How Time Is on Your Side

Bridget Watson Payne

• Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781452172286
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Creatividad

Yes, there really is enough time to do it all: the passion projects, the to-do list, or simply making time to do nothing—the trick is knowing how to look for it. Packed with helpful tips, How Time Is on Your Side is a simple handbook to help reframe your relationship with time. Through practical productivity tools and inspiring stories of people who make time for the things that matter to them, you will find that achieving your goals isn't as farfetched as it seems. Let the encouraging words of artist and author Bridget Watson Payne be your guide to reinvent your relationship with time: it's not the enemy; it's a friend.• Learn how to nurture your inner creative, spiritual, emotional, and mental lives.
• Written in author Bridget Watson Payne's smart, friendly, tell-it-like-it-is prose
• Tips and tricks include utilizing your calendar to its full advantage, doing mental work in the morning and physical work in the afternoon, and putting your big goals on your to-do list. With smart, unintimidating content, this guide is sure to inspire anyone to make time to achieve their goals. Take a moment, a minute, or a day to reinvent your relationship with time, and discover how it can work for you. The time you need is there. Let How Time Is on Your Side help you find it. • A great book for men and women of any age, creatives and aspirational creatives, busy professionals, students, young families, graduates, and self-improvement seekers
• Great for busy people who want to make the most of their time
• Perfect for fans of The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, Manage Your Day-to-Day by Jocelyn Glei, and Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day by Jake Knapp and John Zerat

TIPS, TRICKS, AND LIFE HACKS

LET’S GET DOWN TO BRASS TACKS

“Are you really going to be upset because you’re really busy? Some people are not busy and are praying that they could be as busy as you are.”

—JANELLE MONÁE

Here come the productivity-minded tips and tricks. The brass tacks of time management that can help you reclaim your time. All are interdependent with a change of mind-set.

As you read about these strategies, imagine yourself deploying them. Think about which might fit you and which might not—which might solve your particular problem, and which are just not your cup of tea.

But remember, if you’re tempted to think “that sounds great, but I couldn’t pull it off,” pause and reconsider. Empowering yourself to pull it off might be exactly what you need.

PUT IT ON THE CALENDAR

“Make it a recurring appointment in your calendar and plan on sticking to it.”

—ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Perhaps the number-one thing we can do to make time for a particular activity is to put it on our calendar. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about making time to jog or to draw or to volunteer or to work on a long-term project at our job. Whatever that priority of ours may be that we find ourselves struggling to make time for in our days, this is quite likely the solution.

Look hard at your calendar and figure out the best time to do the thing. Should you focus on that work project for an hour first thing when you start work in the morning a couple of days a week, before you check email? (Much more about email starting on page 85.) Can you make time for exercise before work, or after? Is there a particular evening of the week you could block out for that personal creative project? A recurring weekend slot when you could fit in time for that family activity or social justice cause?

A few tips to really make this work:

Once it’s on your calendar, you have to believe it. The same way you’d believe a calendar appointment that popped up for a dentist appointment or a meeting with your boss. Things on your calendar are real and you’re really going to do them on the day and at the time the calendar says you are.

And, remember, to find these pockets of time you previously didn’t know existed, you’re going to have to use your prioritization skills and make use of some of that good kind of procrastination. What can you move or scrunch or let go of entirely in order to make time for these higher-priority things?

Is that half hour you collapse on the sofa when you get home with your phone and a beer essential self-care time? Or could that time be better used for something else? Only you know the answer to that question, and you only really know it if you’re willing to be brutally honest with yourself.

SYNC UP YOUR TO-DO LIST AND YOUR CALENDAR

“So many people trip in front of them because they’re looking over there or up ahead.”

—KAMALA HARRIS

A to-do list that floats in its own isolated bubble—be that bubble a notebook or an app or something else—just sitting there waiting for you to come and choose a task whenever you have a moment to spare, is not only oppressive (who wants to be followed around by a bubble full of things-you-really-ought-to-be-doing all the time?), it’s also not terribly effective.

After all, much of the time you’ll be called upon to do things other than what’s on the list. This is how you can have something like “make optometrist appointment” or “change 401(k) allocations” sit on your to-do list for literally years. There was always something more important. It was never that thing’s turn.

Plus, every time you do have time to do something from the list, you end up wasting precious time looking up ahead—for example, going over the list and figuring out which of the various things on it you ought to do.

Many of the most productive people avoid this pitfall by hybridizing their to-do list and their calendar.

This can be done in any number of ways:

• Perhaps you take ten minutes each morning to insert to-do list items, as appointments, into all the open slots in your calendar for that day.
• Perhaps each time you add an item to your to-do list you assign it a do-date rather than a due-date (that is, the date you actually plan to do it, and when you foresee having enough time to do it, as opposed to the date it’s due).
• Maybe you jot down calendar notations for your evenings—which night you’ll do laundry, which night you’ll work on your taxes, which night you know you’ll just want to chill.
• Maybe you even go so far as to get rid of your to-do list altogether—every task that arises going immediately onto the calendar instead. This works best with electronic rather than paper calendars, since inevitably things end up needing to get moved around.

Whatever particular system you employ, the underlying win is the same. You’re weaving the stuff you need to do and the time you have to do it in into a cohesive whole in your mind. Tasks and time become teammates working together rather than opposing teams duking it out in the arena of your brain.

THE DREADED IN-BOX

“People live too much of their lives on email.”

—TRACY MORGAN

Oh, email. If you work in an office or an otherwise correspondence-heavy industry, chances are you regularly (or always) feel like you’re drowning in your in-box.

In her book Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done, Jocelyn K. Glei tackles our collective problems with email—from our obsession with checking our in-boxes to the elusive etiquette of writing good messages. Perhaps most valuable of all are her insights into crafting a daily email routine.

Numerous experts agree these strategies are effective. Numerous happy workers have discovered their merits. Yet, until you try them, such ideas sound nearly impossible. You’ll read what comes next and think, “Oh, sure, that’s great for someone else, but I could never do it.” But the thing is you can. You can put reasonable limits on email and use the time you gain back for other, more important work. You really, really can. Three tools, drawn from Glei’s research, show us how:

1. Don’t do email first. Glei suggests spending the first hour of your day on “a task that advances your meaningful work goals.” Make it one of those calendar appointments from page 80. Set your email program to open not to your in-box but to your calendar. So the first thing you see when you sit down to work will be that appointment telling you to do that important work now.

2. Corral email into two or three blocks of time per day—each block a half hour (or at most an hour) long. Put the email blocks on your calendar as appointments and, once again, treat those appointments as commitments. Start working through your in-box when the appointment time starts, and stop when it ends.

3. Don’t have your in-box open on your desktop while you’re working on other things. Either switch it to show your calendar or shut the program down entirely.

Another useful thing is to decide on your own personal nonresponse rate. Articulating to yourself, “Of the emails I receive that could warrant a response, I respond to 95 percent” (or 90 percent or 80 percent or whatever feels right) will be liberating. As author Mark McGuinness puts it: “It’s better to disappoint a few people over small things than to surrender your dreams for an empty in-box.”

DO THE REAL WORK FIRST

“The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second.”

—MARK MCGUINNESS

OK, so if we’re not doing email first, what exactly are we doing first?

McGuinness writes that “creative work first, reactive work second” means “blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and email off. I used to be a frustrated writer. Making this switch turned me into a productive writer. Now, I start the working day with several hours of writing. I never schedule meetings in the morning if I can avoid it. So whatever else happens I get my important work done.”

He is a writer so the creative work he needs to do first is, not surprisingly, writing.

But this doesn’t apply only to those who work in creative fields. Just like a writer should write first and email later, an executive ought to lead first and do spreadsheets later, a retail worker helps customers first and restocks the shelves later.

Nor does it apply only t...