Harnessing Time in a Nutshell

Yesterday, my coaching client Wendy told me on the phone that her house was a mess but she felt too overwhelmed to do anything about it.  She said there was just too much to do and she didn’t know where or how to start and she had other things she had to deal with too and the thought of it all just made her want to give up and take a nap.

I suggested she look at the specific amount of time she had available during the rest of the afternoon and then pick a couple of specific things to do that would fit into that time, listening to her intuition about what she most needed or wanted to do. For example, she could decide to put aside from three to four, and she could decide to make the bed, pick up the living room, vacuum, and do the dishes during that time.  If she couldn’t get all that done between three and four she could at least get some of it done. And if she finished it all early, at 3:45, say, she could do one more thing or she could quit early and take a break.  And if things didn’t work out at all – if she got sidetracked with a phone call or a complicated text message or the overwhelming need to take a nap – she could just reboot and do the whole exercise again tomorrow or some other time soon.  I also suggested she call me back when the time she picked was over and tell me how it all went, knowing that doing that would help her – or I would help her -- focus on what she did do instead of what she didn’t.  Because even if she thought taking a nap or catching up with a friend she needed to talk to was wasting time, I’d remind her that it’s not.  (To me resting and doing nothing is a great use of time, and besides who cares if we waste a little time.  The problem isn’t really wasting time anyway, I’ve come to see; it’s feeling like we’re wasting time because we’re not noticing or giving ourselves credit for how we’re spending our time.) 

I realized afterwards that this little exercise captured my harnessing time practices in a nutshell.   For me, harnessing time is about looking at how much time we’ve got – right now or during the whole day today – and making realistic decisions about how we’re going to use it.  It’s also about looking at something we have to do – perhaps something we haven’t been able to get to or are worried we won’t be able to get to -- and picking a time when we can do it (and writing that time down).  It’s about slowing down enough to tap into our intuition so we can make decisions we can live with, decisions about how we truly want to spend our lives on the micro level as well as the macro level.  It’s about simply rebooting, picking a new time and making a new plan, when things don’t work out the way we planned.  And it’s about focusing on what we did do instead of what we didn’t, maybe with the help of a friend.

It all seems so simple, and yet it seems like even I have to keep being reminded over and over to follow my own practices.   I’ve got it down in the morning, when I plan my day – every day I look at the time I’ve got available and I consider what I’m going to do when during that time, and then I call in my plan to my time partner.  But sometimes, when I’m feeling busy or rushed, it takes me a little while to remember this simple formula for getting more peaceful.

For example, this morning I got up knowing I definitely wanted to clean the cat boxes in my basement and wash my kitchen floor.  Those things had been on my plan yesterday but I just didn’t have the energy to do them when the opening for them came.  But they were bothering me.  The cat boxes were grossing me out – they definitely needed to be emptied, washed, and refilled with fresh kitty litter – and the kitchen floor definitely needed to be washed because I had a friend coming over in the late afternoon.  Somehow I thought I should do them before I sat down and made my plan for the day, and I was kind of vaguely worrying they’d take up so much time they’d throw my whole day off at the same time that I was worrying I wouldn’t be able to get to them at all.  Then I realized:  Duh! Use the harnessing time thing.

So I sat down and made my plan for the day, planning to spend an hour first thing dealing with the cat boxes and washing my kitchen floor.  The cat boxes and the floor took less time than I had thought they would, and I felt good about getting them done for the whole rest of the day.

I don’t know why it should be so hard to remember to keep following these simple little practices, but I guess it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that we remember them eventually, and it does seem like the more we keep using them the more quickly we remember.