How does one work 40 hours a week, have time to cook healthy meals, sleep 8 hours a night, and go to the gym?

Photo by Julien L on Unsplash

I suspect most of the advice you will get on this will say better “time management.”

At the risk of sounding insulting, let me remind you that we can’t “manage time.” Time is fixed, immutable and unchanging. It manages itself and we can’t change what exists for us to function within. You can’t change that a minute is a minute and a day is a day.

You can only manage yourself. What we tag as “poor time management” is simply “poor self-management.”

I can sense your pain because you are baffled – as we all are – by “where does all my time go?” “How can I end up killing so much time?”

WTH!

I’m a pretty organized guy that doesn’t finish a day without saying to myself: “Where the hell did my day go and why didn’t I get done what I wanted to get done?”

Have you tried doing the math on your day or week? I do it all the time trying to get better at not “killing” so much time.

You’d think, after 8 decades on this mudball, that I’d have it figured out.

Go ahead – think again!

Let’s do a hypothetical on the question, granting the benefit of the doubt on some of this. There is some solid priority stuff built-in already – sleep, healthy meals, and the gym.

• 168 hours (the week we all start with)
• Less 40 hours of work
• Less 10 hours commute
• Less 56 hours of sleep
• Less 14 hours to fix and eat healthy meals
• Less 8 hours at the gym (or equivalent)
• Balance: 40 hours/24% of the week untagged.

Isn’t it freaky how we can’t account for a quarter of our week? Or that it slips through our fingers so easily?

The gold for a fulfilling, happy, purposeful life may lie in your 24%.

People who demonstrate productive self-management seem to have a handful of common sense things they have put in place:

1. A well-defined direction and sense of purpose in their lives. They have clear, challenging, and motivating goals, know where they are going, and have a limited number of lanes they are staying in.
2. They stay focused on priorities by defining what is most important within those lanes. They have learned to avoid letting the urgent displace the important. (You might find Stephen Covey’s classic book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” helpful).
3. They are very good at saying “no.” This appears to be one of the most important things to consider to put solid self-management in place. Self-management experts will tell you that saying “yes” is a major killer of getting your time use under control. Whether you say “yes” or “no” will be driven by the clarity of, and commitment to, your goals and purpose.
4. They have 5–10-year plans that are written but flexible. They work backward from those to develop written quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily activity lists.

You can see that the principles of good “self-management” aren’t rocket science. But that’s not to say they are easy. Life just gets in the way. Being able to roll with the unexpected that sucks up so much of that 24% and get back on track takes discipline. And, without question, discipline is central to good self-management.

The simple fact that we feel the angst about this and ask the question means we are at a good starting point.

Endless battle

I ‘spect I’ll go to my grave still wrestling with this. But there is one thing that I feel supremely confident in advocating and suggesting that will get any of us closest to solving this persistent challenge.

Stop time traveling and bring it down to today.

John Wooden, arguably the best basketball coach ever, coached his player to avoid “time travel” – projecting into the future or reaching back to their past. His mantra was simply “Make today your masterpiece,” something his father had taught him. He focused his players on today – each practice session was as important as a championship game.

Steve Chandler, in his book “100 Ways to Motivate Yourself”  emphasized that Wooden knew something profound:

“Life is now. Life is not later on. And the more we hypnotize ourselves into thinking we have all the time in the world to do what we want to do, the more we sleepwalk past life’s finest opportunities. Self motivation flows from the importance we attach to today.”

Time is our most valuable resource. Once spent it is irretrievable. Treat it with respect and it will reward us in kind.

How are you dealing with battle against time? What’s working for you? Love to hear your thoughts – leave a comment. If you haven’t joined our tribe, sign up for this weekly blurb at www.makeagingwork.com