Time Management By The Hour Chapter 6 - Staying On The Wagon

The biggest problem with all time management systems is typically keeping to the system. They always look great on paper, but can you keep them up week in week out until you finally get somewhere? I don't know if I am worse than average about this, but I am generally a terrible recidivist.

I find I need to make a continuous effort to stick to my time management system.

There are various ways I do this. You are reading one. Writing this book is basically an exercise in keeping time management in mind. Another good approach is to listen to a time management book on audio while you're doing something else. This should be one that you have already listen to. The idea here isn't to absorb information but to keep the concepts close to the top of your mind.

Another technique which I invented independently but later discovered has been widely attributed to Jerry Seinfeld is ticking off everyday but you have carried out some activity on a particular project. This is rather neat because it uses the sunk cost fallacy to your advantage. Once you have invested quite a few hours in building up a good track record on a project you really don't want to throw it all away by just missing one session.

Strangely the things that ought to be quite motivating somehow doesn't work for me. When my time is well organised and I am working towards my goals I get a great feeling of contentment and inner peace. For some  this tends to make me complacent rather than eager to continue. I usually think that I am fairly typical of most people when it comes to the problem of time management, but this seems to be something that is quite unique to me. The way I overcome it is to try and treat each day the way I treat a piece of writing. I will often literally document every part of the day so I can look back on it, but more importantly work towards the sense of completeness I get from finishing a writing task.

The other thing that helps my motivation a lot is working to lists. I have plenty of lists and I devote time to them every day. The key one is the daily to do list. I work on paper with a pencil, usually in a spiral reporter's pad. This can fit into a back pocket. I don't have a set schedule of when I review and revise my lists, but I try and make this my between jobs activity of choice. This both keeps my lists up to date and keeps me away from more distracting things like social media. In fact if it only kept me away from social media that would be enough to justify it.

The other thing I find helps is looking at myself in the third person. This is easiest when I look at my desk. "What kind of person has a desk that looks like this?" I ask myself. The obvious follow up question is do I want to be the kind of person the answer to that question implies.

For example I asked that question today and found that I had a pile of unprocessed papers of dubious relevance to anything just beside my computer monitor.  They had been there over a week. It wasn't posing any particular problem but it was evidence that the owner of the desk does not rapidly decide on how to deal with things. The great advantage of this particular motivational technique is that it more or less automatically suggests a course of action when you find a mismatch between the kind of person you want to be and the evidence in front of you of the kind of person you are. (Needless to say that pile of papers is no longer there.)

You can do a similar exercise for most things you want to motivate yourself to do. Don't say to yourself "I don't want to do my tax return because it is so boring". Do say to yourself "I am the kind of person who is so well organised that I get my tax return done ahead of time." It is much more effective.

One thing that doesn't help much and in fact is probably harmful is stressing yourself out about time management. Your aim is a calm well organised day where the time is efficiently used to move steadily towards your goals. But we are all human and we all live in a world full of chaos and unpredictability. Sometimes you are going to screw things up and sometimes things are going to screw you up. Don't set your expectations too high. And remember that a day that didn't go according to plan might well nonetheless have been quite productive in its own way. We all have a very poor recollection of what we have done in the short run. It is very easy to imagine we have done very little when in fact we have clocked up  fair bit of achievement when it wasn't what we had on our plan.

One powerful way of motivating yourself is applying social pressure to yourself. Imagine that you are a role model with people looking up to you for guidance. Try to impress people with how well organised you are.  (Don't worry about coming across as an insufferable know-it-all. Most people are so self absorbed they don't the the slightest interest in what other people are doing. I know I don't.) I actually phrase one of my goals as "impress all about you with how well you organise time and manage projects".

It also helps to remind yourself of some of the great things that have been said about time management over the years.Using your time well is such av key skill and one that makes so much difference to your chances of success in any project that it is little wonder that it has spawned a great many aphorisms. An aphorism is after all a great example of time management in itself, cutting out all but the most necessary and most effective wordage.

Here are a few that I particularly like.

“If you don't write when you don't have time for it, you won't write when you do have time for it.”
― Katerina Stoykova Klemer

“Where your attention goes, your time goes”
― Idowu Koyenikan

“One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not to be done at all.”
― Brian Tracy

"Lost time is never found again."
-Benjamin Franklin

And although it is not really a fully formed aphorism I like Edward Gibbon's phrase about the emperor Julian about him displaying an avarice of time. I love the idea of being jealous of one's time and only parcelling it out when it is really needed. I have noticed that the really successful people I have met have had this sort of approach. People who get things done rarely have Mitch time to spare for us mere mortals. Their dance card is already full.