Work Life Balance. It’s another one of those metaphors that feels OK until you actually start thinking “How would I do that?”. It assumes that your time is an external thing, with mass, and that you will know when work and life are in balance by some kind of external scale. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that’s how I do it. I make judgements on the fly, sometimes I’ll ask myself my favourite time question: “Is this time well spent?”, but I’m not weighing up my options in a considered way. I decide using a feeling – that I’ve been spending too much time working, or not enough time at the gym – it might not be objectively true, but subjectively it is. I’m using a heuristic to make my way to a decision – a short cut that allows me to reassess how I respond to the different demands on my time.

“Not all time has the same weight, does it?”

I guess the objective way to balance would be to keep a running total of time spent in various activities, placing them in different domains, like work, home, leisure, sleeping and decide how much time we wanted to spend in each domain, and plot it as slices on a pie chart. This appears rational, and it’s what many time management teachers advise, but it only tots up the quantity of elapsed time, not quality. Because not all time has the same weight, does it?

Contrast ten minutes spent waiting on hold for a customer service rep with ten minutes speaking on the phone to a friend you haven’t spoken to for ages. Which seems longer? Which is the better use of your ten minutes?

So when you’re doing that balancing act with time, your internal measurement system also has to take into account the heft of time, as well as the duration. It’s hard to map it out on a pie chart, and maybe that heuristic you’re using to weigh it up could do with a little recalibration.

 

Time Anxiety

 

The Big Business Man smiled. “Time,” he said, “is what keeps everything from happening at once.”

…….And space is supposed to stop it from all happening to me.

It usually happens on a Friday, a few hours before a looming deadline, the day before a holiday. The printer stops. The computer goes into update mode, or crashes altogether. People you need to talk to vanish off the face of the earth, just to spite you. All you want to do is get out of there, close the door and run away, very fast, and very far. But you can’t, because you’ve remembered that you’re a grown up, with responsibilities and people who are depending on you. And shouting at your laptop isn’t a good look.

So what can you do when time anxiety grips you? It’s about managing your state, as well as your time.

Step 1. Stop.

Stop and breathe. You’re going to need oxygen, but not for running away. You’ll need it to think straight and clearly and come up with a plan. But for the moment, just stop and recover. Stand up. Feel the weight on your feet. Relax and drop your shoulders. Move your centre of gravity down to your navel and breathe slowly, from your belly. Be present. You might need to repeat this from time to time,as we go through the next steps,  if you feel that your centre of gravity has shifted upside your head.

Step 2. Gather Resources.

Gather resources, starting with yourself. Go back to the past. Think back. This is probably not the first time you’ve needed to deal with a deluge of demands, 90% of them unreasonable, unfair and poorly timed. How did you overcome? What are your strengths, that you know you can rely on in a crisis? Name them and gather them in a circle in front of you. Bring to mind a few more of those sticky situations and the resources you used. Put them in the circle in front of you. Then step into the circle and take them on board, one by one. Use a key word as an anchor to bring this state to mind when you need it in future.

Step 3. Plan

Using what you now know from Steps 1 and 2, look around you. Who else could help you, if you asked them?  Ignore the voices in your head telling you it will take too much time to involve other people. Pretend you have loads of time, just for now. Even if you just bounce your ideas off someone else, you won’t be on your own.

Now put together a visual plan to get you where you need to be, broken down into timed chunks. If you have an hour, split it into 10 minute chunks. If you have longer, split it into 30 minute segments. Be clear, and write down how you’re going to use each timed segment, including a small amount of time to review each chunk. This will keep you in control.

Step 4. Do.

When you’re pressed for time, the easy thing to do is to start here, in the belief that you don’t have any time to plan. But steps 1 to 3 should only take you ten minutes in total. Your return on this investment is regaining your sense of control and agency. Your anxiety level has dropped.You’re back in the driving seat. Things aren’t just happening to you.

Step 5. Review

When it’s all over, take stock and get a wider perspective. If you could get a re-do, how would you change things? Start from further back than when the shit appeared to hit the fan. You’ll probably find that things were set up to go wrong at a much earlier stage.The warning signs often get ignored. You should review dispassionately. This isn’t beat yourself up time, it’s a genuine discovery process, so you’re being curious, not the Witchfinder-General.

In summary, you combat time anxiety by getting back in control. Of yourself, mostly.

Many people will tell you that Time Management is really about Self Management, because you can’t manage time. They’re right, if repetitive. But it’s not about a Spartan regime of discipline and self-denial. I prefer to call it Self Mastery.

If you liked this article, you might like this one: “Time Poor. You’re Probably Making Things Worse”.

And you might want to subscribe to our email list, so you won’t miss out in future. There are links over on the right hand side.

Burnout

Are you worried about burnout? If not for yourself, perhaps for your colleagues. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do all of the work. Staff cuts and lack of job security mean that everyone has more to do, with fewer resources in the same amount of time.

Deadlines have to be met and we all need to deliver, otherwise, we’re toast. That’s definitely how it feels for many people today. So we end up working late, at weekends. at home, and it’s still not enough. There’s still more to do, everything’s urgent, piling up and threatening to over load your system.

“There’s no one to delegate to any more”

People get sent on Time Management courses to fix the problem, but the new normal at work isn’t about prioritising. It’s not about being better organised, or being able to delegate there’s no one to delegate to any more. It’s probably not about In-box Zero, either.

It seems like all we can do is, like a galley-slave, row faster and keep up with the drum beat.

This is where I’m supposed to tell you about our new, improved, turbo-formula Time Intelligence, with added Psychology. A magic way to get more done in less time.

Not going to do that this week. I just want to ask you………..

If this is the new normal, and most of us are heading for burnout…..

What can you do about it, for yourself and members of your team?

• Say “No” more often?
• Renegotiate time scales and deadlines?
• Review your objectives, and your team’s?
• Be ruthless in identifying waste work, especially when it’s being allocated?

And what can a company do to adjust to the new normal?

• Update objectives?
• Focus on a maximum of 5 strategic priorities and execute them?
• Be ruthless in saying “No”?
• Identify waste work, and stop doing it?
• Make it safe for people to identify their own waste work?

One thing’s for sure. Work can’t go on like this can it?

Please leave a comment below. What’s the new normal like where you work?

When you’re time poor, it’s easy to think that you’re being more efficient if you pack as much as possible into those 1440 minutes in a day. Working at 100% capacity has to be efficient, right?

Here’s how stressed people with no time try to make more:

Speeding Up

• Speak faster. Miss things out.
• Skip lessons learned briefings
• Cancel “soft” meetings like 1:1s and reviews

Replacing a long-duration activity with a short one

• Email instead of phoning or meeting face to face
• Skimp on background information

Multitasking

• Emailing during meetings
• Not finishing one task before starting another
• Driving and texting or phoning

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs4lO2IceFk

• Walking and texting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNyTqIsrk0w

Wall to wall scheduling

• Leaving no gaps between activities
• Not leaving enough time for any one  activity
• Scheduling “free time” 
• Racing from one thing to another

Time and Space are inseparable concepts, ask any physicist. So are No Time and No Space.

Oh, and there’s a fifth one. Looking for quick-fix tips, tricks and apps about time management, hoping they will make you time rich. They’re the Ponzi schemes of the time management industry. You’ll spend your time trying them out, but waste most of it, because only a few will ever work for you.

Do you recognise these behaviours in yourself or members of your team?

A way to prioritise, if you have time

How do you prioritise when everything seems to fall into the Urgent or Important quadrants of Stephen R Covey’s  model?

I always assume that people have seen this model before, and know how it works. I guess you can think of it as a sorting-hat for tasks. If the tasks are in the top two quadrants, they’re important, and that’s where you should spend most of your time. The bottom two quadrants are for tasks that are not important, but it’s very easy to spend a lot of time there.

This is Whack-a-Mole prioritising

If you’ve ever spent your day being busy, but not feeling like you’ve made any progress on your goals, you’ve been hanging out in the Urgent zone. You’ve been working to meet deadlines and reacting to the thing in front of you – the Boss, a phone call, an email – stuff that didn’t even make it onto your To-Do List for today. This is Whack-a-Mole prioritising.

The truth is, not everything is Urgent, we just don’t get time to stop and think “which box does this really fit in?” – all the moles have to be whacked urgently. No one stops to find out where they’re coming from in the first place. No one stops to think whether we’re in the business of whacking moles either.

Much as I like Covey’s model, in my opinion it doesn’t deal with the systemic problems that teams face – of managers saying stuff in the top right quadrant is strategically important, but their behaviour doesn’t back it up. People thinking that they need to reply to an email in a nanosecond, otherwise they’re not on the ball. Colleagues making demands and causing interruptions that cascade into a wasted day.

So how do you prioritise, when everything seems urgent?

Work Life Balance

I’ve always had a problem with the concept or work life balance. It’s a logical contradiction, because Life is a class which has the sub-categories of work, rest and play and all the other things that fit into a life. Yep, people call me a pedant sometimes.

Nevertheless it’s a hot topic, and has been ever since we started making the distinction between work and life. Interestingly, this seems to have started in the ’70s when the number of women in the workplace was increasing rapidly. Apparently, before that, men didn’t notice there was a distinction, or care if there was one!

There are still many people today (men and women), who aren’t bothered by that distinction. And if it doesn’t bother you, I guess your work-life balance is …err… balanced. As long as your friends and family accept that as well.

Uh huh, just let me finish this important email

So that leaves the rest of us, who feel a conflict, some of the time. I experience it as tug-of-war for my attention, and it happens in real-time, as a choice. My epiphany came 13 years ago, when I realised that my two kids, who were 5 and 7, only needed one thing from me. My attention – now. Not the “uh huh, just let me finish this important email” kind of attention, but a fully present human being, during the time I was with them. For my part, I realised that time was not unlimited, was irretrievable, and that days quickly turn into years. Now they’re 17 and 19 and we’ve had some really, really  good times together. I have to admit that, now, I’m on the receiving end of “uh huh, let me just finish this really important Facebook status update/Twitter “, but I don’t need their attention, so that’s OK with me. I guess.

Eventually, if you add the slices together, you’ve got yourself a life

The other time demands that hit us in work and in life are a series of micro-decisions and choices about what we’re going put our attention, for that particular slice of time. Eventually, if you add the slices together, you’ve got yourself a life. which you either live consciously, by actually making a decision, and asking “is this the best use of my time?”. Or not.

Otherwise you’re just passing the time.