Making up Time
The month of June has literally disappeared. I said this in passing to a client last week and he looked at me with a “you can’t be serious look”. His experience was an endless month. How can two people have such totally different experiences of time? How is it that some days literally disappear, and others drag? The simple explanation is that our perception of time is all made up with our thinking. We all have different experiences of the 24-hour clock, the 7-day week or the 30-day month. This is why many time management tips are not always effective as they tap into our thinking in a specific moment. Your To-do list, ranked by importance, is ranked by your thinking of what is important in that moment, which is a constant variable.
The Resiliency Hub Busy Mind Programme is designed to move us towards productivity. Now more than ever we hear our clients talk about being busy and not having time to complete tasks; resulting in feelings of stress or overwhelm. We have become addicted to the feeling of being busy so much so that I have known people who stretch the time it takes on one task especially to create that sense of urgency and busyness that is the new normal. Urgency is nearly always a signal to slow down or take a break. When we are in a hurry, we tend to make mistakes. Important things get forgotten or missed. We cut corners and things get half done. What if you could shift your mindset and thinking around the concept of time? Being productive is a whole new way of thinking about busy.
One of the reasons we spend so much time on email or social media or we unconsciously make ourselves “available” to interruption, is because it creates the experience that we are continually engaged in the activity. This leads us to the false conclusion that if we are always busy, we think we are productive. It is this thinking that leads to stress as many clients agonise over incomplete projects and missed deadlines.
Let us look at your own personal productivity; defined as your ability to produce results. Your ability to produce results has absolutely nothing to do with your level of activity, time spent, busyness, efficiency, effort, or stress. It has everything to do with results and output. If you consistently produce quality results and output over time, you are productive.
By switching your focus on your results and not all the things you think we must do to produce the results, you quickly see how much of every day is not productive.
This runs counter to the management approach that tracks activity instead of results. The difficulty in tracking the intangibles that lead to high-level results means that work ethic often gets elevated above productivity, which is kind of like rewarding the hare for running three times as many miles as the tortoise in the process of losing the race.
The simple rule of thumb for higher productivity is this: You get more of what you focus on. Focus on your to-do list and watch it grow or focus on results and watch them happen.
One caveat: none of this is to say that if you want to be productive at a high level, you will not have to put in the hours. I do not know anyone who consistently produces quality results over time who does not. Whether those hours are experienced as hard work or even busyness, is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind, which is directly related to your thinking.
The same teenager who struggles to focus on school work for more than ten minutes at a time can lose themselves for hours in online gaming, making music, doodling in a notebook or travelling through time and space in the pages of an epic novel. The problem is almost never in their brain but rather in the way they are using their mind.
So here are a few reflective questions to get you started on the road to less busyness and more productivity. By looking in the direction they are pointing, you are likely to get some insights for yourself into how you can get more done with less unnecessary effort and struggle:
Think about some times in your life where your effort was disproportionate to your results; either you put in a ton of work to no avail or you felt like you barely did anything and the results came pouring in. What do you make of that discrepancy? Were they random flukes or could there be a larger principle at work?
How is your experience of work different when you are fully engaged to when you are distracted? How could you cultivate the experience of full engagement?
If your productivity was the result of making higher quality decisions (i.e. “one good decision a day”), how might you design your day differently? What states of mind would be of higher value to you? How can you cultivate those higher quality states of mind?
Change your to-do list
The next time you look at your to do list, notice the things that always stay there, the things that get moved from an old list to a fresh list but never get done. Maybe it is time to start focussing on the things you need to let go of (perhaps by delegating). Instead of a new list of achievements to pursue, try focusing on a list of things to let go of. Then look at the things that you can naturally complete with ease, without a thought! And finally, look at things they simply need to stop doing.
Top Tips on Procrastination
I will finish on procrastination. I have yet to meet someone who is not a procrastinator at some level. I was clearly a level ten procrastinator: the closer the deadline, the greater the urgency. I have found a new method; one that I am sharing with my clients more and more, and for the most part, it has the result of minimising the over thinking about the unfinished task.
Avoidance generally results in excessive thinking and a busy mind, which is often made up busyness.
Procrastination is often the result of our “overthinking” about how we believe someone is going to receive or react to a task. We make up a lot of narrative in our heads about how something will be received – how a report will be read, for example. We have absolutely no idea how something will be read or how it will be received and yet this excessive thinking causes endless delays.
Sometimes there is just the right time to do something. What if you were willing to use your gut to identify the right time.
When we take the pressure off ourselves to be exceptional and recognise that things take time, and people aren’t always at their best, we recognise that ‘good enough’ is nearly always good enough and that if we give ourselves a bit of space and time, something new will always (yes, always) come to mind.
This does not mean that we must go slowly. It simply means that when we are willing to slow down, we are often able to make much quicker progress.
Contact eibhlin, if you want to know more about the Busy Mind Programme.