hacks you try; no matter how many productivity books you read; no matter how many productivity programs you purchase.
After all, at its most sanitized and analytical definition, what is life, if not the usage of time?
What is MAPP and Why is it Special?
MAPP is not a productivity system, such as Pomodoro or countless other systems.
MAPP is an underlying mental framework upon which you can “hang” any productivity system.
In relation to your time, you must be:
👉 M — Mindful of your time
👉 A — Accountable for your time
👉 P — Protective of your time
👉 P — Productive with your time
(Just by chance, after coming up with these four steps, I realized it serendipitously made a kitschy acronym.)
MAPP will help you understand the concept of time and how it relates to your life. This is vital before implementing any productivity system.
You need an intrinsic, emotional understanding of your time, and the essence of time in general, before you can efficiently control it.
This understanding of time is what the MAPP framework will give you.
MAPP will help you get where you want to go.
Being Productive:
Before I talk about the details of MAPP, I would like to talk a bit about this idea of productivity.
Everyone knows that being productive seems simple enough — you just do it, right? However, that’s certainly easier said than done. Why is being productive so difficult sometimes?
There are many reasons, such as not enough time, lack of confidence in yourself, lack of mental focus, too many distractions, depression or anxiety issues and having to tackle an overly-difficult task.
The good news is, most of these types of distractions can be overcome by using the MAPP framework that I lay out in this article.
Let’s get to it.
Step 1: Be Mindful:
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates
If you have been wanting to be more productive, then your mind has already been tossing it around.
Once this topic of productivity is in your mind, you must do three things: think about it, measure it and analyze it.
In this first step of being mindful, I will break it down into three parts:
🔸 Think about your time
🔸 Measure your time
🔸 Analyze your time
Think about your time:
What’s it mean to be mindful, in terms of productivity?
Well, you have to think about your current usage of time, your lifestyle and your responsibilities, and how you deal with all of it.
Find somewhere you can relax and quietly think about your life.
Maybe take a walk in the woods. Maybe go for a run, or a ride in the car. Listen to classical music. Whatever relaxes you.
I like to take a walk in the woods with my voice recorder. There are two advantages of using a voice recorder. First, it allow you to play back your thoughts. Next, it slows our thinking because they say we speak seven times more slowly than we think.
Next, make a mental note of the things that seem to take up most of your time.
Are they responsibilities that are necessary and cannot be offloaded to someone else?
Are you prioritizing your responsibilities properly?
How much of your time is considered relaxation as opposed to simply wasting time? There is a difference, you know.
I’ll talk more about these questions later.
Measure your time:
Once you’ve thought about your life and your usage of time, you now must try to measure it.
You should keep track of how you use your time for at least a few days.
Some ways to do this would be in a spreadsheet, in a note-taking app on your phone or even a productivity app.
I’ve been using this productivity app for a few years now. After all, we can’t learn about something and improve upon it if we do not measure it first.
Regardless of how you actually keep track of your activity, it’s a good idea to come up with a list of different categories of activity, and possibly subcategories. For example, work is an obvious category.
If you are particularly interested in being more productive with your work, then you may also want to have subcategories, such as replying to emails, sales calls, accounting — whatever your job entails on a regular basis.
Other categories can be relaxation, housework, other domestic/life responsibilities, and the dreaded wasted time.
Subcategories will be different for different people. However, examples of subcategories for relaxation might be spending time with your children, working on a hobby, hiking or reading. You get the picture.
Before you even analyze your time usage, you probably already have a gut feeling and reaction about how you are currently using your time. Does it surprise you? Does it upset you? Do you immediately see some red flags?
Analyze your time:
After you measure your time and put it into categories, you must analyze what you have measured.
It is important to look at the various things that took up your days and then prioritize the recurring tasks and responsibilities that you have.
Prioritizing is important because no matter how productive and efficient you are, there are only so many hours in a day.
Some tasks are going to need to be put off for a future day or forgotten altogether.
You need to be absolutely sure that tasks that don’t get done today are the least important.
When analyzing your recent usage of time, you not only want to look at what you are doing and how long it is taking, but also what time of day you are doing these things. Time of day is important so that an important task is not conflicting with a busy time of day where you can’t focus, or when you have other responsibilities.
Step 2: Be Accountable:
“Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’, 1889
It’s not enough to be mindful of your time. You have to make yourself accountable.
How do you make yourself accountable in regards to your time? What the heck does that mean?
First off, it means you have to be self-aware and almost painfully honest with yourself. If you can’t be honest with yourself, stop reading this article right now. You must take personal responsibility in this endeavor.
For this second step of being accountable, I will break it down into three parts:
🔸 Offloading tasks
🔸 Prioritizing tasks
🔸 Relaxation vs. wasted time
Offloading Tasks:
One way to be accountable to yourself is to determine which tasks you can ignore or offload to someone else. As an entrepreneur, it took me a long time to realize that doing everything myself was not a good idea.
If you can pay someone to do certain things, it is like buying yourself additional time…additional life. Don’t look at this as what it will cost you. Look at this as what it is worth to you.
If you truly do not have the money to spare to hire someone to do certain things, then try to get creative. Ask someone to do certain tasks for you and in return you can do certain tasks for them at some point; ones that maybe you can do more efficiently than what they do for you.
By the way, this is generally the idea of time banks. (Here is a directory of time banks.)
Besides, it is always good to build a team of friends and colleagues around you so that you can help each other.
Prioritizing Tasks:
I asked earlier, are you prioritizing your responsibilities properly?
In other words, are you getting the most important things done before things that are less important?
This sounds like a simple concept; however, how many times have we fallen victim to procrastination?
How many times have we convinced ourselves that being busy with tasks was also being productive?
Being busy and being productive are two different things — and we fool ourselves, sometimes quite impressively.
Are you picking one major task each day, and making sure you get it done? I read an older edition of a solid book about “eating the frog,” which means getting the most important thing done, even if it is not palatable, interesting or exciting.
In regards to procrastination, let’s listen to Ben Franklin:
“You may delay, but time will not, and lost time is never found again.”
Relaxation vs. Wasted Time:
Another way to be accountable to yourself is to understand the difference between relaxation and wasted time. I already touched on this idea a bit earlier.
Scheduling time on a Saturday night to watch a movie with your family or significant other is a good example of relaxation.
Mindlessly flipping through TV channels or browsing Netflix selections with no particular goal or expectation of finding something that you would be truly interested in is generally wasted time.
Don’t try to fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
Generally, if you are looking forward to something and/or have it scheduled, then there’s a good chance that it is quality relaxation time.
A good way to understand if time you spent on something was relaxing or wasted, is how you feel when you are done.
Do you feel refreshed and relaxed? Do you feel as though it was a good use of your time?
Be honest.
Or do you feel it was really just wasted time?
This is where self-discipline is going to come into play. The idea of self-discipline is an entire other aspect of self-improvement in and of itself, and is certainly out of the scope of this article.
(Self-discipline, self-awareness and personal responsibility are things that I am extraordinarily passionate about. If these things interest you, please be on the lookout for future essays on these topics.)
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes, on days when you just do not have focus, wasting time is acceptable, and even necessary. However, most of the time we obviously want to minimize our wasted time.
In the end, get yourself into a habit of asking yourself if this is the best use of your time when you are about to do something.
You should have certain business and/or personal goals in your life. North stars, if you will.
Ask yourself if a given task is taking you closer to those goals, and if not, can you afford the slight divergence off of the path for an hour or two, a day or two — whatever the case may be?
Step 3: Be Protective:
“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” — Warren Buffett
After you realize that you need to be accountable in regards to your time, then the next step is to protect it.
If you don’t protect it, you won’t be productive, which is the fourth and final step.
How can you be protective of your time?
Well, in the previous step we learned that being accountable to yourself means you cannot waste your own time. Being protective of your time means not allowing others to waste your time.
You have to be honest with yourself in order to determine what wasted time really is.
What if a neighbor asks you to help remove items in their basement that is flooding? Wasted time? I think most of us would say that is not wasted time. In that case, it may not necessarily be productive for you personally, but it certainly is not wasted time.
One of the bedrocks of our moral code and character is to acknowledge and wholeheartedly accept that we have a responsibility to our community, friends and neighbors.
I mention this in order to remind us all that we have to keep things in perspective. It’s easy to be inflicted with tunnel vision when talking about productivity and getting ahead in life.
Step 4: Be Productive:
“Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.” — E. B. White, American writer
Now comes the hard part: producing.
Never fear, it will not be as daunting and difficult because you set yourself up for success with the first three steps. That is the framework upon which you can build.
There are countless books, blogs, YouTube videos and articles explaining how we can be more productive. That is certainly an exhaustive subject and not something that we can cover in great detail in this article.
Whether you use the Pareto principle, the 40% rule or the psychology of achieving a flow state, MAPP will set the groundwork and build the framework for you to be productive.
It all comes down to the fact that we only have a certain amount of time in the day, and in fact, in our life.
We need to value it and realize it is the most important resource of our lives.
Learn to master it, please.
(I do not receive any compensation in any way from any products or websites that I reference in this article. If I ever do, I will note it here.)
