 Contests & Activities: July 21, 2021 Issue [#10885] |
This week: Timely Habits Edited by: Jaeyne of the Free Fab Five  
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Time Management gets a bad rap for being rigid and boring, but what if you approached it as a series of small habits? Incremental changes can lead to big gains and help you reclaim some time. WdC has some activities that can help!
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I hate time management. I am not the type of person who can pencil in every second of every day. For me, day planners are the most useless invention ever (although I have written poems across the pages a few times). I don’t get along with many calendar apps. I finally found one I like this year. My brain does not agree with the traditional time management strategies preached from the self-help pulpits. I am a to-do list person in a world demonizing to-do lists.
What’s a loosey-goosey person like me supposed to do? It feels like a forever failure to not ‘maximize productivity’ and make the most out of every minute. The hard-planning theory persists, and not without reason. There’s only so many hours in the day, and there’s X number of things to get done.
We can’t make more hours, so we have to make more out of the time within them. How can you do that while maintaining some flexibility?
By reclaiming time from the stuff you’re already doing. Small, barely noticeable changes, repeated and built upon, until you have new, smoother systems. This isn’t groundbreaking—it’s the key to any efficiency gain. Developing a way to use the least amount of energy and resources for repetitive things doesn’t make you a robot, it frees up brainpower and saves time.
If you make it a habit to put your keys in the same place every single time you put them down, you’ll save yourself a bunch of minutes of the morning. The more things you automate, the easier life gets, and the more time you reclaim.
Anecdotally, I tried a new morning routine habit-building exercise. Over six months, I built up six new habits (called habit stacking), none of them particularly difficult after the first few days. It ended up saving me 25 minutes every morning. What did I lose? The commercials during CSI reruns every night while I did the things to improve the morning. I didn’t even have to give up the show. Spoiler: I have since given up the show.
Giving up the show to gain the 25 minutes would have felt like a “have to”, and I don’t know too many who like “having to” do anything. What happened was I “did” something because I also “got to do” something. Brains are weird. It’s much easier to do the habit-stacking thing if you bake something you like into it.
Once I started the process, I found that instead of a daily planner, a habit tracker worked the best for me. I reclaimed a fairly significant amount of time—and I was married, working full time, and raising two kids. Even if I hadn’t gone past that 25 minutes, the entire systems concept reduced my stress level.
Now, this time reclamation will not achieve other goals for you. This is one way to get you there, but what you do with the time is on you. That’s where the tough decisions come in.
You decide what it is you want out of the gains.
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