Early in a new year many of us want to re-organize our lives, especially our work lives.
In Japan’s culture, the entire country spends January in a massive de-cluttering and re-organizing operation. Some of us make resolutions about behaviors we want to add or change in the new year, which in itself is a re-organization project.
All of these distill down to our relationship with time. We all have the same amount of “time dollars” each day, and how we choose to spend those time dollars will amount to how our lives are organized and if we are at peace with that picture.
One way to check into your own relationship with time is to examine the language you use when talking about time. You may be amazed at how often that word comes up in your conversations, and more importantly in your self-talk, words from the little hypnotist in your head.
It is common to talk about time as a commodity. We talk as if we have a box full of time and can take a chunk out and spend it on this or that. We talk about wasting it, as if we may reach into the box and grab a handful and spew it out the window (watching time fly I guess). Any day you will hear phrases like this: “When I have more time…,” “I’m short of time right now,” “Let’s save some time…,” or two of my favorites, “I’m gonna make some time…,” or “Time got away from me.” Another favorite is, “Can we talk when you have a minute?”
Better take more than a minute with you into that conversation as I’ve never known it to be that brief.
Rather than a 50-pound box of time, or whatever we imagine we have, I think of time like a river in which we move gracefully or frantically, or in some mix of the two. Technological advancements can be your best friend or worst enemy—depending on how you deal with them in your relationship to time. Do clocks and watches make you anxious? Then you are probably feeling that time is something running ahead as you try to catch up. Panting.
As a business executive you “spend” a lot of your time dollars tracking activities, planning, prioritizing, meeting –with customers, employees, wanna-be employees, lawyers—the list goes on. You perform these tasks all day and they are tasks that tap into your brain’s prefrontal cortex. This is the region of your brain that a good executive uses nearly all day, and the part of your brain most damaged from extended periods of stress. Becoming more intentional about the choices you make can lessen that damage.
After listening to your language about time, a helpful next step is to examine your “time bandits.” Perhaps you began the day feeling in charge of your time allotments and by the end of the day felt you got nothing done. We’re all victims of the time bandits we allow into our days, and usually allow them to come and go unrecognized and unmanaged. There are many varieties, and you have your own; still some are common in any workplace.
One of course is meetings. There are many ways to take charge of the time dollars you spend in meetings. One is to start on time. If you don’t, you are training your team to lollygag about getting to your meetings and throw away the first minutes. Your team might spend some time dollars brainstorming about meetings and how they can be streamlined.
Another famous time bandit is multi-tasking, which is very hard on that old prefrontal cortex.
Check into that. We can all be fooled into trying to conduct performance reviews while thinking about next year’s budget, or delegating tasks while mentally putting together a golf foursome. It is tiring, stressful and usually a waste of time. If you must multi-task, do easy things where mistakes are not critical, tasks you can almost do by rote, and don’t imagine you’re fooling the people around you.
Driving while on your cell phone amounts to multitasking that can kill you and others.
You’ll find other time bandits, and then you can choose what you want to do with them. I must add that choosing to “waste time,” to twiddle your thumbs, or take a break and do the crossword puzzle—things like this can be helpful, can reduce stress and get you out of a frenzy. Choosing is the key word here.
It is rewarding to consciously make choices about time, choices that are in keeping with the man or woman you are. It contributes to your success to take a good look at your relationship with the time you’ve been given. It feels great to start out the day with a plan for how you will spend your time dollars and end the day with that satisfied feeling that comes from sticking to that plan—imperfectly. n
Jo Gorissen is a certified transition coach and a former Milwaukee resident. Her web site is www.coachingconbrio.com and she can be reached at (414) 305-3459.
