If you’re feeling stuck and like you can never accomplish quite as much as you want to, maybe your thinking style is partly to blame. At the 2018 Watermark Conference for Women in Silicon Valley, Laura Vanderkam shared some simple strategies that can help you revise misconceptions you may have about time and rethink your approach to time management.
“You may be wondering if you will always be busy, and the answer is yes,” said Vanderkam, author of several time-management and productivity books including, “I Know How She Does It” and “What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast.” “But however busy you are, you can build the life you want in the time you’ve got.” Here’s how:
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Start a time log. As a first step on the road to spending your time better, being more productive where it counts and getting to do more of what you want to do, Vanderkam recommended starting by “minding your hours.” This is done by tracking your time — at least for a few days, but ideally for a week — jotting down what you do so you can really see how many hours you’re spending on different activities.
She pointed out that time tracking works for the same reasons that keeping a food journal has been proven to do so — but that people may try to avoid time tracking for the same reasons that they don’t want written evidence of their junk food habit. “The truth is, we just don’t want to know how much time we are wasting,” she said. It’s important to have this reality check, though, because research has shown people aren’t very accurate at estimating how much time they’re spending on certain activities. For example, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans tend to significantly overestimate how many hours they spend on the job.
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Even if the idea of penning each of your daily activities sounds laborious or you feel nervous about seeing where your time is actually going, Vanderkam noted that the exercise is critical to gaining a true and realistic sense of where your energy currently goes. “If we don’t know where the time is going now, how do we know we’re going to change the right thing?” she asked.
If you’re ready to try tracking your time, Vanderkam emphasized that the tool you use for recording your activities isn’t important, and can be anything from detailed weekly spreadsheets to a simple pen and paper journal. What matters is getting it done. “Just write down what you’re doing as often as you remember in as much detail as you think will be useful for you,” she said.
Decide what to spend more time on. When pondering how to disrupt your usual approach to time, it’s common to focus first and foremost on how to eliminate minor annoyances from your life, in the hope that hacks and shortcuts in everyday chores and actions will save enough minutes that you can add them up and transform your schedule. But Vanderkam emphasized that this is the wrong approach: “We don’t build the lives we want by saving time,” she said. “We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself.”
With this in mind, she recommended the following tactics:
— Create a list of professional goals. To help you figure out what you want to spend more time doing, start a list of all of your career-related goals. (You can do a separate list of personal goals too, if you’d like.) Think about all of those things you’ve always wanted to accomplish, whether it’s mentoring others or writing a book, and then start choosing a few areas where you’d like to focus more of your time right now.
— Conduct your own prospective performance review. Imagine it is the end of 2018, and you are giving yourself a performance review. It has been an amazing year for you professionally. What three to five things did you do during this year that made it so amazing? Write down these items as your professional goals for the year based on doing this prospective performance review.
— Script an ideal end-of-the-year holiday letter. If you want to expand this exercise to your personal life, try this: If it was the end of 2018, and you were writing a holiday letter to your friends and family about what you did during the year, and it had been an absolutely amazing year for you, what three to five things would you have done? Combine these goals with your professional goals above, and you’ll instantly have a list of six to 10 things that you want to spend more time on in the next year.
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By using Vanderkam’s steps of first minding your hours so that you know how you’re spending time today, and then purposely planning what to do with your upcoming time by setting career and life goals that you want to spend more time on, you’ll become more active and productive in the areas that matter most to you.
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Want to Boost Your Productivity? Change How You Think About Time originally appeared on usnews.com
