When It's All On the Line

“Revelations come when you’re in the thick of it, pitting yourself up against something larger than yourself.”

— Frank Langella

No matter how well you plan, there will be times of high activity as you drive toward a goal. Sometimes that goal might be continuing to do your darndest to raise your child right as s/he goes through a trying phase. Sometimes it will be coordinating numerous pieces of a business project that will make or break your position in your job or seriously impact your bottom line. It might be moving to a new location. Some goals just require that we power through difficulties to some extent because timing is critical. How can we do this without losing our grip and letting everything fall to pieces, including us? Here are my suggestions:

• When you're truly being stretched to the edges of your capacity, it's time to get serious about the fundamentals. You can't power through anything when you're floundering without proper nutrition, exercise, and sleep. These basics are never optional, but least of all when you need to perform at peak productivity and resourcefulness. 
• This is the time to ask for help. This may seem like yet another way in which you're stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone, but if you can challenge yourself to reach over your ego and tap someone else on the shoulder, you'll find a huge source of help and support waiting for you. Maybe you won't find what you were hoping for on the first try, but keep at it. You don't have to do everything alone, and depending on the complexity of your project, sometimes you literally can't. If you want to get more done in life, you need to improve your interpersonal skills and your willingness to partner with others to get where you want to go.
•  If you have forewarning, front-load some routine tasks, or set up a way to outsource them whether through cash or trade. With just a little thought and time invested, you can make sure what's absolutely necessary will be covered even if you can't handle it in the midst of everything else.
• Realize in advance that when your life is in a state of high demand, you may need to make some messes that will get cleaned up later. It's very rare that a highly challenging period will come and go entirely smoothly, and that's normal and ok. By all means do the best you can to keep on top of everything, but don't add unnecessary stress to the cacophony by expecting or trying to insist that everything be perfect. When things calm down again, or once you acclimate to the new pace of things, you can address the results of any minor explosions that occurred en route. 
• Plan to do something relaxing for yourself on the other side of all this heightened activity so you have something to look forward to, and sneak in relaxing moments throughout this time whenever you can. As a teacher of mine used to say, a muscle that's always tense is not useful. You need to stay flexible  in order to get things done, and to do that you need to be able to relax and breathe.

Most of this may seem fairly obvious now, but when we're being challenged in a major way, sometimes we stop thinking because we go into some degree of fight/flight/freeze mode, and it all goes out the window. The more you get used to thinking along these lines, the more this habitual thinking will remain an asset when you find yourself overwhelmed and on auto-pilot. Times when you feel pushed to your limits may be among the most difficult of your life, but if you have a few helpful strategies at the ready, they can also be among the most rewarding.

Tempus Fugit

“Lost time is never found again.”

— Benjamin Franklin

We’re two weeks into 2017, and right about now it starts to become difficult for many people to see how they’ll keep up new habits inspired by the turning of the new year.  Some people never got around to taking action this time around at all.  Others may be feeling the difficulties of making change and the sacrifices it often requires.  Often times we decide to make time for these endeavors, only to find that life has a persistent way of “happening” during those very free times we expected to utilize.  Our rhythm may get interrupted, our commitment may start to waver, and those shining visions we had of the future may seem to recede farther into the distance with every step so that they seem like they were only ever a fantasy.  Then, the negative thoughts come out to play, suggesting that we’ll never get anywhere, and who are we to have thought we could in the first place?

If some version of this is happening to you, congratulations—you’re human!  Really making change happen is difficult, messy, and often time consuming well beyond our expectations and hopes.  The world around us feeds us stories of “overnight” successes without acknowledging that most of these successful people actually put in a great deal of effort of some kind before they ever achieved any accolades or grand opportunities.  Learning and growing in meaningful ways, building new skills and habits, requires long-term application of focus, creativity, and persistence.  All of these take practice to wield consistently, but one of the biggest challenges you will face in the modern world is the scarcity of available time; not that this has been absent at any time in history, because time is one the one commodity that it’s tough to make more of, but the pace of life now is arguably more hectic than in times past.  We live longer, but we also work more hours, and for more years, than ever before, while the notion of success has continually expanded to cover more ground.   

Time management is therefore a key skill, and unfortunately one that we are not formally taught during our formative years in most schools.  It’s something we’re usually left to figure out for ourselves—or not.  Unless you’re naturally talented in this area, you may find that you never have a clear sense of how much you can realistically accomplish on any given day, nor how best to organize your tasks to get where you’d like to go.  You may find that you always seem to be running, but without actually getting anywhere.  If you never take the time to step back and think through new strategies suited for your unique needs, you may find yourself living in frustration, self-recrimination, and despair that things can ever be better.  It’s easy to decide that everyone else knows things we don’t, or was born with skills we lack, but the truth is that most people have to work to gain these skills.  Below are some suggestions for increasing your time management competence.  This is one of the leverage points that almost any satisfying life must incorporate in order to run smoothly.  Doing this work may not seem fun, but so much more becomes possible when your time management skills improve that it’s well worth putting effort here consistently until you’re more proficient.

·      If you’re someone who tends to lose track of time, and find that something you thought would take an hour often ends up taking you three, you may need to consciously become more of a clock watcher for a while, or maybe always.  As you work on a task, try keeping a clock in view and check it often.  Make it a game to try and guess how much time has passed since the last time you looked.  Keep this casual and light.  If you play this game consistently, you may find that you become more attuned to the passage of time. 

·      You can also try setting alarms for certain periods of time so that you have warnings when you’re a quarter of the way into the amount of time you’ve allotted to a task, then halfway, then three quarters, so that you can continually measure where you are.  The point is not to stress yourself out with hard interruptions, but to have a chance to speed up, slow down, or make new decisions about how to work.

·      For example, if you’re halfway through the time you have, and nowhere near completing your task, you may need to stop, admit that your goal was unrealistic at this time, and either accept a lesser goal for the day or allot more time to continue your efforts.

·      Note that people tend to be more naturally productive at different times of day.  If you know that you’re a morning person, plan your most difficult tasks to be done first thing.  If you tend to come alive in the evening, plan your productive time to take place then.  Start to take note of when your high-energy times of day seem to be.  There may be times when you need to work outside of these, but acknowledge that you will be less efficient in that case.

·      After you become more adept at knowing how much time it takes for you to complete certain kinds of tasks at various times of day, you can begin to do a better job of planning your life.  (The previous steps are necessary before this becomes plausible.)  When you can plan realistically, you can steer your life with greater effectiveness and satisfaction.

·      Once you are in a position to plan well, it’s time to start thinking about how to consolidate your movements so that you waste less time and effort.  What would you like to get done today and how much time will each task take?  Is there a way that you could accomplish two or more at once, or nearly so, by doing them in tandem?  Is there a way that you can walk across the room only once, doing something on the way and something on the way back, rather than making a separate trip for each task?  Planning can make a huge difference in how much time you seem to have and what you can accomplish.  Again, challenge yourself to be creative about this, but treat it like a game.  If you make it fun, your creativity is more likely to come to your aid with less effort and more consistency.

·      Always plan a little “uh-oh” time into a task for things that will come up and surprise you—at least an added 10% of the time you were already planning.  For example, if you’re doing errands, you may at some point be slowed down by road construction.  If you build in a buffer, normal curveballs like this won’t frustrate you out nearly as much, and you’ll be much more likely to stay on track with your overall schedule.

·      When you decide to make an important change to your life, you must talk seriously with those close to you about it.  Communicate what you’re doing and why, and ask for their support.  Be clear that the time you set aside for this new effort is essential to your making the change happen.  If they respect and support your goal, there will be times when you might have faltered, but their support can help you use your time and keep up the effort necessary to keep growing.

·      In turn, respect the time that others need in order to pursue their important goals.  Support your loved ones in carving out and protecting that time.

·      Occasionally emergencies happen.  When they do, take care of them, and then get back to your important goals.  Moving forward toward our dreams and goals is part of what makes us feel that we’re truly alive, so don’t allow surprises to permanently knock you off course.

·      If all of this is particularly hard for you, consider hiring a teacher or coach to help you increase your skills.

You deserve to be living the kind of life that can be yours through efficient planning and time management.  Resist hasty conclusions that you’re not capable of having what you want, and notice the ways in which you just need to build your skills in order to waste less time and effort.  In later blogs, we’ll look at other ways to keep moving forward, but don’t ignore these fundamental skills.