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But It Doesn’t Look Finished

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Have you ever noticed that it’s really difficult to motivate yourself to complete a task that doesn’t produce an immediate, visible result? It can be a real challenge to your time management.

For example, if you have a paper to write for school, you might spend all day researching your topic in the library. You may emerge feeling much more knowledgeable about your topic and more prepared to write your paper, but if someone asked what you did all day, you wouldn’t have much tangible work to show for it.

My frustration this week came from cleaning. We are moving into a new place next month and have started the packing/cleaning/organizing process. I spent all morning reorganizing the garage. I went through all the shelves, threw things away, consolidated boxes, and sorted things into a “give away” and “throw away” pile.

When I was done, I stepped back to admire my work…and realized it looked pretty much the same as when I started. Wow. Had I just wasted my whole morning?

Looks Can Be Deceiving

The most satisfying tasks to complete are ones that produce an immediate and visible result, but unfortunately, those aren’t the only kinds of things we need to do. Sure, I could have spent my morning putting all of my books into boxes. That is a much easier task to do and my room would have looked much more empty. However, looks can be deceiving.

Working in the garage was a much more valuable use of my Saturday, even if it didn’t necessarily look like it.

When deciding how to spend your day, be careful not to put off difficult things just because they aren’t very satisfying to complete. Remember, “later” always gets here eventually and you won’t be any more thrilled about the work. Better to just do it now!

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Technorati Keywords Time Management, Efficiency,

Photo Credit: Master Isolated Images

The Vacation Dilemma

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Time off from work or school is great. No one is going to argue with that. However, deciding how to spend this rare chunk of free time can prove difficult.

I’ve found that people usually have one of two reactions at the beginning of a break:

1. “It will be so nice to finally catch up on my work!” or

2. “I can’t wait to just relax and have fun!”

Therein lies the dilemma: Do you use these days off to get work done? Or do you take advantage of an opportunity to relax and go take a trip or do something fun?

This week is my fall break from teaching. I am so excited to finally have some time to breathe, but I’ve had difficulty deciding how best to spend these few precious days.

On the one hand, I could get caught up on a lot of work. It wouldn’t really feel like a vacation, but I’d be far less stressed when I went back to work. On the other hand, I could sleep in every day, go shopping, go on a trip, and other fun things that I never have time for otherwise.

 My Day of Nothing

I thought I had found a good balance. I was going to work hard for the first three days of break, and then go on a vacation to Florida to see some family. However, yesterday threw that plan out the window- in a good way.

I woke up feeling a little sick yesterday. I tried to just work through it, but I kept feeling worse. I ended up spending the whole day lazing around the house. You know what? It was wonderful. Anyone who knows me knows that I never ever spend a whole day doing nothing, but it was exactly what I needed to start my break.

I’m certainly not advocating that we all sit around and be lazy all the time, but I think there is something to be said for allowing yourself to do nothing once in a while. My vacation will be fun, even though I won’t be sleeping in or really “relaxing.” Then, it will be nice to get work done and finally feel as though I’m crawling out from my pile of “to dos.” However, my yesterday of “nothing” was blissful.

What is your favorite way to spend your break?

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Photo Credit: Michal Marcol

The MultiTasking Dilemma

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The more things we have on our plate, the more likely it is that we try to multitask as a time management strategy.  We work while we eat, we eat while we drive and we have conversations via phone, email and IM all at the same time.

Doing two things at once seems like a great way to get things done faster, but I’ve learned there is some interesting research that proves otherwise.  This is particularly true when you are trying to do a “Meat” task in your Time Diet that requires a lot of thinking.

A 2005 study published by The Procedures of the National Academies of Science found that doing too many things at once can be detrimental.

When people multitask while doing something like reading, listening or studying, they store the information they learn in a different part of their brain than people who choose to only focus on one thing. Non-multitaskers store it in a part of the brain that easily recalls information later. Multitaskers store their information in a part of the brain that is more difficult to recall in different situations.

Basically, if you multitask on something difficult, you’re still going to get your work done, but you’ll have a more difficult time remembering it later.

How to MultiTask Effectively

So, what do we do? Sometimes there simply aren’t enough hours in the day! We can’t finish everything if we don’t double things up.

Save the multitasking for your Vegetables. Remember, the Vegetable tasks in your Time Diet are the easier ones that don’t require as much intense thinking. If you simply must multitask, save it for the Vegetables that aren’t very difficult to do.
For example:

Folding laundry and talking on the phone- perfect combination!
Filing papers and skimming your email- great!
Reading a report and messaging with a friend….not the best idea.

Then next time you catch yourself trying to multitask with difficult and important things, remember: it’s better to find a few extra minutes to focus on one thing so you do the best job you can and don’t have to find time to re-do it later.

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The Consequence of Nothing

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When we fail to make time for our own projects, a terrible thing happens: Nothing.
It’s one thing to find time to work on projects or assignments that are essential. If you don’t finish a project for work, your boss will be upset. If you don’t turn in an assignment for school, your professor will lower your grade. If you don’t get your leaky roof fixed, you’ll have an unwanted shower in your living room the next time it rains. However, if you fail to make time for your own projects, an even worse consequence occurs: Nothing.

When we already have a full plate of obligations to other people, it’s difficult to find time for completing our own projects that are important to us. There is no consequence for never planting that herb garden you’ve always wanted in your backyard or never getting around to training for that marathon you’ve thought about. The only thing that happens is….well…nothing. And that’s the problem. You’ll experience “nothing” instead of the fulfillment and happiness of working on something just for you. You have to learn to be accountable to yourself .

What Writing a Book About Time Management Has Taught Me About Time Management

As many of you know, my project has been writing my first Time Diet book about time management. It has been more difficult than I ever imagined. I’ve re-written it twice and really thought I’d be done by now. However, it’s extremely difficult to find time to write when I have so many obligations for work and school. I have learned three ways to manage my writing time so I don’t let my book fall by the way side.

1) Make Appointments for Yourself
I schedule my writing time in my calendar just like I schedule all other work time. Before something makes it into my calendar, it’s just an idea. When it’s written down on a specific day and a specific time, it’s a commitment.

2) Remove Other Distractions
When I’m writing at home, it’s all too easy to become distracted with other work I have to do. This is why I do most of my writing at Starbucks. I almost feel obligated to share some of my (hopefully) future profits with them, but I think they’ve made enough money off of me in Grande Java-Chip Frappuccinos.

3) Hold Yourself Accountable
I don’t allow myself to break commitments I’ve made to my writing. I set mini goals for myself such as “Have Chapter 1 edited this week” or “ Re-write Chapter 2 by Saturday.” I write these goals in my calendar and tell my husband about them. My big goal is to have this book finished this summer. There, now I’ve told you my goal too. Feel free to nag me about it. I can use all the help I can get.

I don’t know what will come from finishing this book, but I do know that the worst thing that could possibly happen is “Nothing.”

If you’re also writing a book, or curious about the process, I’ve been reading “The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published” by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry. It’s a fabulous resource. You can buy it on Amazon Here.

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Harnessing Unexpected Motivation

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Sometimes work just seems to take longer than it should. We may have eliminated all distractions and given ourselves ample time, but we just aren’t being as productive at a task as we know we could be. Why is this? It may be because we just aren’t motivated. Focused work is twice as efficient as unfocused work, but focused work that you are actually motivated to complete is the even more ideal scenario.

I’m not saying you will always be 100% motivated and excited to complete a task or that you should wait around for inspiration to strike before beginning anything. However, when you do feel particularly motivated to do something, it’s often best to just go ahead and do it, even if you had originally planned to complete something with a slightly more pressing deadline.

Adjusting Your Schedule

This past week was my spring break from both teaching and my grad program. I had a detailed plan sketched out of what tasks I needed to complete and when I planned to complete them. On Monday, I had planned to knock out some easy and tedious tasks first that were due right after break was over. However, when I woke up on Monday, I felt ambitious. I wanted to tackle the literature review for my research class. A literature review is the part of a research study in which you read as many published studies as you can that have already been written about your topic and then summarize them into one concise section that will eventually serve as the lead-in to your own research paper. I had really not been looking forward to doing this, and since my paper isn’t due until May, I was planning on breaking up this task into tiny little parts and spreading it out over the month of April to make it more manageable. Usually, this would be a great plan, however, here I was on a Monday morning actually feeling motivated to tackle this challenge.

Even though I had tasks on my choose-to list with more pressing deadlines, I took advantage of this surprising motivation and spent all of Monday and most of Tuesday finishing this literature review. I took frequent breaks to complete chores around my house and make sure I didn’t burn out on this heavy “Meat” task, but overall, I was on a roll for two days straight. By late Tuesday afternoon, my motivation was gone, but I had almost finished my task.

In our Time Diets, we work so hard to motivate ourselves to complete tasks we don’t want to do. We post our goals in our workplace so we remember what we’re working for. We break up big tasks into more manageable chunks and we remove all distractions so we are free to focus on our work. We are so good at manufacturing inspiration that we can’t forget to ignore when inspiration strikes on its own. I ended up finishing those easy tasks I had originally planned to do on Monday a little closer to their due date than I would have hoped, but I was still able to finish everything I needed to do without the risk of missing a deadline. Taking advantage of my surprising motivating to finish my lit review was the most productive decision I could have possibly made over my spring break.

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Scheduling Creative Tasks

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If you’ve been following your Time Diet, you’ve already become an expert on scheduling a good variety of Meat tasks, Vegetable tasks and Dessert tasks into your day. However, you may have encountered a problem. Sure, it’s easy to schedule tasks that have a finite completion time. If I give myself half an hour to respond to some emails I’ve set aside, I know I can sit down and knock those out in the time allotted. When I sit down to finish my grades for school, I know that as long as I stay focused, I will have them done by the end of the afternoon. But what about those tasks that require more creative thinking?

Sometimes when you sit down to complete a creative task, it goes very quickly because you think of an idea right away. Other times you can spend what seems like hours just figuring out how to start because the ideas just aren’t coming to you. How in the world do you plan for that?

In one of my graduate classes at ASU, we read about a guy named Graham Wallas who explains why “planning” to be creative is such a problem. Now, don’t get me wrong. There are tons of theories out there about how creative thinking works, but this one really spoke to me. Wallas wrote about the 4 steps he believes make up the creative process.

Step 1: Preparation- This is when you gather information about the problem you are trying to solve (or in this case, the creative task you are trying to complete.)
Step 2: Incubation- This is when you step back from your task and allow all the information you’ve collected to sink-in and gel.
Step 3: Illumination- The moment of “illumination” is when a great idea comes to you. It’s that creative spark when a great idea pops into your head.
Step 4: Verification- This last stage is when you take this new idea and do something with it. This is when you test it out and see if it’s an idea worth sticking to.

When I read all this, I thought, “Ah ha! This explains why creativity doesn’t always mesh well with time management!” When we’re planning out our day, we need to take these steps, especially the one about incubation, into consideration. We can’t say, “I’m going to be creative between the hours of 4pm and 5pm today.” It doesn’t work like that! Instead, here are 3 ways you can make creative tasks work with your time management.

3 Strategies for Time Management of Creativity

1) Go do a Vegetable task. Taking your mind off of your creative task for a little while can help ideas come to you. This is that “Incubation” period Wallas talked about.  By doing an (easy) Vegetable task you can still be productive while waiting for inspiration to strike. (One of my fabulous professors says that you can always tell when she’s working on a big creative project because her garden looks amazing. Working in her yard is her “Vegetable” task she does when she’s searching for a creative idea.)

2) Just write something. When trying to come up with a good idea for a creative project, we sometimes get hung up on perfection. We hesitate to write a sentence until we are absolutely sure it is the perfect combination of brilliant words. This not only wastes time but it puts a lot of pressure on ourselves! Got an idea? Write it down! It doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s what revisions are for. Not sure if your creative idea is very good? Who cares! Go with it for a little bit. See where it takes you. Maybe you’ll come up with an even better idea in the process.

3) Set aside a day for creativity. This doesn’t mean you have to sit around the whole day waiting for that magical spark of inspiration, but it just means that you can be slightly less rigid in your planning. For example, instead of planning to be creative during one specific hour of the day, take a look at all the times in your day you could devote to this creative task. If you have time at 10am, 2pm and 6pm, leave yourself a little flexibility as to which of those times you use for your creative work and which you fill with other tasks. This way, you are still able to schedule your time but you don’t have to force that creative spark into a specific time slot.

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Our Unhealthy Obsession with Due Dates

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One of the tenets of The Time Diet is that stressing out and worrying wastes our time. Half the stress of getting it all done comes from worrying about getting it all done. This attitude comes from our unhealthy obsession with deadlines and due dates. We are bombarded with deadlines in our lives. Bills are due! Projects are due! Paperwork is due! This is the kind of stuff that keeps us up at night and we’d be far more efficient if we spent that energy developing a plan of attack to actually complete this work. You see, every deadline you write in your calendar has a corresponding date that is much more important: your start date. While deadlines are often set by other people, the more important start date is set by you.

This past week was the first full week of the ASU spring semester. There is no better time to witness the stress of deadlines than this initial week of school (except maybe finals week, which has some pretty intense deadline stress too). You see, this first full week of classes is when all the course syllabi are handed out. As the professors carefully walk the class through their expectations for the semester, the students are frantically flipping through the syllabus looking for words like “20 page paper” or “Final Exam: worth 50% of your grade.” Those deadlines then take their place in the part of students’ brains reserved for stressful things where they will loom for the rest of the semester. When you multiply this process by the number of classes a student is taking, the resulting state of mind is the student version of deadline-stress which I like to call, “syllabus overload.”

Syllabus overload is a perfect example of the dangers of stressing out about deadlines with no regard for start dates. Rather than allowing deadlines to pile up in their brains, students should immediately get out their calendars, write down the deadline and then also write down the date they intent to start that project. Does your syllabus say you have a 15-page paper due half-way through the semester? You’ll want to allow 5 days to write it (3 pages a day as a general rule of thumb) plus a buffer of a few days to allow for unexpected things to come up. I would pick a date in my calendar no later than 10 days before this paper is due and write “start paper.”  Do this for every due date in all of your syllabi. Now, you still have a lot of work to do, but the deadlines don’t have to freak you out. All you have to do is look at your calendar and you’ll see your whole plan of attack all laid out. No more worrying about how in the world all your work will be done. You know when it will all be done. You just planned it!

The importance of start dates applies to more than just students. Anyone who has deadlines in their lives needs to also plan out their start dates. Take taxes for example. April 15th does not often invoke thoughts of happiness because it is ingrained in most people’s heads as the day taxes are due (except of course this year when they are due April 18th.) If you do your own taxes, you’ve likely stressed about this deadline many times. Instead of just writing “taxes due” in your calendar, pick a date that you will begin working on them and write “start taxes.” The simple act of designating a start date will do wonders for your stress level. Looking at a calendar of only deadlines makes us feel powerless. Looking at a calendar of self-created start dates makes us feel in control. The Time Diet is all about being in control. Good-bye deadline-stress!!

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Not an Afternoon Person

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Wow! What a crazy week it’s been, but so much fun! I knew teaching at three schools was going to be difficult to organize and I was right. I’ve had to tweak the way I do things a little bit. I really like to get my lesson planning done in my morning “Time Bucket” because this is when I’m the most focused. Unfortunately, I’m scheduled at one of my schools in the afternoons only and therefore would need to get my lesson planning for that school done after lunch, when I’m the least focused and productive. Instead, I decided to buy one of those rolling crates to keep all of my music and lesson materials in one place and carry it from school to school. This way, I always have all of my stuff with me and can do the lesson planning for all three schools in the morning.

It’s amazing how drained I am in the afternoons! I never thought I’d be one of those “morning people.” I get up at 5:00am every morning and before I get out of bed I’m exhausted, but then I’m quickly wide away and ready to get to work. While some of my colleagues are still a little groggy when they get to school in the morning, my mind is going a mile a minute with lesson plan ideas, instrument repair solutions and thoughts about our upcoming concert. Once 1:00 hits thought, yikes! My energy level spirals downward until by 3:00 I’m ready for a nap!

It’s important for us to recognize when we are most alert and productive and try our best to put any difficult or thinking-intensive tasks in that time slot. I know that’s not always possible, but if it’s something we’re aware of when planning our day, it certainly can help!

Getting ready for school to begin!

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An essential part of the Time Diet philosophy is that everyone is in control of his or her own schedule. Boy have I been reminded of that lately! School is starting back up on Wednesday and this year I am teaching at three schools instead of one. That means three rooms to set up, three sets of welcome packets to get ready, three desks to organize, three sets of music to buy…it’s a little crazy! I am constantly reminding myself that nobody is making me do all of this. I requested to be at three schools this year because it meant I could focus more on teaching band- my true passion. I love teaching band and if I truly felt that the stress of getting the school year going out weighed the benefit of doing something I love, I would be looking for a different job!

I have three full days left before the students arrive and I have left nothing to chance. I have each day carefully planned out so that I know everything will get done on time. Part of that planning process includes going out to dinner with friends tonight. The best part about that is that I don’t have to feel guilty about enjoying an evening out because I will have gotten a lot of my work done before hand, and I have made time later for the rest of it. I know if I just worked non-stop this weekend, I would get burned out quickly. What good is a schedule if it doesn’t include a little fun?