Inspiring Growth | Spring Clean Your Time
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Spring Clean Your Time

11 Aug Spring Clean Your Time

Posted at 16:44h in Articles by
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ROLE REVIEW

When discussing the issue of time management with my clients, the most common obstacle for getting things done is the challenge of BALANCE.  How do we maintain balance?  Is it running fast enough to keep everybody happy – including yourself?  I believe that balance is more likely to be achieved if we invest time in deciding the roles that are important to us and then set goals and activities that are appropriate to these roles.

The steps below suggest a way of doing this:

  1. Define those roles that are important to you – for me it is things like Consultant, Friend and Homemaker. I would suggest you focus on around 6 key roles.
  2. Add an extra role which I call Personal Development. This can be about any aspect of YOU that you feel needs attention.  For example, in preparation for a holiday in South America mine has been learning Spanish.
  3. Take some time out to list what goals you want to achieve in each role. For example, under ‘Family’ my current list includes organising a trip to Barcelona to celebrate my Mum’s 70th birthday.
  4. It is up to you how often you update your goals. I tend to do mine at the beginning of each year and add to them as I think of new ambitions or adventures.
  5. At a regular time each week take a few minutes to review each of your roles and decide what you want to do in that week to take a step closer to your goals. Ask yourself, what activities do I want to undertake this week to demonstrate this role is important to me?
  6. And for me this is the critical step. Put those activities into your diary and stick to them!

In summary, establish the ROLES that are important to you, set GOALS for each role and then schedule ACTIVITIES that move you towards those goals.

Of course, there will be times when different roles take a large percentage of your time, a busy period at work might mean you have to pull back on social arrangements.  But by still reviewing ALL of your roles each week you will be more inclined to find a gap to phone a friend or a spare hour to pop for a quick swim.  I have been organising myself in this way for over twenty years and believe this has made a significant difference to how much I get done and how well I balance the different parts of my life.

To find enough time to achieve these goals and maintain balance, the time management matrix below will help you identify areas where your time needs to be spring cleaned and how to ensure that goal focussed activities are integrated into your weekly life.

GETTING ORGANISED

Do you often feel like there are not enough hours in the day to get everything done?  Do you find you are trying to keep so many people happy that you fail to meet anybody’s needs, least of all your own?

You are not alone.  Many of my clients enter the coaching relationship because they need help sorting out what they really want to achieve in their life and need to put steps in place to make sure that those things happen.

For many people, the first step is to ‘spring clean’ how they are using their time in order to make sure that they are not wasting valuable energy.  I strongly believe that being organised makes us feel in control and supports us working towards achieving our goals.  I also feel that there are two factors that influence how we spend our time – Urgency and Importance.  Let’s look at each of these in turn.

URGENCY

Few of us realise how urgency affects the choices we make.  The doorbell rings, a deadline approaches, we get into work to find 45 new messages in our inbox.  Although urgency makes us feel stressed and exhausted, it also makes us feel exhilarated, valued, and successful.  People now expect each other to be busy and overworked, if we’re not busy we’re almost embarrassed to admit it.  The problem is that urgency can become addictive, and like other addictions can result in very destructive behaviour such as inflated egos or problems in our relationships,

Sometimes it is appropriate to treat things as urgent, the concern is that when we are focussed on what is urgent, we often neglect what is important.

IMPORTANCE

Important things contribute towards our goals and bring meaning and richness into our lives.  The challenge is, because they do not tend to press us, these goals can be ignored and neglected because we run out of time.  It is never a priority to get that check up at the dentist – until we get toothache!

 

TIME MANAGEMENT MATRIX

To help us understand the distinction between urgency and importance, let’s look at the Time Management matrix illustrated overleaf:

  • The first square represents those things that are both urgent and important, so things like repairing a broken washing machine, dealing with an irate customer and having open heart surgery come into this category. We can summarise this square by the word CRISIS.
  • Square 2 is those activities that are important but not urgent, this is the square of QUALITY. This is where we do our long-term planning, learn a new skill and invest time in ourselves and our relationships.
  • The third square is those things that are not important, but we perceive as being urgent – I call this the square of DECEPTION. The reality is that the noise of urgency creates the illusion of importance and advances in modern technology and devices like smart phones fuel this problem.  Phone calls, other interruptions, and some meetings we are obliged to attend come into this square.
  • Finally, we have square four which is those activities that are neither urgent nor important.  This is referred to as the square of WASTE OF TIME or ESCAPE.  Junk mail, mindless tv and trivia fit into this square.  The challenge here is that the more stressed we become, the greater the temptation to spend time in this square.  Some escape can be healthy and recharge the batteries, but like everything else it needs to be managed.

 

Take the following steps towards spring cleaning your time:

  1. Review how you spent your time last week, putting each activity into the appropriate square. Pay attention to things in squares 1 and 3 as many people find that they spend most time in these squares.  It’s easy to think because something is urgent that it’s important.
  2. Start to review Square 2, those things that are important to you, but not urgent. Are there activities that you did not undertake because you ran out of time?  It is vital to schedule quality activities into your week and to make sure they happen.  For me swimming would be on this list, so at the start of each week I put ‘swim’ into my diary 3 times – and treat it as a commitment.
  3. Next, review those activities in squares 3 and 4 and make a commitment to either delegate or stop doing some of them. A while ago I decided to stop watching EastEnders and Coronation Street.  I missed them for a couple of weeks, but it was amazing how much time it created for me.

 

TIME MANAGEMENT MATRIX

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