Want to be great at Time Management? Don’t do what I do!

The sky is frozen white, like the blank canvas of my mind as I sit at my computer to create a first of many Saturday morning blogs.

I promised myself I’d write more

But lately my writing has become decidedly stuck, especially since this need I have for variety and excitement took over my life. It seems that after I turned 50, I felt like I was a ball rolling swiftly down a well greased hill. The only way to slow down the rush of time became to fill it with fun activities. In that way, the ball would swerve left and right, and not descend directly into the waiting jaws of the end of time.

Apart from my day jobs, which I love, and which I’m doing even more of, (part of the variety), I’ve been teaching intuitive painting and then I also decided to try my hand at singing in a choir, and there’s always staples such as reading sophisticated novels and some non-fiction, and don’t forget Netflix to relax me just before bed, except it often has the opposite effect and I end up feeling like I’ve become Claire in the Outlander, repeatedly avoiding disasters in not one, but two lives, in two different time dimensions.  If that was a run-on sentence, there’s a reason for that. My life has been one constant rush for the past period while all around me are neighbors, colleagues and friends getting sick and dropping dead and I DON’T WANT THAT TO HAPPEN TO ME!

News flash: Only 24 hours in the day!!

So, one day while I was feeling more stressed than usual, I called up a friend of mine who’s also a coach and asked her for some advice. She was so kind and understanding, able to identify with me fully, in my pursuit of the full, fulfilling life where I can do it all. Then, very gently, she reminded me that very unfortunately, there are only a certain amount of hours in the day.  A part of me thought of Leonardo da Vinci, who supposedly slept only in the time that it took the metal spoon he held in his mouth to fall to the floor, but realized that he and I are a far cry apart and that I do need my 7.5 to 8 hours sleep a night so that my tired brain can recharge and resharpen.

I still continued on my merry path of self-exhaustion, but with a touch of introspection and something called, ‘there is a middle way,’ (you know, when you don’t want to stop doing something completely, but you could potentially do it partially or in a totally different way?). For example, instead of planning 12 more painting sessions to be prepared and taught by yours truly, I could put together a group of creative people – and we could each take turns teaching! 

I still wasn’t taking any decisions, and with a deadline at my work looming, the pressure was starting to build.  My husband got a bad cold, but I took more and more vitamin C and trudged onwards, until the day when I was in class, teaching Time Management. Ha, ha, ha, the irony! The woman who always arrives everywhere JUST ON TIME and who is constantly feeling there are not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything – I’m going to teach my innocent students something I don’t know how to do well myself.

I stood in front of the class, and asked the students to make an account of how they spend their time. Often, when I encounter blank faces, I like to give an example. So, in front of them, on the white board, I wrote:

Accounting time 

8 hours of sleep (well – this is what I’d like)

3 X 20 min food prep = 1 hour

1 hour enjoying dinner & chit chat with the family after dinner

Hmm – How many hours a day do I work? As a teacher, I thought – well, my schedule is flexible -  but let’s take today as an example… I was here at school at 08:00 and leaving at 17:00. Since my math skills are a little rusty, the students assured me that this added up to 9 hours

1 hour of TV/Netflix for relaxation (my guilty pleasure)

Students reminded me that I had ‘travel time’ to and fro from work. Yup, half an hour each way.

1 hour travel time

I didn’t share with them that I take 2 showers a day and that when I do, I tend to turn into a mermaid, and that’s when my best ideas come up, but if I were honest and took that time plus time to get dressed for work, do makeup (that’s 3 min max), then I will have spent another hour.

1 hour ‘prep’ for work and for bed and making myself beautiful.

½ hour shopping for food (not daily – but when it’s for a few days, then it’s an hour at least).

That’s 22.5 hours in a day that’s only 24 hours long. And what I didn’t include here was my reading, my singing (2 hours a week plus travel time), my painting as prep for the class I was teaching, reading email (ha ha ha that hardly takes any time at all,right?), occasional trip to the gym, physiotherapy, paying bills, listening to my kids tell about their lives, giving my husband some attention, petting the cat, and it’s no wonder I have ZERO hours with which to write.

Doing this little exercise, especially after the talk with the coach, and with my stress levels rising, really shocked me.

And I like to think that I don’t shock easily. But I’m also not a great planner. I’m the typical perceiver type (MBTI) and am super good at improvising. But that means that I’m usually stuck in the crisis management part of the Eisenhower Time Matrix instead of the Visionary section – where I should PLAN time for projects that are important for me – but not urgent.

I can be a Visionary!

In the week following this ‘shock’ – I decided to rethink my painting lessons, to take a break from my choir, and to dedicate Saturday mornings to writing. And here we are. An hour of bliss. Doing what I LOVE, what I want to prioritize, working towards that novel of mine which needs to be edited, energizing the writing part of myself into action, through this blog.

What do you WANT to do, and aren’t doing? 

How are YOU going to do it? 

Give us tips in the comments below!