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.

Time Is the Most Powerful Tool of Them All

Ever since I discovered that I was suffering from time anxiety -- ever since I noticed that how busy I was, that what I had to do and was and wasn’t doing on any given day -- was causing me a lot of distress, I’ve been paying close attention to what’s at the bottom of the feeling. Every single time I’ve felt anxious or rushed or too busy, I’ve look closely at what’s going on, considering whether it’s inside me or outside of me or both.  And I’ve learned something sort of surprising:  How busy I feel doesn’t necessarily correlate with how busy I am.   But I’ve also learned – not just recently but over the course of many years -- that it isn’t that easy to change how I feel, although I can change how I act and that will change how I feel.

I’ve evolved a number of practices that have drastically changed the way I feel by changing the ways I use time and look at time.  These practices include planning my day every morning by considering what I’m going to do when; calling my time partner and telling her about my plan for the day as well as what I did and didn’t do yesterday; spending ten minutes every day, usually before I make my plan, sitting quietly listening to my intuition, my higher self, or whatever you want to call it (I call it lovely gracious higher power); consciously setting aside time to rest; watching myself for signs of time anxiety and whenever they come up, getting quiet for a second to check in with myself about what's going on; and more.

I’ve been following these practices faithfully for several years now, and they’ve changed my inner and outer life dramatically:  I hardly ever have time anxiety any more and when I do it doesn’t last for more than a few minutes; I almost never feel rushed, harassed, anxious, tense or too busy.  I’ve gotten way, way more peaceful and happy on a day-today, moment-to-moment basis, and I’ve come to feel a sense of personal power and confidence – confidence that there will be enough time to get everything done, confidence that I have the power to do whatever I need to do in life -- big things as well as small things – confidence that I can change or accomplish whatever I want to. 

I’ve always felt suspicious when people said things like that, in self-help books or elsewhere, because I knew it wasn’t that easy -- for me, at least -- to change.  And I also knew that sometimes I could fool myself into believing that I would change, even had changed, just because I wanted to or planned to.  I’ve got old journals from the 1970s and ’80s in which I filled pages and pages fantasizing about all the writing I was in the process of doing, blabbing on and on about the various screwed-up ways I used to be but that I wasn’t any more. But when I look back at those journals now I see really clearly, and with more than a little embarrassment, that I was still those ways that I said I wasn’t any more and I never did any of that writing.   And sometimes I wonder, when I read self-help books promising certain radical results or I hear people claim that they’ve achieved certain sweeping, permanent, fantastic changes, whether there’s something a little bit similar going on.   Because, as I’ve learned, there’s a long distance to travel between wanting to do something, thinking about doing something, planning to do something, and actually doing it.  And, I’ve learned, the key to bridging that distance is time – finding time, making time, to actually do things, even if it’s just to take a small step toward accomplishing a big goal.

I've heard people say “You can act your way into thinking differently, but you can’t think your way into acting differently.”  I’ve definitely experienced the truth of this, over many years of trying unsuccessfully to think my way into acting differently and eventually acting my way -- imperfectly, through many small daily actions -- into changing my thinking.  What I’ve also learned, ever since I’ve been harnessing time, is that the way to act your way into thinking differently, the way to get yourself to act at all, is to make time for whatever actions there are to be acted.  And that acting your way into changing how busy you feel no matter how busy you are – is a sure-fire way to truly become more happy and peaceful, and to get a lot more done.

Grappling with Procrastination, or Letting the Inner Monkey Off Its Chain

Once, a long time ago, I had a crippling bout of procrastination.  I had just gotten a grant to work on my writing, the money was going to last for a year so all of a sudden I didn’t have to be anywhere, didn’t have to go to a job or try to get a job, and I somehow got into a vicious cycle where I couldn’t make myself do anything productive at all.  When I was right on the edge of it I put my dirty dishes in the sink and covered them with soapy water and there they sat, smelling worse and worse, for about three days, while I sat in a chair in my living room feeling crippled with ennui and guilt.  Two things helped me get out of it:  One was that I called a friend, a guy who worked as a “shovel bum” in the office of the State Archeologist where I’d had my most recent job, and told him about my problem.  “I’d do the dishes first,” he said, in a cheerful practical, non-judging way, and somehow the fact that he told me exactly what to do without judgment or any kind of controlling, gave me the energy to get up and do the dishes.  The other thing that helped was that as I was sitting in my chair, unable to do anything but sit there except eventually the dishes, I started reading The Shining by Steven King.  That book scared me so much it totally changed my mental landscape and by the time I had finished reading it I was in a completely different place -- maybe it’s not possible to hold boredom and terror in your mind at the same time.  All I know is that after I did my dishes and finished that book I was able to pick myself up, apply myself to my new life where I had all my time to write, and be energetic and productive again. 

I’m not sure how much of that story can be applied to someone else’s situation, except to say that maybe when you get into a place of procrastination, you should try calling a friend, someone practical and nonjudgmental, and ask them what to do first.  Or maybe you should just ask yourself:  Pick only one thing to do – the bare minimum that you can get by with on that day – and do that.  Then let yourself off the hook for the rest of the day.  I do believe that scaling back to the bare minimum and deciding to let yourself not do the rest – just for today -- is a good idea when you really don’t feel like doing anything.   I think that’s because guilt and negative self-talk – although it might seem like they’re helping you by trying to motivate you – may actually be the very thing that’s keeping you from being productive. 

 Consider (and maybe see my August 6, 2012 post, “The Power of Flexibility”):  If you tie a monkey to a tree it’ll try to get away, but if you leave the monkey alone near the tree, its own curiosity will propel it toward it.  Both the tree and the monkey are parts of you.  The tree is what you think you should be doing, what you think you must do in order to be a good, successful, whatever person, and the monkey is your will, the part of you that wants to do something or not do something.  If you keep tying the monkey to the tree – i.e., telling it over and over that it should be doing a certain list of things, if you keep beating the monkey with a figurative stick because it won’t do those things, it’ll just keep trying to get away.  So you need to find some way to make the monkey want to do what it needs to do.

When you’ve been stuck in ennui and inertia (what they call sloth in the Bible, one of the seven deadly sins – how’s that for monkey-beating language?), the first step in getting back your motivation is probably to let your inner monkey off its chain.  This might look like deciding that, just for today, you’re not going to do all those things you think you should do, ought to do, need to do, and pick one small thing that you do actually want to do.  (This may be surprisingly hard – sometimes our sense that we’re supposed to do some thing or things is so strong we can’t let go of the idea that we must make ourselves do it today – then we get stuck longer in the whole inertia cycle.)

And maybe – this is even harder – you could try doing absolutely nothing for a whole day. 

Someone I know once told me that she spent a whole Saturday lying around watching TV and not doing anything else, not because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t make herself do anything different.   She had a busy full-time job, a live-in partner, and no kids – if you have kids it’s a whole different story, I know, but maybe there are things those of us with kids can learn from her story too; we’ll talk about that another day.

My friend said she felt really bad and guilty doing nothing all day.  She kept worrying about what she needed to do, but somehow she couldn’t stop just sitting on her couch watching TV.  Then the next day, which was Sunday, she was almost supernaturally productive and energized:  She cleaned every single room in her house, cleaned out her refrigerator and a closet, caught up on some old emails, and did a whole bunch of other stuff she’d been putting off for a long time.  

Just hearing that story gave me a visceral feeling of relief – a good, happy, relaxed-inner-monkey kind of feeling.  And I knew there was something there for all of us to learn – something about the soil lying fallow for a while in order to produce a good crop, about renewal and regeneration and the fact that it really, really is okay – maybe even necessary – for us to take time to rest.  It might even help us get a whole lot more done.  And it might not cure every case of procrastination but it could be a good place to start.

And a Little More Help from My Friend

In my last post, Harnessing Time with a Little Help from My Friend, I describe all the benefits I get from checking in with a buddy every day.  Now I going to mention a few things you might want to be aware of as you go about the check-in process. My check-in partner and I have wandered into some of these areas from time to time, and you can learn from our experience.  If you and your partner set a few ground rules when you first start out you can avoid these potential pitfalls and find what works best for you. 

It’s probably best to avoid both being too rigid and too loose about when you do your daily check-ins.  If you pick a fixed time to check in every day, it increases the probability that one of you won’t be able to do it during that time, and so on that day you won’t do it at all. My partner and I generally check in in the morning – I often call her when I’m eating breakfast.  But we like not having a set time when we call each other, because both of our schedules change from day to day. 

One little challenge that can come up with the daily check-ins is in the talking itself.   You and your friend may end up chatting so much the check-in itself ends up taking too much time, or one of you may want to chat more than the other.   You may find yourself chatting as a way to put off doing the rest of the stuff that’s on your plan, or your friend may want to talk about whatever problems she’s got going on and you may feel like you’ll hurt her feelings if you don’t listen and respond for as long as she wants to talk.  In general, it’s best to keep on task during the check-in and if there’s something else one or both of you wants to talk about to do that during a phone date later.  Otherwise, the check-in itself can start to feel like a burden, and you definitely don’t want that.  My friend and I usually spend ten minutes checking in at most and often less.

Another good rule of thumb you and your partner might want to agree on is to avoid giving each other advice or any kind of negative feedback about each other’s plans.  This is probably the most important ground rule you can have.  It can be tempting to make a suggestion or offer advice when it’s obvious to you that your partner’s plans are undoable or when you can see some other problem with the way she’s doing things, but in order for the daily check-ins to work – for your partner to feel safe and comfortable telling you what she needs to tell you and for you to feel the same way with her – you should both keep what you say strictly neutral and positive.  This is a good moment to practice your listening skills. You may also feel the urge to help or care-take your friend if she’s having problems, but I’d avoid that too.  Otherwise the check-in time can start feeling messy, time-consuming and entangling in a way that isn’t helpful for either one of you.   It’s probably best just to do a straightforward check-in, laugh at each others failures and celebrate each other’s successes from the day before – the small but huge daily successes of getting done what you planned to do or most of it – and then hang up and get on with the rest of your day.

Whatever it takes to make the daily check-ins work for you and your friend, it’ll be worth it.  Once you start checking in with a friend on a daily basis, you’ll never want to stop – believe me.  My friend and I have been checking in every day, five days a week (we generally don’t do it on the weekends) for about four years, and the longer we’ve been doing it the more we’ve come to rely on it. Checking in has helped us both stay on track and get an incredible amount accomplished during very busy lives.

Harnessing Time With a Little Help From My Friend

They were really onto something when they made you team up with a buddy at camp.  A number of recent studies have shown that doing things with friends reduces stress and helps people exercise, lose weight, live longer, survive cancer, recover more easily from negative experiences, and even see steep hills as less steep.  I’d like to add something to that list:  Teaming up with a friend helps you use your time better, and it makes you happier, less self-critical, and more present and mindful as you go about your day.

            For me, planning the day is a two-part process. Once I’ve come up with my plan, I call my friend – my time partner – and tell her what my plan is.  I tell her how my day went yesterday too – what I did and didn’t do, what kind of successes I had and glitches I ran into as I carried out yesterday’s plan.   Then she tells me the same about her day yesterday and her plan for today.   We give ourselves stars too, as in, “Yesterday I had a four-star day.”   The starred items are things we picked on any given day to give ourselves extra credit for if we did them.

This little exercise, which we call checking-in, has completely changed my life.

Checking in with my friend every morning motivates me to figure out what my plan actually is.  If it weren’t for the daily check-in, I might be tempted to let my planning slide.  The check-in also helps me think out loud about what I’m going to do.  And there are lots of other good things I get from doing it too.

There’s a kind of intimacy that comes with telling someone about my day and hearing about theirs that adds a sense of companionability to my life and deepens my friendship with my check-in partner.  And it makes me more mindful of what I’m doing because I know I’m going to be telling someone else about it; it activates what Eckhart Tolle calls the ‘observer’ part of me and gives me just a little bit of detachment from everything that goes on.  Even when hard things happen, I think about how I’m going to tell my friend about them and somehow that makes them not quite so hard.

  I read somewhere about the power of “bearing witness to your own life and to someone else’s life.”  When I use the checking-in process, my whole day becomes about bearing witness to my own life and to someone else’s life.  It becomes a kind of dialogue, with my friend, with myself, with life.  And because now I have a kind of witness, and in a way have become my own witness as well, I have a stronger, clearer, more definite sense of accomplishment.  When I tell my friend everything I did, I pay attention to it myself – I give myself credit instead of just focusing vaguely on what I perceive as the day’s failures.

Somehow telling my friend what I didn’t do on my previous day’s list is even more satisfying than telling her what I did.  When I say what I didn’t do my friend “forgives” me and I forgive myself, and then I forget about it.  And I love hearing what she didn’t get done, love seeing how someone else’s day can get out of control, how my friend’s best-laid plans could so easily go awry.  I learn from the whole process what’s a realistic amount of work to expect of myself, and that helps me stop beating myself up for not accomplishing goals that weren’t realistic to begin with.  And hearing how my friend decided to give herself a break and rest or do something fun instead of something “productive” that she’d planned, helps me see – truly see, instead of just giving it lip service – that resting and having fun are just as real as anything else and we deserve to spend as much time as we can engaging in them.  My friend and I laugh and joke about what went wrong or about being “bad girls,” congratulate each other on taking care of ourselves instead of working.  Not getting things done starts to feel like something fun and interesting instead of something to feel guilty and bad about.

Anyone can have a time partner – all you have to do is find a friend who feels chronically rushed, anxious, or bad about what she gets done on any given day, and ask her if she wants to try making things better by checking in every day with you.   There are a few things that can make your check-ins go more smoothly.  I’ll talk about those in another post.