Category: Time Management

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You’re Wishing For The Wrong Thing

Don’t you wish for work to feel like this?
Relaxed, clean, a cup of coffee and a blank page?
Fuh-gedda-bout it.

I am a little upset. My life isn’t neat and orderly. Stuff is happening and I’m not as caught up as I’d like to be. Sound familiar? You too? Huh.

Well, let me go you one better. My work life is that way too. What do you think of that?

You think I should take down my Life Coach sign and go home, don’t you? Or maybe you’re like many of my clients and you’re a bit relieved to learn that I’ll be spending an hour or four on Sunday getting my inbox in order.

The nature of work is to be messy. Hey, after all, we’re working in here, we’re having a life. Each of us is trying to grow, to master the next thing required of us and to find a way to balance this against all the other demands on our time.

Work is not static and it never will be.

As soon as we wrangle all the demands into an orderly state, as soon as we master what’s in front of us, something changes. A competitor comes up with a better product and we have to catch up. Our co-worker retires and we have to learn their tasks. A new opportunity presents itself and we have to learn to fit it into the puzzle of time and tasks. All of this happens and more. It never ends.

Regardless of where we are on the learning curve, the curve keeps sloping off into the distance.

Are you disappointed?

I used to be so change resistant that I let my living room sofa make me unhappy for a month. I spent hours and hours shopping for it. It was perfect until it arrived. Then it was all wrong – because it wasn’t the couch that used be there.

Now, I’m older. I know I’ve got at least three more couches coming my way before I kick the bucket. I don’t need my couch to be perfect to be happy. It’s not the centerpiece of my life.

What if you let work, be work? You know, kinda how when the cat leaves dead mice on the doormat, you have to acknowledge that Mr. Fuzzy is a predator and not a really short person?

What if you looked at work and noticed that it always comes with challenges? What if you looked at work and noticed that interruptions arise daily? That if you turn off your phone and log out of instant messager, people will show up at your door? That your work consists of both projects and changes to the projects?

If you wish work would be orderly so that you can relax, then you’re wishing for the wrong thing. If you require your situation, or your sofa, to conform to your expectations in order for you to be content, then change is going to be a problem.

When you and your work are separate, you get to be you.

Work gets to be work.

Work can stay messy. And you? You can put your feet up and be content.

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The List of Wants

Finding out what you want in life? Priceless.
If you’re in my Reboot Your Day Job Program and you haven’t reached week four yet, skip this blog.

What if I asked you to tell me 25 things you want to have in your life – in the future? Do you think it would be hard to come up with that list? My clients did. In fact, most of them were relieved when I let them stop at 20. Want to know what was on their lists?

First, a bit of back story. I’ve been busting my butt to create a new program – Reboot Your Day Job. It’s six weeks long, and it’s jam-packed with all the bells and whistles. I’ve been taking beta-clients through the program for a couple of months now. The difference with a program is that there’s more structure to the work than the normal one on one coaching. As an unintended side-effect, I’ve had a bunch of clients go through the same exercises and I’ve been able to get some interesting data.

If you would like to go through my new program, you can drop me an email at Amy@RockYourDayJob.com and get on my waitlist. You can also sign up for a free 25-minute session – Here.

In week four, most people are starting to feel better, have more free time and less stress, so it’s a good time to talk about the future life they want to build. I ask clients to list out twenty-five things they want to have in their lives. I’m always cheerfully amazed at how difficult this exercise is for them. I’m also quite impressed with how much of what we want out of life is similar across industries, age, and gender.

Here are the common elements most of us want, in no special order:

  • Health
  • Happiness
  • To do something outside – walk, run, sail, swim, bike, garden
  • Read more
  • Spend more time, be connected with, family and friends
  • Reach life stage milestones – a home, college for kids, retirement
  • Mental health – have peace, clarity, be guilt free
  • Have a dog or cat
  • Go somewhere interesting – travel far or near
  • Do something interesting – start a side hustle or have a hobby
  • Engage our spiritual practice – meditate, attend church, etc

Notice anything interesting about this list?

People! You don’t have to wait to do this stuff. You can take action right now to be healthier. You can start building out your personal finance plan to hit goals, right now. You don’t need to be five years older and richer before you can go for a run. All you need in order to spend some time reading for pleasure is a library card and a comfortable chair. Dogs, cats, people find ways to have pets all along the income gradient. Day trips, hobbies, startups… the barriers to entry to these are all low. You can attend church this week or sit right down and meditate.

So why are these on our “someday” lists?

Because we’re not building them in now.

And why is that?

A scarcity mindset about time. Most of us say we don’t have time but what we mean is, sometimes we’re busy. Sometimes we have to cancel things. And when we could be doing something on that list above, we’ve forgotten what the list was. But I want to offer you the idea that telling yourself you don’t have time… isn’t helping. Try this – tell yourself you have plenty of time for everything that makes life worth living and no time for the rest. Now, what do you want to do?

All you have to do to start living your dream is … start.

Good to know, right?

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Are You Brave Enough to Manage Time?

Sandra Day O’Connor said “Slaying the dragon of delay is no sport for the short winded.”
Neither is the game of time management.

My Clients All Want to Know the Secret.

Yep. I feel for them. They want to know the three things which will solve the problem of work-life balance once and for all. For the first few sessions, they think we’re not talking about time at all.

I keep asking them to put names to emotions, remember thoughts, separate facts from fiction. They want a detailed plan on how to be more productive. They want to know how to finish their to-do lists in seconds and plow more work into less time. I keep trying to show them their thoughts.

I know how they feel. I analyzed every sentence in First Things First by Covey, Merrill, and Merrill. I spent a weekend pulling apart my filing system and making little labels after listening to, and then reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I made boatloads of time maps, trying to follow Julie Morgenstern’s Time Management from the Inside Out. I learned a ton by reading these works and much of it I kept.

If you can do it in 2 minutes, do it – is a keeper (David Allen)

I kept Urgent V Important, and Put The Big Rocks in First – Covey, Merrill and Merrill

I gave up being a Conquistador of Chaos and took up Time Boxing – Morgenstern

I calendar and habit stack. I pomodoro ( – thanks Francesco Cirillo ) and I use Trello.

I’m an A+ Time Management Student – but nothing stuck until I understood one thing: I’m Worthy.

Did you just groan? Just a bit?

I know – it sounds trite and you can’t buy it at the store and take it to work to solve all your problems. Sorry.

M. Scott Peck said it this way: Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.

Here’s the deal: You’re never going to be any more valuable than you are right now. There’s no such thing as self-improvement if we’re implying that we become more worthy, more important or more valuable when we change or grow.

You’re as valuable as the next guy, you’re as important as your boss and you have as much right to make decisions about your time as the CEO does. You have your own allotment of time on the planet. Nobody is going to stop you from spending it all at work – not in America, not in this century. The only person who can decide how valuable your time is – is you.

You still have to deliver value and results to the company that pays your salary – on the regular and in good faith, but as long as you think there is something more important or someone more important than your own decisions about what you’re going to do with your next 24 hours? You’re sunk. You’ll waste time, give up time and let work slide into personal time and personal time slide into work time.

You have to value yourself before you can set up a time management system that works.

It’s not easy to put a high value on yourself. You have to be very brave to do it. You have to have the courage to try it, to be willing to let people think stuff about you – to be willing to make mistakes. You have to be one tough lady, one strong dude to reign in time and make it take you where you want to go. The good news is – you can learn to value yourself and your time.

And that? Is just good to know.

If you would like to figure out how to stop seeing yourself as someone who needs fixing and start realizing that you are fine, right now – as you are, it would be my great honor to work with you. Before I worked with my coach, I really didn’t see myself as worth much. Now? I’m absolutely committed to modeling self-appreciation and helping others find their own self-compassion. Book a free session here.

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You Gotta Fight…For Your Time.

We all have the same twenty-four hours…
But someone is trying to steal yours.

Everybody Wants You

Look, time is the one thing that you can’t get back after it’s gone. You’re not going to earn more time. You don’t even know how much you’ve got. You can trade some of it for money by going to work and putting in your steady eight plus. You can trade even more of it for money by doing for yourself what you could pay someone else to do, like mowing the lawn or washing the car.

If you’re like most people, you watch TV. You’ll trade a big eighteen-minute chunk of your time to advertisers for the privilege of trading forty-two minutes for entertainment.

You’ll pick up your cell phone and flat out give the thing 20 minutes just scrolling between apps and emails.

Let’s face it. You? Are getting ripped off.

And that’s not all. The way you’re thinking about time at work isn’t helping you any either. We’ve all been conditioned to think in dollars per hour. If you want more dollars, you have to work more hours. But that’s not actually what’s happening at work, is it? Some people at your shop are bringing home more dollars for that hour. Why? Because of what they can deliver during that time.

Believe me, your company is certainly paying attention to the amount of money they are willing to pay for different types of work … delivered within the work day. Your company is paying you cash for results per hour. No mistake about it.

You should be looking at your time the same way. What results would you be willing to give up an hour to get? If you said you’d like to trade an hour of your life for the chance to eat four twinkies and watch one episode of “Badly Dressed Unhappy People” – I wish you well.

On the off chance that you have better things to do with your time, start taking it seriously.

At work, there’s a version of reality shows and smartphone apps too. It’s called interruption. Emails coming in, people stopping by your desk, the idea that you should get another cup of coffee or a maybe go find a bit of chocolate all conspire to keep you from delivering the results per hour that both you and your company want.

For most knowledge workers, we are being paid to do work that requires concentration and focus. If we’re not careful, those interruptions will suck up our work day and leave us working far into the night to catch up. Here’s four ways to take back your time.

1.

Spend the majority of your day doing the work that is most expensive or most skilled. Let’s face it – you want them to hire someone else to do the inexpensive stuff you can’t get done – not the other way around.

Once you get your head around that, it’s a lot easier to say ‘later, baby’ to the quick to get done, but not so challenging work of answering emails or filling out forms.

2.

Plan results – not time. That’s right. Don’t decide to spend three hours on coding. Decide what blocks of code you want to finish, then figure out how much time you have to do it. Push hard and settle for B- work until you get that amount of work done in the expected time. You can always come back and polish later during unit testing.

If you’re a manager, plan to get a specific task completed in a fixed time. Once you start planning results, you’ll be amazed at how it will bleed into the way you think about meetings and your personal time.

When you’re working toward a result instead of just burning time, it’s a lot easier to say no to interruptions. Combine that with the dopamine hit you get when you complete the result and you’ve got a big win.

3.

Refuse to work at the expense of yourself. Once I got serious about my time, and the way I want to spend it, I stopped tolerating my tendency to sit for hours at night doggedly trying to catch up. The more I insisted on treating myself decently, the more work I got done during the work day. I’m no where near perfect at this and I still have plenty of days when I get distracted and fail to deliver on my highest priority for the day, but I’m improving every day and it feels – GREAT.

4.

Stop using work to escape your life. You heard me. Work-a-holism is no joke. Our culture loves to applaud the guy that sleeps under his desk. Your mother will forgive you for missing her birthday if you “have to work”. You don’t have to come home, you can get away with just about anything if you’re working. After all, this is American and we love us some crazy hard workers.

It takes one to know one, and for sure, I used heroic work effort to avoid a lot of stuff in my life. And now? I can’t get that time back.

If you would like to have help figuring out how to conquer chaos and get yourself hitting your goals, sign up for a free 25-minute session with me. I would love to take this work further. Click the link below to get started.

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Next week – Facts v Opinions – The Ultimate Power Source.