Does this sound familiar?
- Your schedule is out of control.
- Your to-do list keeps growing, no matter how much you get done.
- Nighttime – You dream about work.
- Daytime – You daydream during work.
- When you take time to relax, you feel guilty.
If so, you’re not alone. Most people feel overworked, overwhelmed, overtired and overextended. They simply have too much to do, and not enough time to do it.
I’ve been teaching time management seminars for the past 30 years. In my sessions, I’ve often asked this question:
If you had an extra hour every day, what would you do?
The most common answer? “Sleep.”
Others say, “I would catch up on my email” – “I would spend time with my family” – “I would clean the garage.”
Almost no one says, “I would work more.” Occasionally someone does, but they quickly became a target for friendly abuse from other participants.
Most people wish they had more time to do things that they either want to do or need to do – but they’re trapped by things they have to do.
They want quality of life but feel like they just don’t have time. They feel hopeless like there’s no way out.
They think they need more time.
They don’t.
They need more discernment.
Without discernment, they’d fill up that extra hour with the same things they’re already doing – and would feel just as trapped.
It Wasn’t Always This Way
My father-in-law spent his whole career with the gas company. Every day he’d go to work, do his job, and then come home. “Bringing work home” wasn’t a consideration.
He didn’t live to work; he worked to live.
Somewhere in the 70’s, work became more demanding. People became stressed because they had so many things to do, so paper planners became popular. It was a place where people could write down everything they needed to do so they didn’t have to keep it all in their head.
It worked. People had less stress because they didn’t have to remember everything. They just had to look at their planner and do what they had written down.
The focus was simple: How can I get everything done?” The planner helped.
But then the number of tasks got bigger, so we added seminars to help people prioritize what was in their planner. Since most people did all the easiest things first, we taught them how to do the most important things first.
That worked, too. The planner held the information for them, and they did their daily planning from there.
Jump forward a couple of decades, and technology replaces the paper planners. That was supposed to make everything simpler because typing was so much more efficient than writing, and nobody needed to carry a big book around.
It did make everything more efficient and faster. It also brought more things to do, because people had a new way to push their demands and expectations to us. Suddenly, “getting it all done” wasn’t realistic, because there were simply more things to do than were humanly possible.
The demands and opportunities multiplied, but time didn’t increase.
Because of technology, urgent demands and “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities now flood our lives like a mental tsunami. Without discernment, we become victims.
It’s Not About Quantity
Most people still measure success by how much they get done – which means they never really feel successful. At the end of a productive day, the only thing they see is what’s still on the list. They’re exhausted and don’t have energy left for the things in their lives that matter most. They get to a place where their personal worth is determined by check marks.
They don’t see a way out.
It doesn’t feel good.
That’s a problem – because we hoped that if our time management skills improved, we’d feel better. If we could catch up, we’d have more free time. If we have more free time, we could do the things we say are important like exercise, family time and goals that we’ve had for years.
We believe those things are important. But if our behavior doesn’t match those beliefs, we’re deceiving ourselves. Most of our frustration with ourselves comes when our beliefs and our behavior disagree.
We don’t need more time.
We need discernment – the ability to decide which tasks are just urgent, and which ones will change the trajectory of our lives over time.
Start With Meaning, not Productivity
My niece, Alicia lives in Japan. A couple of weeks ago, she had an unexpected free day. She figured that if she could use that day to get caught up on her to-do list, she’d be energized and refreshed.
At the end of the day, she wasn’t refreshed. She was exhausted.
“I spent the whole day focusing on all the demands placed on me by other people,” she said.
I wrote her a note for clarification.
“I realized that when I have one of those ‘productive’ days, I’m just as tired as any other day. I’ve spent the whole day doing “need-to” things, so I could get to the “get-to” things. But I never get to the “get-to” things.”
Someone suggested that she take her day off occasionally and set aside the “should-do’s” and focus on the “get-to’s.” She tried it one day – played music, went for a walk in the sunshine, hung out with animals, baked and cleaned (a mindless task).
At the end, she was refreshed.
When we have too much to do, most of us buckle down and work harder. But we never take time to step back and determine what really matters to us in life. When we do, it becomes a filter to use in discerning what we should focus on.
Here’s a simple exercise to try today:
- Pull out your to-do list and read through it.
- For each item, ask yourself: How important will this seem a month from now? 6 months from now? 5 years?
- How will you feel if you don’t finish them?
- At the end of your life, what accomplishments will you feel best about? What things will you regret that you never accomplished?
I don’t think anybody will be on their deathbed thinking, “I’m so glad I responded to all those emails.”
There are a number of great resources to help us learn a different perspective on time management – a perspective that shapes our daily choices based on our unique roles and contribution. Here’s a link
But it’s not about having the right tool, whether electronic or paper. Good tools can help us get more of the wrong things done and still feel good about them.
It’s about choosing the things that can overcome the trivial, and lead to a life of impact.
It’s about learning the skills of discernment.