Watching the Clock (Making Time for Art, Part 3)
This is the third of a four-part series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.
Having your priorities straight and knowing how to focus make finding time for art easier. But bringing continual awareness to how you spend your time is really critical.
When I say awareness, I’m talking about both a practical kind of awareness — What am I doing with my time? Am I spending it well? — as well as a deeper sense of knowing time.
In many ways, time is like money: We have it, we spend it. However, unlike money, everyone starts out with the same amount of time each day. And also, unlike money, we all have to spend it down at the same rate. There really is no such thing as “saving” time — it’s not like you can put it away for later. It’s here, right now, and we get it on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. There is no bank where you can buy or borrow an extra few hours. For better or for worse, it just doesn’t work like that.
So what matters is spending it well. And if you don’t know how you’re spending it — if you’re floating through your days on a cloud of distraction and confusion, or attending to priorities that don’t make your life juicy and alive and worth it, then you’re spending it poorly.
So if you really want to get control over how you spend your time, you need to be aware of exactly how you’re spending it.
Keep a journal in 15-minute increments. Keep it for a day, three days, a week, however long you can. Then take a look: How much of the time allotted to you did you spend on the things that are truly priorities? (Refer back to Part 1) How much of the time allotted to you did you spend distracted, unfocused, not energized? (Refer back to Part 2) Were you aware of how you were really spending your time before doing this exercise? If not, what surprised you?
Keeping a time journal can not only help you identify how you spend your time versus how you’d rather be spending it; it can also help you deepen your awareness, then, so you’ll be able to answer questions like:
- What pulls my focus? Is there a task, situation, person, time of day, train of thought, Web site, TV show, room in the house, memory, feeling that distracts me from my mission? What is it? Why does it distract me? What does it want from me? What need does it fulfill? Can I get that need fulfilled and move on, instead of letting it pull my focus every time? Can I address that need in some other way?
- How long do things take? Underestimating the length of time a single task will take can throw off your whole morning. Underestimating the length of time many tasks will take can sabotage your whole day, week, year, life. If you’re a chronic under-estimator of time, the time journal above should help you in the future. Do some reality checking because you’re probably over-scheduling yourself. Expect less of your time so you can do the quality work you need/want to do. This problem also demands attention to priority (Refer back to Part 1).
- How long should things take? This, too, refers back to the question of priority in Part 1. If you’re spending two hours on a task that’s not a high priority, you need to rein it in, streamline it, outsource it, or eliminate it from your day. Remember that “priority” doesn’t necessarily refer to the things people say you should be doing; it’s what is priority to your life: your material survival, your sense of love and belonging, your creativity, your self-actualization — all those things, in Maslow’s order, discussed in Part 1. Only you can decide what your priorities are, and only you can decide how much time each priority should take. Being aware of how time spent on a task measures up to that task’s relative importance in your life will help you make better decisions about how you spend your time.
Knowing all these things will help you focus, set realistic deadlines/timelines, and stop or modify your approach when low-priority tasks start taking up too much time. Not knowing all these things puts you at risk for spending your time less optimally — and that can cost you.
In: I don't have time., I don't know where to start., I have too many projects on my plate., I'm overwhelmed. · Tagged with: time, time-management
on October 13, 2010 at 9:50 pm
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[...] over your time, is the proper management of four things: priorities (Part 1), focus (Part 2), awareness (Part 3), and energy (this [...]