The Time Management System Must-Have Ingredient
You can have the most beautiful process in the world for baking a cake, but if you leave out a key ingredient your cake will suck. It’s no different when you are developing your time management system, in fact it’s harder to do, especially if you are leaving the armed forces, where your time management system was largely created for you. Let me explain.
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When you are following Grandma Pastry’s recipe for apple pie, Grandma tells you the exact ingredients and the precise quantities of each ingredient which make up the apple pie recipe. Then she gives you the system – the method, if you will, to pull all the ingredients together. This is grand when you want to produce Grandma Pastry’s Apple Pie, but when it’s your own life outcomes you want to structure, then your ingredients need to go into your own time management system, if you don’t want someone else’s apple pie.
Firstly, you must decide what cake you want and then what ingredients you need to include in your time management system to get the results you want.
Often when we plan our week, what goes in to our time management system are the major tasks. Important meetings, reports which need to be written, getting the kids to ballet – I’m sure you get the picture. What gets left out, because we don’t apply a high value to them, are the tasks which relate to our life maintenance. According to Harriet Schechter’s Conquering Chaos At Work, Michael Eisner, former CEO of the Walt Disney company, spent 75% of his time on maintenance such as keeping his desk clear and returning phone calls, leaving him to concentrate on his more creative work.
Build Your Life Maintenance Tasks Into Your Time Management System
How much time do we really spend on paying bills, doing the washing, cooking, washing up and repairing the car? Loads. But is it wasted when we consider what happens when we neglect this stuff – life can get fairly miserable, pretty damn quick and our efficiency drops in our working arena.
What happens to our lives when we don’t build basic maintenance into our time management system?
1. Things start to fall apart. The car breaks down because the oil didn’t get topped up. You don’t have your best suit for that important meeting, because it didn’t get taken to the cleaners, etc.
2. You aren’t ready for what comes next. When you wash the dishes and put them away, then you’re getting ready for the next time you want to prepare a meal.
3. The neglected life maintenance tasks bubble over into the time you’ve allocated in your time management system for the really important stuff – like getting that report done.
When you fail to spend enough time in maintenance, then the life maintenance tariff will just have to be paid further down the track – and you can bet that the fee has gone up…
Fail to plan to pay a bill and pay later in wasted time making phone calls to reinstate a service, make apologies, or pay late dues. This means that part of running your life efficiently and getting this boring stuff over and done with, is about learning to do what needs to be done. This leaves you free, and ready to maintain, or work towards the life you want.
Time Management System Exercise
When there is money to be earned and kids to get to school, it is easy to prioritise these important daily tasks, whilst life maintenance gets pushed to the back of the queue until it’s a mountain. This is how it used to work for me. I’d rush ahead working like stink for so many hours of the day that by the time I’d finished, I was either too tired to deal with the life maintenance tasks, or all the offices and shops which I might need to liaise with were closed for the day. I’d carry on like this and meanwhile papers, washing and dishes were piling up until it reached crunch point. The next stage for me is a sort of mental collapse which means I can’t get on with the job of earning money until I’ve cleared the crap out of my brain, my desk and my laundry basket. Now, instead of weaving these jobs into my daily time management system I’m forced into a down-tools for a couple of days because now I have to plough in and sort out what has evolved into a daunting mess. Here’s what you can do to prevent that…
1. List out your basic life maintenance tasks…here are a few ideas to get you started…
- Buying food, household supplies, stocking up with medication and personal supplies, cooking and clearing up
- Laundry, dry cleaning, clothing and shoe cleaning and repair
- Looking after yourself with your daily personal hygiene and special scheduled more intense pamperings
- Paying bills
- Reviewing bank statements and other financial matters
- Car maintenance, including MOT, servicing, winter preparations, insurance and tax
- Tidying up – the beds, tables, your wardrobe
- Cleaning the house
- Planning your social and leisure time
- Clearing your desk
- Returning phone calls
- Medical and dental care
- Hair dressers, manicures, facials
- Brain down time
Don’t be put off if you think this lot is going to take a lot of time. Firstly, you need to do it, and secondly, it will take you a whole lot longer if you neglect it.
2. Find a way to enjoy and appreciate the order which carrying out your life maintenance tasks brings – do the ironing with your ipod, or use it as a time to meditate and practice your deep breathing.
3. Take out your calendar or planner and schedule life maintenance into your personal time management system.
And don’t cheat. This is not the time which should be cast aside because something, which appears to be more important, has cropped up – that will bed into it’s own place, once you decide that the life maintenance part of your time management system is the life blood of your productivity. And remember, there is ALWAYS something more important to do than the laundry, right up until the time that you stink so bad that you’re Billy-No-Mates, or Billy-No-Job, or Billy-No-Contract!
Related articles
- Essential Time Management Techniques for Administrative Professionals (thinkup.waldenu.edu)
- Five must-have time management web services for small businesses (techvibes.com)
