4

Managing Your
Time and Life

Time Management the Low-Tech Way

If you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t get there! Therefore, visualize and then write down how you would like to use your time, articulating your priorities and goals. Whenever an idea or task presents itself, determine how it meshes with these priorities and goals. If it’s something you want/need to do, ask yourself the magic word: “WHEN?” Then enter into your tickler or planner when you plan to begin and complete the item, even if it’s months away. Now it’s not one of those free-floating anxiety-producing thoughts, and it won’t slip through the cracks (unless you don’t look at your tickler or planner)! If you can’t do it when it comes up in your system, move it. If you have to move it several times, consider whether it truly meshes with your priorities and goals.

Ann W. Saunders

S.O.S.—Simple Organizing Solutions

Baltimore, Maryland

www.SOSforOrganizing.com

Power Organizing the High-Tech Way

Make your computer the central hub for all of your phone contacts, fax and letter correspondence, to-do lists, addresses, reminders, and calendar information. With personal information manager (PIM) software, such as Outlook, Act, Entourage, and Goldmine, you can do all that and even keep track of your email. And the great thing is you only have to enter contacts once. The information in your contact database links to your PIM email, calendar, reminders, to-do lists, and correspondence features. Have your PIM launch automatically by placing it in your start-up folder. If you are on the road a lot, synchronize (hot-sync) your information to your personal digital assistant (PDA) and take it with you. Using a PIM is a great way to stay organized and can help make possible the illusive paperless office.

Do’reen Hein

DoHein@compuserve.com

“American workers are slaves,” said my seatmate on the Lufthansa plane returning to America. He was a man of imposing stature and authoritative accent, an executive with a tire company that had factories in both Germany and America. “They work too long, too hard, and often for too little pay.”

I was shocked and a little hurt to hear my hardworking countrymen called slaves. Later as I thought about it, I concluded his perspective had allowed him to clearly identify a problem in American life. It applies not only to work-related experiences but to life in general.

Americans put a very high premium on accomplishments. People are talking faster, driving faster, and packing their schedules with activities back-to-back. Many people are no longer comfortable experiencing the joy of the moment with relaxation or family time. They feel guilty when they are not involved in working toward a goal.

We get rewards of various kinds by working hard, some monetary or physical in nature, some related to self-esteem. But there are two problems that occur when we form the habit of working to finish one job just so we can go to another and then another:

• The payoff becomes less satisfying.
• Once we start running, it’s hard to slow down.

Unchallenged, this way of life will lead to health problems, among them depression and physical complaints. If you have been living a busy life and been successful but this activity-oriented life has begun to lose its pleasure, you may be ready to make changes.

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IN THE TRENCHES WITH SMART HOMEMAKERS

The order of prioritizing has to be SELF, FAMILY, OTHERS. Years ago I heard (from the La Leche League) that the best way to implement prioritizing is NEEDS BEFORE WANTS. Keep these two principles in mind, and you’ll be all set. You need to take care of yourself first, because if you don’t, you won’t have energy to help anyone else. So in effect, taking care of your needs is taking care of others.

Family is next, for obvious reasons, but it’s so easy to cast them aside because “they’ll understand” while you go help out your neighbors. You must get in the habit of realistically assessing your needs and your family’s needs and then figuring out how much energy you have left to give to others.

Then, once you’ve given all that you’ve had left over, you’re going to have to learn to be hard-hearted and say no. Of course, you’ll do this in a polite and friendly manner. “Oh, I just wish that I could, but I’m sorry, I really can’t.” No excuse is needed, although if you wish, you may mention some other things that you have to take care of. Most people will accept this except for the most persistent neighbor pests. Those who are so rude as to insist that their needs come before yours don’t deserve to have your help—they’re not going to help you when you need them.

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What Do You Really Want?

What most of us really want is unlimited time and energy. There is exhilaration in living a jam-packed life. Even the stress of overdoing gives us an adrenaline rush that we grow used to and that feels natural and good after a while. But our dealings with time and energy bring us back to the reality of life. We can do only a limited number of things. To fit in all of the important ones, we must control our time—or rather ourselves. Unfortunately, we are forced by reality to make choices to include some things and (sigh) omit others.

If you feel stressed by having more to do than time or energy will allow, determine the areas of life over which you have the most control. Where do you have power to make decisions that will relieve some of the pressure? In the list below, put a check by any life responsibilities you can modify. Put two checks by any that need to be modified badly or over which you have the power to make significant change. Keep these in mind as you evaluate your activities later in the chapter to find the parts of your life that have the greatest impact.

____1. Work hours. Could you spend less time on your work? Do you stay at work longer than you need to?

____2. Commuting time. Are there any changes you can make, such as changing jobs, moving closer to your job, or taking another mode of transportation?

____3. Housework. Is there any way you can spend less time working on the house? You could ask for more family involvement or have a friend or professional organizer help you organize for more efficiency. You could hire someone to clean. You could lower your standards or organize yourself and your routine to do things more efficiently.

____4. Cooking time. Can you plan better, cook and freeze on the first day of the week, eat out more, bring cooked food in?

____5. Additional responsibilities. Do you have responsibilities that you can omit or modify? Perhaps you have too many pets to feed, groom, and take to the vet. You may have overcommitted yourself to help friends. Is your garden or yard too big?

____6. Hobbies, sports, reading, entertainment such as television. Most of us can minimize time spent on activities in this area, although this may be the hardest of all. We are an entertainment-hungry society, and entertainment consumes a large part of our time.

____7. Ministry or charity. Are the activities you are involved in the best ones for you? Would something else fit in better with your talents and time? Evaluate carefully so your efforts will be the most productive.

____8. Some other activity that consumes a lot of your time.

The Bare Bones Way

Life in general, including home life, is becoming more and more frenetic. Everything, including gym time, classes, children’s activities, meals, even volunteer service, must be scheduled.

In the past, writers of screenplays used the rule of thumb that one page of dialogue equaled one minute of performance. Now, because people are talking faster, a page of dialogue equals forty seconds. Because of the focus on speed, people seem to be walking, driving, and in general moving faster. Just as we are seeking faster and faster computers, we are seeking to digitize ourselves so we can speed up production and consumption.

For some, the home is so busy and unfulfilling that they seek satisfaction at work as a substitute. Work becomes less stressful than home life, and companionship develops there. Habits develop that cause further neglect of the home.

Only by stopping and evaluating where we are in fulfilling what is really important to us can we get a handle on how we want to use our time to live our lives.

The Heart of Time Management

The heart of time management the Bare Bones Way is deciding ahead of time our chief (top 20 percent) priorities or life goals and limit the bulk of our time, attention, and energy to those. Some priorities last a lifetime; others vary with the seasons of life. Whatever our priorities are, daily decisions must support them, keeping them alive and healthy.

Life goals are like the queen bee in a hive. Daily activities are like worker bees that hover around the queen. Their one desire is to support her however they can. A bee that goes out on its own to do something else is ejected from the hive.

Often we spend time on activities in our lives that have little or nothing to do with our goals. If we want to do less and accomplish more, we need to eject those activities and keep only the ones that move our lives forward to where we really want to go.

Locating the Queen Bees

Obviously the most important part of this is to identify the queen bees of our lives. Identify priorities by making a circle graph. Making a circle graph instead of a list eliminates the problem of having to rank our priorities in order of importance, which is difficult to do and tends to stop us from moving forward with the process. Later you will make some judgments about the place of importance of each of your priorities.

Jot down in any order five or six aspects of your life that are really important to you. Here it is important to remember the KISS principle: Keep it super simple. Then make a circle and draw as many pie wedges as you have priorities. This is important because it helps you isolate your priorities in your own thinking.

Most of us will list some of the same things, such as family life, work, personal and spiritual development (some may wish to put God or spiritual development as a circle in the middle that becomes a part of all of the other pieces), and finances. You may want to separate categories in a different way. For example, have a different pie piece for husband, children, and house instead of just calling it family life.

Some things, such as hobbies, pets, sports, or travel, are priorities to one person but not to another. As we move along in life, our priorities change. Your job right now is to evaluate what is important to you at this time and draw your pie. Don’t overdo by making too many pieces. Don’t try to do it perfectly; just get it done in a general way so you can move on. If it doesn’t distract you, you may wish to number the pieces in order from the most important to the least important. You may wish to write beside the priority how it will work out in your life, for example listing where you want to travel beside your travel priority. Again, the main thing is just to draw a pie that shows your priorities in some way.

Reading about this activity and generally considering it mentally will not substitute for actually getting a piece of paper, back of an envelope, or whatever to make your list and quickly sketch a pie with wedges.

These are your life goals for this time in your life. Sticking with them and not being diverted by unimportant activities is at the heart of the Bare Bones approach.

For some this next optional step may be among the most important. Many times we are hindered in accomplishing what is really important to us by the intrusion of other activities that, though they may be good, are not important at this time. They are pie pieces that do not belong in our current pie. Maybe we got pressured into them or maybe they are left over from a previous time of our life and are not appropriate at this time. If this is true of you, you may find it useful to actually draw pie wedges over to the side of your pie chart, label them, and then cross them out. This is a concrete way indicating that you are removing these activities as goals at this time.

Once you have decided on what is really important in your life, arranging your activities to fit these goals is a necessary but tricky task. All of your activities do one of three things in your life:

• directly support your life goals
• provide background support for your life goals
• interfere with your life goals

Ask yourself the following questions about each activity:

1. Direct support. Does this activity directly support my life goals? The goals that do should be adhered to closely. Being present at children’s performances is an example of a direct support for those whose children are a priority. One characteristic of this category is that usually nobody but you can accomplish the goal. If an activity is a key part of a life goal and only you can do it, it is a keeper for sure—a no-brainer.
2. Background support. Does this activity provide important background support for my life goals? Organizing the house; shopping for groceries, clothes, and household items; decorating; car care; paying bills; banking; and the like support family life. Dental care, haircuts, and such support self care. These activities are important, even essential, but they should be worked around the activities that directly support your goals. A lot of activities fit into this category. They take up most of our time. A characteristic of this category is that frequently others can do these activities for you. You can delegate, hire workers, or make other arrangements to get the jobs done.
3. Interference. Does this activity distract me from my life goals? Rogue activities that don’t actively or passively support your life goals need to be jettisoned from your life or at least closely scrutinized to see if they should be omitted.

“To-Don’t” List

Dr. Howard Hendricks of Dallas Seminary has said it is obvious none of us can do everything, so we have to make choices. A person has to choose between the things that he or she can do and the things that he or she must do. That calls for elimination. He notes that we all have to-do lists but he suggests we also need to-don’t lists.

Do you have five or six items that you are presently doing that should go on your to-don’t list, either because you should not be doing them at all or because you can delegate them to somebody else?

At this point, remember the importance of just refusing jobs that don’t fit with your priorities. A wonderful little word is no. You don’t have to explain why you are saying no. It’s nice to say, “No, I’m sorry.” If pressed, give a general explanation like, “It doesn’t fit in with my schedule right now” or “That’s just not my style.”

Of course, the hardest person to say no to is ourselves. We have many interests, hobbies, and causes to which we want to say yes when we know we don’t have the time and it is not one of our predetermined priorities. We must tell ourselves, Not here, not now—maybe later. This takes commitment to our predetermined goals.

If your family or coworkers keep wanting you to rescue them, remember the motto that you should post in various places:

Lack of preparation on your part
does not necessarily constitute an emergency
on my part.

If others expect you to respond to problems caused by their poor planning and you cooperate by helping them, you will have a different KISS. You will be kissing your own responsible and productive living good-bye.

Ordering Priorities

Deciding what to do when there are conflicts in scheduling is not always easy. The problem comes when a small problem in a vital area meets a big demand in an unimportant area. This happens all the time in busy lives.

For example, let’s assume the following are priorities of a fictional family. They are listed in order, with the most important listed first.

5. Spiritual development. Church attendance, family and personal Bible reading at home, participation in church outreach and activities. All of these flow from personal faith.

4. Family togetherness. This family has decided that Mom should stay home with the children, the family eats meals together, and Mom and/or Dad go to all sports, school, and other activities of the kids.

3. Support Dad in his work. Dad strategizes for promotions. Dad may need to take time for more classes and even consider moving.

2. Finances. Plan activities wisely to save for the children’s college fund. Will this mean the kids need to get jobs to save money and to study harder to get scholarships? Will it mean less extravagant vacations and forgoing a new car? Review choices of utility companies, insurance companies, and others to see if changes would be beneficial.

1. Education. Mom is finishing her college education. The kids may need to pitch in more with cooking and house care.

0. Other miscellaneous activities.

Earlier you made a pie chart to begin isolating your priorities. To participate in the next decision making, you will now need to list your priorities in order of the most important down to the miscellaneous activities, which is 0. A 0 means they are not among the top 5 in priority, though they may be important on a daily basis, like feeding and caring for the cats. Don’t try to make your list perfect. Just jot down your priorities so you can move forward. Later you can revisit the list and tweak it, adding more if necessary.

5 _____________________________________________

4 _____________________________________________

3 _____________________________________________

2 _____________________________________________

1 _____________________________________________

0 _____________________________________________

Priority Scale

Importance Scale

Does your priority list mean that a church activity that conflicts with a family activity always automatically wins out? No, because some church activities are more inconsequential than others or not as important as activities in a lower priority area. For those who want a formula for making decisions when priorities conflict, try this one. Construct an Importance Scale of 1 to 15, with 15 being very important and 1 very unimportant. For example, on this scale minor emergencies rate a 12, while full-blown emergencies rate a 15.

Importance Scale

Make your decision by using both the Priority Scale and the Importance Scale. It is easy to work this if you think of a balance scale such as elementary school children use when they learn math.

First go to the Priority Scale. Let’s say that the church (an important 5 on the Priority Scale) is scheduled to hand out vacation Bible school leaflets in the neighborhood on Saturday afternoon. You are really interested in doing this. However, Grandmother’s birthday party (a 4 on the Priority Scale because she is family) is at that time.

Now go to the Importance Scale. Weight the importance of your part in handing out the leaflets. Let us say you decide it is a less important 2. Now weigh your attendance at the party, which you decide is an 8 in importance.

Importance Scale

When you add the Priority Scale with the Importance Scale for the church activity, the sum is 7. Add the two for the family activity and the sum is 12. The formula indicates what we already suspected would be true for this family—Grandmother’s party is the big winner!

Of course, it may be possible to do both activities, but when you have to choose, weigh the priority and the importance.

In real life, we do not ordinarily make decisions by referring to scales of importance. In our minds, however, we are balancing priorities and importance all the time on a casual basis. When you are just beginning to focus on your priorities or when making hard decisions, a more objective method such as this will help you sort through your thoughts, without being rigid, and keep you committed to what you have decided is really important to your life.

If you use the scale method and strongly disagree with the outcome, go with your personal conviction. Using the scale has helped you clarify how you really feel about your decision, even if the number system did not. The important thing is to clarify the tension you feel in making decisions between what is a general priority in your life and what must be tended to at the moment.

Just for illustration, let’s suppose the dog breaks its leg on the afternoon of Grandmother’s party. The dog is not on the Priority Scale you have created (not that little Fido is not important!), so the incident is rated 0. But on the Importance Scale the broken leg rates a 15 because it is a serious emergency.

Importance Scale

The dog’s broken leg wins over the party, which rated a 12 in the exercise we did before.

Of course, there are always variables to consider. In this case, some family members could go to the party with your apologies, while you ferry Fido to the vet.

By the way, nobody is going to whip out this book and review the scale (I hope!) to decide whether to go to the party or the vet. This illustration is just to show how the thinking behind the scale works.

Practicalities in the Midst of Priorities

Even though setting priorities and sticking to them provide the framework of a well-ordered life, accomplishing everyday tasks is often where we feel we are faltering in our time use.

Mornings can seem like a leftover nightmare for someone who is less than organized as she bounds out the door, leaving a trail of kids, pets, and discarded clothing in her wake. Here are some ideas on how to set a good tone and get started right at the beginning of the day or the night before. When you plan ahead, the whole day will work better.

1. Do as much as you can the night before. Make the lunches, refrigerating what might spoil. Set the table for breakfast. If you have indecisive kids, have them pick out what they want to wear. If you have trouble making up your own mind, plan what you will wear. Make sure it’s clean and ironed.
2. Get the kids to help. A child old enough to go to school is a child who’s old enough to help. This means making beds (don’t sneak in later to smooth out the wrinkles), packing lunches, buttering toast, clearing the table.
3. Stick to a routine. Make beds, eat breakfast, wash up, brush teeth, comb hair, get dressed, out the door. Whatever order your family settles on, stay with it regularly. You’ll find you all move faster.
4. Keep an eye on the time. As you move along in your routine, occasionally remind everyone what time it is, just so it doesn’t get to be later than you think. Set a kitchen timer for five minutes before you need to leave.
5. Discourage anything that keeps you from getting out the door. It’s true that reading is educational, but memorizing the back of the cereal box doesn’t help to keep things moving. Promise to talk over last night’s dream at dinner—and then be sure you do it.
6. Try to be sure everybody leaves the house happy. There’s nothing worse than picturing those angry faces all day, especially when you can’t do anything to set the situation right. A hug and a kiss on the way out the door can make all the difference in your day—and theirs.
7. Make sure the house welcomes you home in the evening. If you will be gone all day, put dinner in a slow cooker so the house is fragrant and dinner is ready when you step in. Leave the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms in good shape so that you smile when you enter them. Put out potpourri and cut flowers that smile back at you. This is all part of responsible self care.
8. If you do have a bad morning, make things right as soon as possible. If your kids call you after school, that’s a good time to say, “I love you. See you tonight.”

Basic Tools

TO-DO LIST

Make it easy on yourself by dividing the to-do list into groups. Most people find their groups focus around actions that correspond to four locations:

• around the house, which we will call do
• at the phone, which is call
• at the computer, which is write
• in the car, which is usually buy

Fold a piece of paper into four squares by folding it twice, putting the short ends together each time. Label the blocks at the top: Do, Call, Write, Buy. In each block, list the activities for the day. Now you have four short, easily analyzed groups of things to do. When you list things in the appropriate box, add pertinent information, such as phone numbers and the like. Finally, put a little box beside each activity you list. Put a check in the box when it is done.

You will notice we have again used the first two Cs of organization. We have consolidated all similar activities into groups, and we have containerized or corralled them under the appropriate heading.

If you find you are overwhelmed by the number of things on your lists, choose just the three most important and make a separate list of these three. Don’t look at the longer list until the first three are completely done. Then, if you have time, go back and choose three more.

CALENDAR

Use one calendar to keep track of all your appointments. If you do not need to fit your activities in with the schedules of others, or if they are work-related activities that take place when you are already scheduled to be away from the house, you may wish to use a book or time management scheduler that you carry with you.

If you work your schedule in conjunction with others, say members of the family, use one calendar, and only one, for scheduling. A large yearlong calendar hung on the wall out of public view is easy to use.

SWISS CHEESE METHOD

The Swiss cheese method, which was popularized by Alan Lakein in his classic book How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, is so useful it must be included with basic tools.[1] If you procrastinate doing a big or unpleasant job, begin to poke holes in it a little at a time. I had a large pile of big photo albums, which I procrastinated moving to another spot until I recalled the Swiss cheese method. Each time I passed the annoying pile, I moved one album into its proper place. Shortly, and I mean very shortly, that pile, which had been there for days, had disappeared.

Quality of Life

If you find that you are busier using these methods, you have missed the point somewhere along the line. You should be less busy, less harried, less stressed because you have more time for vegging, relaxing with family and friends, taking walks, entertaining, reading, hobbies, meditating, and the like.

If the German traveler looked at your life, he should be able to say, “American workers are slaves—but not this guy (or gal).”

Beyond Bare Bones

Here are some ideas for keeping your priorities always in mind. These aren’t for everybody—just those who want to go beyond Bare Bones.

• Write your goals in calligraphy and frame them. Do this once a year, maybe at the beginning, to reevaluate your priorities and determine what is not a priority for you.
• Paint or embroidery your goals onto a piece of fabric and sew them into a pillow cover.
• Draw an Importance Scale, like the one in this chapter, and on the same sheet of paper list your top five priorities in order. Make several copies and have them available when needed for difficult decision making.

Tips

Cut yourself some time slack just by changing a few tactics. Here are some suggestions:

• Live close to places you go regularly, such as your church, dentist, doctor, school, hairdresser, and the like. Each time you change any of these providers, choose ones closer to your house.
• Spend less time standing in line by avoiding peak traffic times at stores, banks, and movies. This will take you out of peak times for car traffic as well.
• Do your business with the post office by going to USPS.gov on your computer. Order stamps, track packages, and find zip codes from the privacy of your home. Saves time and energy.
• Take advantage of personalized services, such as pickup and delivery of dry cleaning, online groceries, and restaurants that deliver.
• Employ technology for such things as banking by telephone or computer and online bill payment and movie ticket purchases. Online banking is gaining in popularity, up from fourteen million in 2000 to forty-seven million in 2003.
• Group errands so you accomplish many things in one trip.
• Make appointments early in the day to avoid waiting when the schedule of the doctor or lawyer gets backed up.
• Use your oven timer to find out exactly how long it takes to do jobs you avoid because you don’t like them. When you discover that it really takes only five minutes to vacuum the bedroom, you’ll be less hesitant about going in there and getting the job done. Many tasks take very little time to do. It’s the procrastination that eats up the hours.
• Save time shopping by checking out www.consumersearch.com for opinions on the best products for the best price.
• Store often used articles, like scissors, tape, nail files, and pens, in various corners of the house for easy access.
• Use a headphone for your cordless phone so you can dust, power walk around the house, or whatever while you talk or are put on hold.
• On the road, use the automated toll-pay program where it is available.

Decision Time—Choose Your Top 20 Percent

Since life is an integrated whole made up of things that are important to you, it may not be appropriate to drop all but 20 percent of your priorities. It is appropriate, however, to major on the majors, though minor issues remain in the background. We get in trouble when we major on the minors.

Several practical ideas have been given in this chapter for getting control of your time. Check the ones below that will help you accomplish your priorities.

___ Make a to-do list.

___ Buy a large yearlong calendar and enter all appointments on it.

___ Use the Swiss cheese method on a task that you have been avoiding. Which task is it?

___ Make a change in your tactics, as suggested in the Tips section at the end of the chapter. Which ones will you change?