When Time Manages You
“Time isn't holding up. Time isn't after us. Same as it ever was.” -Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime
It’s fitting that I am behind schedule trying to get this article written for my blog this week because my topic is time management. More specifically, about how I am bad at time management. It’s something that I have struggled with my entire life for a multitude of reasons but I can sum it up in two.
First, I am incredibly distractable. Second, I tend to devote too much focus to new projects and ideas when I should be finishing up old ones. Because of those tendencies, I often feel as suggested by the title of this article, that time is managing me.
It’s a silly feeling. After all, the solution should seemingly be easy, right? Just focus on the things you should focus on. I sincerely wish it was that easy for me.
My main struggle at the moment is that I essentially have two different jobs. First and foremost I am a personal and professional development coach with a strong focus on leadership. Second, yet still important and time consuming, I am a professional board game designer. While I do focus on ways that I can put those two jobs together, they are still usually fairly independent of one another.
As you may have guessed, the trick becomes how to balance my time between those to different gigs. In the last year, I used what I will call an ebb and flow model. While it is something that could certainly work for other people, it was not very good for me. Here’s a quick summary of what I did. When coaching and speaking gigs were coming along frequently, I devoted more time and focused on growing more of those things. When game design gigs were coming along frequently, I spent my time and energy there.
What that did was create a big self-fulfilling prophecy of success and failure in terms of growing my two jobs. While both jobs saw nice growth in my first year doing them full time, neither will really blossomed as much as I would have liked.
For 2020 I plan to be more direct in how I manage the time spent on each of the jobs. Of course, as I mentioned above, it’s not as easy as just starting to be better at time management. It’s going to take scheduling, discipline, and accountability.
Let’s breakdown how those three things will work together.
Scheduling - Since just following the rabbit trails of new projects didn’t work out, I am going to focus on actually setting aside specific time in advance to work on certain projects. This also helps me avoid allowing myself to procrastinate work until a deadline is looming. In addition to ensuring that I can focus on the work as scheduled, I believe it will also be very helpful in reducing anxiety around that feeling of “What exactly did I accomplish today?”
Discipline - This is the tough part. Making a schedule is easy. Sticking to a schedule can be very difficult. That’s where discipline comes in. I find with myself that positive rewards work best. So my plan here is to reward myself with time that I can spend working on anything I like so long as I am keeping up with the scheduled portions of my day.
Accountability - Deadlines are something that have always been very good at keeping me accountable overall. Sure, I might procrastinate the work for awhile but I am respectful of deadlines and nearly always deliver on time. So there’s a bit of a built in accountability system right there. The difficult part is when it comes to working on the future of the business. There’s not built in deadlines there. Instead, it’s just me making up goals. And it’s easy to miss our own self-imposed deadlines. This is where I will use an accountability partner to ensure that I am keeping on track.
I am absolutely confident that some of you reading this are also not the best time managers either. I invite you to give my schedule/discipline/accountability tactic a try. If you do, I would love to hear how it works out for you. Feel free to send me feedback or ask questions at jason@yourturncoach.com.
-Jason