More Time, Please–Part 1

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can
do to keep in the same place. If you want to get to somewhere
else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
from Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

We Librans pride ourselves on being serenely balanced. No wild extremes for us, is our motto. Then why was I waking up with my Things To Do List flashing through my mind before my eyes were even open? Why had I written, “Get Oil changed” on my weekly list five weeks in a row? Why was I repeatedly telling friends, “No, I can’t come out and play”? How had my life gotten so out of control?

Procrastination was not the cause of my downfall. Underestimating the time it would take to complete several projects had been my undoing. I needed expert advice in reclaiming my time and I needed it now! Fortunately there are a number of writers who have given time management a great deal of thought and it seemed a good use of my time to consult them.

Prioritize

Alan Lakein’s classic book, How To Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, introduced me to the notion of determining priorities. His system is simple and works wonderfully. Once you’ve created a list of things you want to do, you rank them in order of importance using only the letters A, B or C. This system is designed to keep you focused on the most important things in your life, but it only works if you also understand consequences. In determining what item deserves an A, you also ask yourself, “What are the consequences if I don’t do this?” Often you’ll discover that in answering that question what first looked like an A item is actually a C.

Along those same lines is an idea I got from Charles Handy that has made an enormous difference in my life. That concept, which he writes about in The Hungry Spirit, is the idea of determining what “enough” means to you. He says, “My wife and I, since we became self-employed portfolio people, have regularly sat down each year and worked out what we need to live on. Since our standards of comfort and future financial security are quite high, so are our levels of enough. The simple act of doing this removes the temptation to maximize our income by working around the clock and the calendar, which is the dilemma of every self-employed person. This process has freed up a lot of our time because once the enough is guaranteed, there is no need or desire to spend time on making more than enough.”

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New month, new theme. We’ll be spending the month of December Closing the Gap as I explore ideas, resources and tools for getting from where you are to where you want to be.