12

Becoming a Wise Time Manager

Managing time seems to be at the heart of procrastination. We all want to know how to stretch time or make it speed up. Personally, I’d like to add a few hours to my day.

Interestingly, we each have a unique perception of time. And it changes throughout our lives. When we are children, time seems to drag. Christmas and birthdays take forever to arrive. Then our teen years and twenties go by in a flash. Small children take us back to the long days, but in hindsight they were too short. And late nights waiting for a teenager to come home make late nights with a crying baby seem like a cinch.

We either love the passing of time or we resent it. Some hate the wasting of it, and live with regrets of not making the most of it. And we all seem to wish we used it more wisely.

Here’s the reality about how we use time: we will never drift into managing time well. We won’t one day wake up to find ourselves using time wisely and efficiently. Most of us struggle to figure out what we are supposed to do with our time and when we are supposed to do it. And are looking for help wherever we can get it.

I have met some people, usually the ones I admire most, who are acutely aware of the value of time. They know their priorities and make choices that reflect them. But this didn’t happen automatically. It took commitment for them to change and to be realistic about their time.

A Procrastinator’s Relationship with Time

Procrastinators have a creative relationship with time. That’s a nice way of saying we have an unrealistic view of time. But of course, you already know that.

Actually, we all have our own experience with time. This is called “subjective time.” As we all know, sometimes time flies, especially when we are having fun. And other times it feels like the old adage, “A watched pot never boils.”

Cultural differences also affect subjective time. A number of years ago I traveled to Ecuador with Compassion International. We toured the Compassion project and family homes with both an American guide and an Ecuadorian guide.

At one point we split into two groups with the plan to meet back at the bus at 1:00 p.m. Our in-country guide took half of us into the home of a family with sponsored children. We sat in their humble home as our Ecuadorian guide helped translate our conversation with the family. At 12:50, our American guide thanked the family for the visit and escorted the group outside. But the in-country guide stayed behind and kept talking.

Time was ticking, and our group realized we would be late getting to the bus. Checking and rechecking our watches only made us more anxious. Our American guide, who’d made this trip many times, seemed unruffled. He smiled and explained, “Ecuadorians run their day by relationships while Americans run their day by the clock.”

This interpretation of time wasn’t wrong. It worked for them. And it might even work for you at times. However, conflict arises because most of us live in a nation where businesses and schools and churches are run on objective time, which is also called “clock time.”

The goal isn’t to eliminate subjective time. We can’t possibly do that. Nor would we want to make everyone slaves of the clock. Personally, I’m charmed by those who can prioritize relationships over projects.

The ideal approach is for us to respect clock time and integrate it gracefully into subjective time. This would enable us to accurately gauge how long it will take to accomplish a task, like run to the grocery store. We would know when to put down a book in order to leave to get to work on time. And when to start working on that project due in a month.

It sounds so simple. But just watching the clock isn’t always a solution. Sometimes a procrastinator is so deeply rooted in subjective time they don’t see their understanding of time as the problem. They falsely think there is always more time. Hence the last-minute dash to the finish line. And the missed deadlines and opportunities.

When a procrastinator stubbornly resists working within the reality of objective time, procrastination becomes a chronic problem, not just an annoyance. It causes conflict at home and at work and compounds stressful situations.

If this section is hitting close to home, perhaps it’s time to confront your wishful thinking when it comes to time. We cannot outsmart time, only respect it and work within its constraints.

Procrastinators, as we have observed, prefer to remain in the vague realms of potential and possibility and do not like to be concrete, measured, or limited. When they are ultimately caught short of time, they are surprised, disappointed, and even offended.[1]

If we are to confront procrastination in our lives, we must be honest about our subjective view of time. Refusing to accept objective time creates an illusion of control. And what a dangerous illusion it is! Only God has control over time; we are but managers of the time He has given us.

And as managers, we should use time wisely. There are a few techniques I have found that have helped me become a better manager of my time, and hopefully some of these will help you as well.

Schedule Uninterrupted Time

Whether you’re a mom caring for children or an executive managing a business—or both—uninterrupted time doesn’t happen often. Someone always needs something.

And when we are working on something that requires focus and creativity, interruptions are difficult. They require us to stop, redirect our attention, respond, and then redirect our attention back to our original work. This uses time and mental energy. And for a procrastinator, interruptions can be an excuse to stop working.

What could your mind do without the threat of an email, text, or phone call? Want to find out?

The next time you have an important project due or a difficult task, try making an appointment with yourself, and put it on your calendar. Block out an hour and let others know you are booked and unavailable during that time. You don’t have to explain or apologize. We’re all used to people having appointments, and understand that a phone call or email will be returned later.

Do you worry that people will need to reach you? Consider Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon. He knows the importance of unscheduled time and plans it into his week. In the early years of starting Amazon, Bezos tried to keep his schedule completely open on Mondays and Thursdays just to allow himself time to think or to explore an idea.

If the founder of the biggest online shopping mall in the world can keep two full days to himself, we can probably find a few hours. Plan for it, then turn off your phone, shut down your email, and remove anything else that will distract you from your purpose.

Beware the sneaky siren of catch-up work. When we have uninterrupted time, there is a tendency to use that time to catch up on something. My go-to catch-up job is responding to emails. Maybe catch-up work for you is laundry, phone calls, or errands. But don’t start anything except your important task! If you say to yourself, I’ll just answer a few emails first, you will get sucked into the black hole of email and you’ll squander all of your precious time.

Since most of us are unused to uninterrupted time, it might be hard to focus at first. We are conditioned to hearing the ding of an incoming text and are on alert, waiting for it. Start with small blocks of time, even fifteen minutes, and work your way up from there. With practice, you will strengthen your ability to focus.

Identify Time Wasters

My friend Karen Ehman often has people ask her how she’s able to do so much. She’s highly productive and I’m amazed by her as well. Her answer to those who ask is always the same: “You don’t see what I don’t do.”

Karen lives her priorities better than most other women I know. As important as what she chooses to do is what she says no to. Such as watching TV. Oh, she’ll sit down with her husband and sons when a game is on, but that’s more to spend time with them while doing something they love.

Karen doesn’t work like a crazy woman either. She writes and speaks professionally and works part-time from home, but loving people is her priority and she makes choices with her time so that she’s available.

We’d see these same types of hard choices being made if we were able to watch the most productive women in the world go about their days. We’d see them minimize distractions and time stealers in order to make time for what matters most.

Every choice of how to spend our time has an opportunity cost. “Opportunity cost” is a term used in economics to identify the benefit, profit, or value of what is given up to achieve or obtain something else. This cost is used when computing the cost-benefit analysis of a project.[2]

For example, the opportunity cost of going to college is the money we would have made had we gone right into a job. The opportunity cost of watching television all Saturday is the housework we might have done.

If we want to manage our time well, we need to count the opportunity cost when we engage in what could be a time waster. And today we have more potential time wasters than ever before. They are traps in our day, waiting to snare us and redirect our attention away from our priorities.

It’s not that they are detrimental on their own. But they become problems when they keep us from achieving our goals.

Here’s a personal example. I find that reading a magazine is a great way to get inspired. I love home decorating and cooking magazines. However, if I’m facing a deadline or my children have asked for help, it can become a time stealer. Unless I’m reading for research or I’ve scheduled a break, I should postpone my reading pleasure until an appropriate moment.

Be honest about what is stealing your time from your priorities. Some things will be obvious, others are harder to identify. It’s a little like starting to budget your finances. Say you start the week with a hundred dollars, but by the end of the week you have no money and nothing to show for it. Where did all that money go? Time is just like that. If you have no idea where your time goes, keep a time journal for a week. Write down what you do all day, and after a week you’ll see some patterns.

Here are a few common time wasters:

Obvious

Not-So-Obvious

Once you’ve identified your personal time wasters, consider their opportunity cost. Then, next time you have a choice about what to do, you’ll be equipped to choose more wisely.

The Importance of Time to Plan

Taking time to plan your day, or even your week, is one of the most undervalued uses of time. Every minute we spend planning saves as many as ten minutes in execution.[3] What an investment! Just ten minutes spent identifying our priorities for the day, picking which tasks to complete, and setting the order of those tasks could save us an hour and a half of wasted time.

Getting into the habit of planning helps me think and work proactively rather than reactively. Reactive work puts me at the mercy of the agendas and needs of others. Proactive work isn’t selfish; rather it makes us good stewards of the responsibilities God has assigned to us. First Corinthians 4:2 says, “Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.” Planning helps us be trustworthy.

The Bible affirms the importance of planning, with verses such as, “Good planning and hard work lead to prosperity, but hasty shortcuts lead to poverty” (Prov. 21:5 NLT). But at the same time we are warned to make sure to submit our plans to the Lord: “Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and he will establish your plans” (16:3).

Before I plan, I always start with reading my Bible. This sets my mind on the Lord’s will and reminds me that He is sovereign over my life, my time, and my plans. I pray a simple prayer: Lord, show me what You want me to do today. Then I trust Him to show me.

I don’t wait for a neon light to flash to show me God’s will for my day. The Bible assures us God will give us direction one way or another. Proverbs 3:5–6 says:

Trust in the LORD with all your heart

and lean not on your own understanding;

in all your ways submit to him,

and he will make your paths straight.

Once my heart is right, I consider all the work on my project and task lists and the deadlines for each of them. Then I look at the week ahead and what commitments I already have. Finally, I assign certain tasks to certain days. This is very helpful when I’ve got a project with multiple steps. There’s something so motivating about knowing I’m making progress, step by step.

On a daily basis, remember to put your most important tasks first on your agenda. This will make the most of your willpower, energy, and focus. Guard your morning time jealously and put off smaller, less mentally taxing work until later in the day.

The most practical and helpful thing I’ve realized is that I get significantly less done in a day than I wish. So I only set a goal of accomplishing two or three larger items a day. Then if the day goes smoothly, I will also check off a few small tasks.

Set Time Limits

For those who struggle to work within the bounds of objective time, setting time limits on your work can help. If you have been putting off a project, dreading the work or the amount of time it will take, tell yourself you only have to work on it for fifteen minutes. Set the timer and start.

That fifteen minutes will pass quickly, and you may feel motivated to keep going. But rather than continue, honor your internal commitment to stop. This does two things. First, it will give you a sense of healthy control over your work. Second, it will help train your brain to get a better sense of the passage of time.

Time limits also motivate us to work more efficiently and quickly. It can even be a game when we try this approach on certain jobs. Set the timer for fifteen minutes and see how quickly you can clean your desk at the end of the day, or see how much the kids can pick up around the house.

Procrastinators often misjudge the amount of time things take to accomplish. As you set time limits, you’ll learn how much time tasks really take. You might put off cleaning your bathroom, thinking it will take hours, when in fact you can do a good job in thirty minutes.

Try this approach multiple times throughout the day on different tasks. You’ll soon increase your confidence in your sense of time and find yourself moving forward on projects you’ve been resisting.

Value Small Pockets of Time

Sometimes I talk myself out of starting a project because I only have a short block of time. Some work does require sustained focus, but not all work. I don’t need an hour to set an appointment, make an airline reservation, or order something online.

When setting a plan for the day or week, add a few small tasks to your list. Then, when a little window of time opens up, you can quickly check one more item off your list.

Valuing minutes, not just hours, helps us become wise time managers. I often think of the Parable of the Talents, with its three servants who were entrusted with three different amounts of money while their master went on a trip. Two of the servants invested their “talents” and got a return. But the servant who only had one talent buried it in the ground, receiving harsh consequences when his master returned.

Did the servant not value his one talent? Did he think it insignificant compared to what other servants received? The Lord values what seems meager to others. Every effort we make, every small step we take, if it is done with a right heart, pleases God.

Zechariah 4:10 says, “Do not despise these small beginnings, for the LORD rejoices to see the work begin” (NLT).

Perhaps the wisest thing we can do is to learn to value our minutes. The greatest accomplishments on earth started with someone working for sixty seconds.

Reevaluate the Value of Your Time

One of the time wasters listed earlier was tasks you could have delegated. For a mom, this might be when you fold the clothes instead of teaching your children to do it. For a busy home manager, perhaps hiring someone to mow the lawn is a better choice than doing it yourself.

As we become better time managers, we must consider the value of our time and when it’s better to delegate a task. Marketing guru Seth Godin writes:

One of the milestones every entrepreneur passes is when she stops thinking of people she hires as expensive (“I could do that job for free”) and starts thinking of them as cheap (“This frees me up to do something more profitable”).

When you get rid of every job you do that could be done by someone else, something needs to fill your time. And what you discover is that you’re imagining growth, building partnerships, rethinking the enterprise (working on your business instead of in it, as the emyth guys would say). Right now, you don’t even see those jobs, because you’re busy doing things that feel efficient instead.[4]

When I consider my priorities and the best use of my time, one of the questions I ask myself is What can only I do? I mentioned this in chapter 3, but it bears repeating.

There are really only a few things that only I can do. No one else can nurture my personal faith in God. Only I can do that. No one else can get my body to the gym or limit my sugar intake. I have the final decision on those responsibilities.

The same applies to my marriage and children. I am the only woman who is my husband’s wife. Unless I want to abdicate that role, it is up to me to become the best wife I can be. And God has given me five children to mother. Just about everything else in my life could be done by someone else.

If I want to make the most of my time, I need to release responsibility. Not every task, volunteer position, responsibility at work, or job around the house is my responsibility.

This is harder than it sounds. Many procrastinators are also perfectionists, so letting go of setting the Thanksgiving table might feel impossible. Letting older children iron their own clothes might send shivers down your spine. But what is your time worth? Is it worth a task being done differently than you would do it?

Another reason it might be hard to delegate is procrastinators often feel unworthy of help. They are ashamed of their procrastination and feel like they should be able to do it all. I understand this feeling. But the more I’m learning to delegate, the more confident I’m becoming in what I do well. Plus I’m learning to trust others to a greater degree.

Delegating is a skill we all can learn. There might be time spent training, but it will be worth it when you can fully release a responsibility. Plus, it’s really a blessing to let others know we trust them. By delegating work, we build others up as well as free ourselves up.

If you don’t have children around or the money to hire a professional, consider bartering skills with a friend. Perhaps you could make a few dinners in exchange for her running your errands. You also might find a teenager who’s willing to work cheap.

The only reason to manage time wisely is so you can spend it on what matters most. That’s not always work. Please make sure you end this chapter with that understanding. Sometimes the very best use of our time is to stop our work and snuggle up next to a loved one. Or sit by the bedside of a sick friend. Or walk in the park and pray. Or turn up the music and dance.

Practical Application

We all wish we were better time managers. The good news is we all have the ability make time for what matters most.

You’ve identified two areas of your life you want to master—one regular task and one personal goal. How can you better use the time you have right now to get started? Do you need to eliminate some time wasters? Schedule uninterrupted time? Preplan your week? What will you do differently with time in these two areas?

My regular task:

My personal goal: