Great stuff

Great article

A timesaving article: It's About Time
Barbara Buffton / Wendy Sullivan

(The text of this article was first printed in the journal of the Association of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, ‘Rapport’, 50th Edition, Winter 2000, and is re-printed here with permission.)

“Time may be a limited resource, but we aren’t.”
- Stephen Covey, First Things First

In our experience people are prepared to invest time in what interests them. Time affects our quality of life and we imagine that it is possible to manage it if you just learn the right way to do it.

Time management?

Traditional time management gurus would have us see the light and believe that we can manage time - all we need is structure in our lives - a prioritised ‘to do’ list with possibly the aid of an electronic organiser or a calendar. But many who have tried such techniques say that they don't solve the problem or get them what they want.

For those people who think they need better time management skills, the solution is not actually about ‘managing’ time because time cannot be managed. Time just ‘is’. The question is rather how we choose to manage ourselves in relation to time.

We do what we want / ‘have’ to do

We make time to do the things we are most motivated to do: what we want to do or what we decide that we ‘have’ to do - or what allows us not to do what we most want to avoid!

This may result in us always squeezing in things as and when we can at the cost of other activities. So we can now add guilt to the existing emotions of frustration and possibly anger or resentment. Aiming to become happier and guilt-free, we then look at time management techniques hoping to take more shortcuts, stop wasting time and become even more productive. Does this sound familiar? How could it be better?

Know yourself

It is possible to have a much better relationship with time simply by getting to know yourself and what is really important to you. Everyone has their own individual and unique relationship with time. What's yours? Does time weigh heavily on your hands? Do you see it flying by, only noticing it and possibly regretting it, when it has gone? Or do you often hear the space between the notes?

Knowing how you ‘do time’ currently (noticing the patterns you are running and listening to what you say to yourself) is the first step to understanding why you do things the way you do. It also gives you the option to make changes. To discover more about this, you might want to consider the ‘Goldilocks Principle’ 1:

• When do you notice you have too much time?
• When do you experience too little time?
• When do you say to yourself, “It's ‘just right’,”?

Where is the focus of your attention for each of these times? People often tell us that they are focusing on some future event when they are experiencing too little or too much time. What about you?

The second step to knowing yourself is to clarify your mission and your values. As someone once said, there is not much point in becoming a better navigator if you're not clear where you’re headed. There are many resources available to help you find out what your mission in life is and what your values are. However, a useful starting point is to ask questions such as: “What is really important to me about x?” or “How will doing this help me achieve my goal in life?”

To enhance your quality of life, it is important to take into account the larger context in which you exist, e.g. your team at work or your family at home. This, along with clarity about your personal mission and values, provides the basis for setting compelling and ecological goals that are in harmony with you as a person and allow you to maintain the important relationships in your life.

The final step is to decide the best route to your destination - choosing strategies that suit the way you prefer to operate. There are many possible strategies including:

• Giving your standards a holiday (“If you wait until you can get it done perfectly, it may never get done.” 2).
• Doing the important stuff first (don't “sweat the small stuff” 3).
• Practising saying ‘no’ (just because you can do something doesn't mean you have to do it).
• Eliminating procrastination, because it takes time to do (one way is to change your self-talk, e.g. from ‘I should’... to ‘I choose to’... and notice how that affects your motivation).
• Making decisions more quickly (why not model how the good decision-makers around you do it?).
• Asking yourself what would be the best use of your time right now? (And would it be to ‘do’ more or less, or to just do ‘being’?)

Having the time of your life

After all this you may end up with an abundance of time and you'll know what you want to do with it. Do you choose to fill it with more ‘doing’ or are you happiest simply ‘being’? The experts say that the secret is to balance the two. Could now be the time to weigh up the alternatives and choose the right balance for you?

And as you find it and act accordingly, you and others will be able to tell that you are having the time of your life!

Selected Reading

Richard Carlsson, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, Hodder & Stoughton (1998)
Stephen Covey, A. Roger Merrill and Rebecca R. Merrill, First Things First, Simon & Schuster (1994)
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow, Basic Books (1997)
Neil Fiore, The Now Habit, Tarcher/Putnam (1989)
Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle, Nicholas Brealey Publishing (1998)
Dr. David Kundtz, Stopping, Conari Press (1998)
Kim Pickin and Nicky Singer, the tiny book of TIME, Headline (1999)
Stephan Rechtschaffen, Time Shifting, Rider (1998)

1 In case you’ve forgotten or never knew, Goldilocks was the little girl who said (when checking out the 3 bears’ bowls of porridge) “this one has too much, this one has too little and this one is just right!”

2 Kim Pickin and Nicky Singer, the tiny book of TIME, Headline (1999)

3 Richard Carlsson, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, Hodder & Stoughton (1998)

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