“Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.”  – Louis L’Amour, author

I Googled “Time Management” just now and up popped “results 1 – 10 of about 680,000,000.”  No kidding – try it. 

See?  There are probably more by now. Or less.

Why do some people spend enormous amounts of time trying to manage their time when others  just don’t care?

I have to admit, I’m a workaholic, especially now that I work mostly from home.  I will also freely admit that I am one of those people who believes in planning.  I have a strategic plan for my business, one overall guiding mission statement for my life, long-term goals, 5-year goals, annual goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, weekly goals, and daily goals.  Sometimes I even set hourly goals and goals for the next 15 minutes.  I am constantly monitoring and attempting to manage my time in order to do the things required to accomplish my goals.  I want to get the most out of each hour and every day.  I like that feeling at the end of the day when even through interruptions and obstacles, I’ve accomplished everything I set out to do and know that I did everything well – to the best of my ability – excellently.  I own 29 books on time management and have read them all – more than once.  I own a Franklin planner and could teach all of the Franklin-Covey courses.  What I’d like to share with you today is the one trick that I have found that works more than any other time management trick or technique I’ve tried and that is the concept of focus.

Most of the really important work we do requires large chunks of time to complete.  For example, writing a blog post takes me about 90 minutes, while working on my website can take several hours.  If I block out 90 minutes for writing a blog post, I’ll get one post written.  But if I block 3 hours and can work for that three hours uninterrupted, I can often get three posts written instead of just two.  Once I get into “writing mode,” it’s easier to just keep going. 

Working on my website is very time consuming for me because I am just starting to learn coding.  Every time I start working, I have to re-learn what I learned the last time.  Sure, it doesn’t take as long to review, but it does take time, sometimes an entire day.  It also takes my brain longer to get into the task because coding is not as natural to me as writing. 

There are two key factors in being able to implement chunking and making it work.  The first is knowing how long it takes to complete certain tasks, the other is planning.  Then, you must be flexible and realize that things are going to come up unexpectedly, and you’ll have to readjust your schedule or plan differently next time.  And that’s exactly what you do – you change your plans, but continue to allow time for all the things you want to accomplish.  As Mark Victor Hansen explains it, the plan is nothing because the plan changes once you’re into execution, but planning is everything.  This brings new meaning to the old adage, “Plan your work and work your plan,” doesn’t it?

Now, of course, you’ll need to take breaks and there will be times when you simply can’t ignore an interruption.  But when you’re constantly trying to multi-task, you’ll accomplish much less in the end that you would if you had chunked your time, focusing on one objective at a time. So when you start a job, stick with it until it is finished.  You’ll be glad you did.

The term, “multi-tasking” by the way, is a computer term that was never supposed to be applied to humans.  Our brains “multi-task” enough as it is.  We can be doing one task while thinking about another.  As someone who has been around computers for 25 years, I can remember when the goal was to get computers to be as efficient as the human brain.  Nowadays, we think it’s cool if our brains can think like a computer.  What a paradigm shift!  But it’s a false paradigm – so forget about multi-tasking – that’s for your computer only.
Psychologists tell us we need to resolve issues from our past by “re-living” the experience and handling it differently.  Motivational gurus tell us to live for the future and forget about the past.  In reality, you are never in the past or the future.  You exist only in the present moment.  Even when you remember the past or envision the future, you’re still thinking those thoughts in the present.  All you really have is right now.  And that’s all you ever will have.  We are not promised tomorrow.  You can’t control the passage of time, but you can control your present moment focus.  That’s all.  No past.  No future.  Just right now.  But the best way to control your present moment focus is to have planned ahead what you’re going to focus on.  It is also important to reflect on the past with regard to what worked for you and what didn’t.  Reflecting on past successes and failures helps us to better plan our futures, right now.
For those people who never try to manage their time and don’t get what all the fuss is about, I’d like to share this analogy.

When I was a kid, I loved to play the game Monopoly.  My brother, who is six years older than I am always thought of playing with me as a chore, so I didn’t get to play very often.  My Dad would sometimes play the game with me, but he always let me win and I knew it, so it wasn’t as much fun.  My brother always won – mostly because he cheated.  He won’t admit to it to this day, but I know he did.  One Sunday night after church, he agreed to play.  I was 10 years old and he was 16.  I was finally old enough to read and understand the rules for myself so he couldn’t cheat anymore, and I started winning.  I owned all three railroads, Boardwalk, and had a hotel on Park Place.  I was finally going to win! At 9:30, my father came in, folded the game up and said, “Game’s over – it’s time for bed.”  I was shocked – and not ready to quit.

“But I was winning!” I tried reasoning with my father to try to get him to reconsider as my brother laughed.  “You can finish it tomorrow,” was my father’s reply as he put the game back into the box.  There was no reasoning with my father, especially over a game or extending bedtime.  My brother was never brave enough to finish that game with me, but I felt a sense of accomplishment just in getting as far as I did.

My friends, one of these days, I don’t know when, my Heavenly Father is going to close up my game and make me quit.  And just like that Sunday night when I was 10, I will be shocked, and I won’t be ready to quit.  But knowing that I have spent each day, each hour, and each minute learning the rules of the game, doing the best I can, and playing full out in spite of adversity will bring me a final sense of accomplishment.  And that’s all I’m hoping for. 

Thanks for reading today.  I’d love to hear from you.  You can comment by clicking the “No comments” link below, or by e-mailing me directly.

Posted under Education, Inspiration, Motivation