How do you manage your time?
If you have moved from corporate life to running your own business, have you struggled with managing your time?
People would say that I’m pretty organised. I’ve spent a lot of my working life looking at how processes work and trying to help teams be more efficient and effective. I’ve been a hater of ‘waste’ and a fan of ‘flow’. So, when I left corporate life last summer and set up my own business, I didn’t anticipate finding it quite so difficult to get my act together when it came to time management and managing my calendar - or is turned out my 3 calendars.
In corporate life I had one calendar and I speckled a few important personal events in there, but essentially there was only one place I needed to look to know what I was doing today, tomorrow, next week, next month. I also had a paper diary for my personal life. I thought it would be easy, with modern technology, to synch up my new business calendar, the calendar for a consultancy I was working for and my personal life. I thought it was time to go digital and ditch the paper diary. It turned out I wasted a huge amount of time faffing about trying to synch, duplicate, copy. various combinations of calendars. I can’t tell you how many google articles I read or free apps I tried. In the end I sorted out the tech and although I feel I haven’t found the optimum solution, I have something that works and I’m not wasting time trying to solve the problem.
Having reflected on the ‘calendar problem-solving weeks’ (as I’ve come to call them), what surprised me more than anything was to realise how much of a crutch my single corporate calendar had been for all of those years. OK, Covid has made the last year a bit strange and it’s not unusual for people to struggle when life circumstances change, but it was more than that. I felt a bit unhinged, at sea.
I realised that not only was I spending a lot of time wrestling with a technical problem but I was struggling with the real bit that counts: organising what I did when. Was I working on the most important things? Was I wasting time? I would start one task and then my mind would wander off and I’d find myself stressing about what I wasn’t doing.
At one level I knew what was going on - I‘ve been on enough time management courses and read enough business books - but I still found it really difficult to get a grip of my daily routine. One of the things that helped me the most was to find that I had other friends and colleagues who felt exactly the same and struggled the way I had when they changed course in life - that has made me feel a lot better (you know who you are!).
So how did I emerge from ‘the calendar problem-solving weeks?;
At a practical level - I chose to have one master calendar and always work from that. I don’t use a paper diary any more.
With hindsight I wished I’d talked to my friends and colleagues sooner - to know that other people have the same problem and feelings would have helped me a lot - a problem shared and all that….
I spent a couple of hours making a master list of everything I want to do over the next 12 months - I chose to use Trello to create lists which I categorised.
I set up a ‘completed’ list - nothing more satisfying than doing the digital ticking off a completed task
I used a Things to Do book to set out a weekly set of goals and then have a page for what I plan to do each day
I always include ‘non-work’ activities - tennis, walking the dog etc
At the end of the week I write down what I’ve achieved, tick off tasks in my master list and carry forward anything not done
All of the above has really helped. The only thing that’s difficult now is deciding what the priority tasks are and actually doing them (not prevaricating!) - and that’s a whole other subject.
I picked up some of these tips from Chris Croft’s Life Mastery course which I would highly recommend.
If you want to get to work to learn a bit more about how to cope with change please do get in touch: [email protected]
