Whenever someone says, “I want some time management training,” I try to shift their focus.
Here’s the point: it’s not time management, it’s life management.
When you think time management, people are thinking about, how do I get more done in a day? When people are feeling like they’re not getting the right stuff done, it’s not what happens in a day that’s the issue. The issue with them is that they’re not getting to their important stuff – their goals.
If you look at what’s on your to-do list for day, if you have 20 things and you check off 13 of them, you’d think should feel pretty good. Not so fast…
The reality is so many of those things are not tasks that actually build towards a goal or a future, they’re just something other people want you to do, or some other form of administrivia.
I’m not saying they’re not important, but what I’m saying is you may have given them greater importance than some of the tasks that will get you closer to your goal.
What I challenge people to do is to consider what they want to get done this year, in five years, and in ten years? This is what turns time management into life management.
Once those over-arching goals are chosen, you can more easily break them into smaller timed chunks. It becomes easier to say to yourself, “well, I can do this in this quarter, and that in the 2nd quarter, and the other thing in the 3rd quarter, etc.” And then further break it down to, which month in that quarter is best for me to redo my website? And then you break it into weeks. What happens is the long range picture feed into your weekly or daily to do list, rather than unimportant tasks that fill up your days.
I actually abhor having a daily to-do list, at minimum I like to have weekly goals. The weekly goals should come from a larger picture. And drive your choices about what to do today.
Here’s a simple example, one of your goals is that you want to be healthy. We hear so many people say, “I never get to the gym, I never get to exercise, I’m getting fat and I don’t feel good, and I know I need to exercise.” I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there who have had that kind of frustration. If you put in your weekly goals that you’re going to exercise three times that week, it will actually force you to make space for it on three different days. Rather than putting it on your Monday list and then, “Oh, I didn’t get to it,” and then pushing it to Tuesday, “Oh, I didn’t get to it,” and then by Saturday you haven’t exercised it all, and it doesn’t make sense to do three days’ worth of exercise in one day.
Let the big picture filter into your daily to do list. It will help you manage your life, not just your time.
