Time Management Resilience

Eventually you will die. So will everyone else. While we often pretend like we have forever to get things done, that isn’t the case. We cannot create more time in our lives, nor can we get back the time that is spent poorly. The only control we have is over how we spend the time we have left (and probably, not all of that). While this sounds grim, it’s also incredibly freeing. You don’t HAVE TO say yes to everything, because you CAN’T. Therefore, you should choose what is important to you and act upon that choice. While we aren’t going to talk in this episode about the kind of big life goals we wish everyone had (because they make life better), what we are going to discuss is how manage your time so that the chaos that is constantly swirling around all of us doesn’t take your most valuable asset away from you. Or, put more accurately, doesn’t spend it in a way that you wouldn’t care for. Many people struggle with time management, as it gets more difficult the more successful you are. In fact, your ability to manage your time can realistically be viewed as an upper boundary on how far you will get in life. It’s that critical to meeting your goals and dreams, as well as being absolutely necessary to living a fulfilling life surrounded by people you care about. And let’s make one more thing clear. There is a “hustle” culture out there. While that culture says things that sound right, a lot of the premises that you’ll hear people spout amount to nothing more than asserting that you should work longer hours and work harder. While there is some merit in this, simply “working harder or working more” is not going to get you where you want to be. Unless your main goal in life is to simply be the donkey that quits last, this idealogy isn’t good enough (real donkeys quit eventually, btw). It’s only help for those whose work ethic falters, not for those who need more control of their time (often as a result of their work ethic…) Time is your most valuable asset. You can’t make more of it. And you probably don’t want to spend every waking hour on this earth working. Instead, you want to use whatever time is given to you for the right things. Those include having the kind of family bonding and interpersonal relationships that are impossible if all you do is “hustle”. Further, if your time is poorly managed in one area, that will tend to bleed out into other areas. As a result, you need to take action to make sure that your management of your own time and attention is resilient to the chaos in the world and responsive to your goals. Leave the insane “hustling” other people – you want to use your time well, rather than always trying to do “more”. Episode Breakdown Have slack in your schedule Like following another car too closely on the highway, piling time commitments close together can often mean that if anything goes wrong with one, then it will impact (heh) the others. Having gaps in your schedule, even small ones, can give you room to adjust between commitments. You’ll also find that having some downtime doesn’t hurt your productivity as much as you might expect. Work and other commitments tend to expand to the fill whatever time you allow them to fill, within reason. Consider the slack in your schedule to be just as important as everything else. Slack in your schedule should consist of more time than you might spend in transit between two points, preparing for the next thing, or taking a bathroom break. Those things are required too, and will be negatively impacted if your time management strategy for the day goes sideways. If you are already overloaded to the point where you don’t think you can add slack, then you need to drop some commitments.