time to be you
‘The only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.’ – Oliver Burkeman
Like most of us, I’m too busy. I have a demanding job that requires wearing multiple hats, from HR to marketing to IT and GDPR to leadership development consulting and coaching. When I’m not at work, I’m trying to be present with my husband and two teenage children. I squeeze in a bit of fitness where I can and write creative fiction in the sliver of time between waking and working. Occasionally, I get to see my friends. I’m caught between drowning in the present and dreaming of a utopian future where it all magically, stress-lessly fits together. Or I get a clone.
So, at the beginning of the year, I bought a few books on the theme of time, intending to hunt down some killer tips. Obviously, I was too busy to read them. Then I realised the year was nearly up, so I’ve hunkered down and blitzed through my reading pile. What follows is my condensed received wisdom which I hope can set us all up for an easier, happier, more productive year in 2023.
Live for today, not tomorrow
The first thing I learned about was the fallacy of starting with time management tools. The underlying premise of these is that with greater efficiency, you can fit more into your day. At a certain level it’s true. But firstly, the more you fit in, the more you fall into the efficiency trap, where your to-do list keeps on growing. The goal posts will move because the more you get done, the more you will be given to do.
Secondly, and more profoundly, perhaps you shouldn’t be trying to fit everything in. As Oliver Burkeman writes in Four Thousand Weeks, don’t postpone fulfilment, filling today with a training regime for what you want to do or be tomorrow. Or, to put it more viscerally, don’t ‘cause your soul to shrivel with every passing week.’ Life’s too short – in fact, it's on average 4,000 weeks too short. Recently, a good friend who’s been very sick unwittingly brought this to life for me. He paused in the middle of a conversation and said, “Every day I wake up, I’m just happy to be alive.” That leads to one of the killer questions in Oliver Burkeman’s book: ‘What would you do differently with your time today if you knew salvation was never coming?’
Forget FOMO, embrace JOMO
Assuming you’ve taken some time to think about that question (at this point, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Rest, might recommend a walk for your subconscious mind to ‘dislodge some insights’), take a step back and evaluate your life. Are you focusing most of your time on activities you are both proficient in and passionate about? In Free to Focus, Michael Hyatt calls this the Desire Zone. He says it’s not about doing more in your day, it’s about getting the right things done and pursuing what’s most important to you now. By nailing this, he says you will achieve more by doing less.
Taking a more philosophical perspective, Burkeman argues that we need to settle instead of chasing a future that is more fantasy than reality. He calls this JOMO, Joy of Missing Out. We need to make trade-offs and be at peace with our choices. So, he says, ‘maybe making sufficient time in the week for your creative calling means you’ll never have an especially tidy home or get quite as much exercise as you should.’ I like to think he wrote this for me.
When an icy shower is good enough
Where Burkeman suggests settling on not doing things, Hyatt advocates delegating the activities that we are neither proficient in nor passionate about. Both argue that we need to create the Not-To-Do-List and be happy saying no. There are more tips in both books about how we do this, but sometimes stuff has to get done, and we have to do it.
Hyatt suggests ritualising such activities, being intentional with your time and scheduling them. Helpful, but perhaps we need to go deeper to achieve this. Burkeman describes the story of a young man training to be a Buddhist monk, who had to ‘douse himself with several gallons of bone-chilling melted snow.’ It was only when he stopped resisting the experience and concentrated instead on the sensation of intense cold, that he found it less agonising. The parallel that Burkeman draws is, ‘the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.’
I’d add to this, that it’s okay to set the bar lower. Challenge yourself to establish what good enough looks like, stick to it and then embrace the icy shower. We have no time for resentment.
Face the fear
Sometimes, madly, we procrastinate over the things we most want to do, which raids our time bank and drains our energy. Why? Fear. Fear that when we actually get round to it, we might not be good enough. Fear that the activity we’ve craved might not be everything it’s cracked up to be. The trouble is, if we give into this fear and procrastinate, our Desire Zone will become ever more elusive, while we become ever more frustrated and unhappy.
At this point, I think it would be helpful to bring in an exercise from Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of Write it all Down. She advocates acknowledging and challenging what’s holding us back from getting on with the thing we most want to do. Here’s how:
Firstly, complete the sentence, ‘I want to…’
Then the next sentence, ‘I want to do it because…’ and keep writing until you’ve exhausted all your reasons.
Then write a list or draw a mindmap in response to ‘What holds me back is…’.
After you’ve given this ‘shitty committee’ of inner voices the slip, list the actions which will move you forwards
It may be helpful here to turn to another expert, Nancy Kline and counter some of the assumptions your blockers contain. For example, the block might be, “I can’t start writing this article because I won’t be able to bring all the different strands together.” Turn this around and instead ask, “If I know I can bring all the different strands together, how would I start writing this article?”
Build the habit
So, now we know what we want to do, we’re doing our best to focus our attention on those activities in which we are both proficient and passionate, we have a clear not-to-do list, we’re minimising unavoidable activities but not resenting them, and we’re turning the shitty committee away with new, freeing assumptions. We’re on a roll.
That means we’re now ready to look at building habits to help us focus. The most helpful book on this I found is Atomic Habits by James Clear. The points that most resonated with me are:
Assume the identity not the activity – ie, if I were a healthy person I would…rather than, if I want to lose weight, I will. This bolsters self-belief.
Link a new habit to an established routine. It is then more likely to happen. Eg, when my morning alarm goes off, I go downstairs and start to write.
Notice how you feel afterwards. It’s important for your motivation to be able to relive this feeling.
Start small. Doing a little often is better than doing a lot of nothing.
Never miss twice. This is now my mantra and, for me, is the most useful sentence in the book. Sometimes, life gets in the way, but never let it get in the way two days in a row otherwise you’ll kill your fledgling habit.
Deliberately rest
I couldn’t wrap this up without mentioning the need to rest. Not just collapsing on the sofa when you’ve got everything done, but deliberately resting. Make time for rest and enjoy it. Spend your rest time with others, maybe doing something you’re not that great at but you enjoy (an earlier eg article by Catherine Newman may inspire you). Do something totally disconnected with work. It will energise you and give your subconscious time to process in the background the few things in your life that really matter. And sleep. Skipping on sleep will mean you are less present, less effective and less focused while you’re awake.
I suspect having enough time will always be an elusive concept for me, but I do now have ways to be more at peace with the time I have and how I spend it. Having said that, the next book on my fiction TBR pile is How to Stop Time by Matt Haig!
Reading List
Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman
Rest, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Free to Focus, by Michael Hyatt
Time to Think, by Nancy Kline
Atomic Habits, by James Clear
Write it all Down, by Cathy Rentzenbrink
The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig – a beautifully written novel which makes you think about how to live your life without regrets
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