FIND MORE TIME
Find more time in your day with a sneaky trick that’ll reveal what you do, what value it IS to you and your overall life’s purpose…and even how it’s impacting your emotions!
As a busy businesswoman, you’ve got a lot going on. House, spouse or significant other, kids, worship, volunteer efforts, pets, plants, work, commute and more. You’re multi-tasking to the max.
The thing is, while you may be busy you might not feel effective. Or you’re effective, but you don’t know why you’re not more effective. You want to find out why, right? Well, I’m here to help you!
SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND
In a previous post, I raised the issue of logging in how you spend your time so that you can identify how you spend your time. There’s a good 30,000-foot-view approach discussed in that post, so check it out!
In the meantime, if you’re ready to get down to business, this one’s for you! The vid’s here if you like:
Activity logs can be useful, but here’s my problem with them: Knowing how you use your time every day is important, but if that’s all you’re looking at, it can be kinda two-dimensional in nature.
So, sure, I want you to set up an activity log, take a week—starting today—and log how you spend your time, at the office and at home. Weekends and weekdays. Day and night. It’s important that you start now, and today’s as good a time as any.
Don’t change how you’d normally behave this week, just make a point of recording what it is you do. But don’t stop there. We’re about to blow this otherwise two-dimensional approach into one that’s full-on 3-D, and you’ll find out a whole lot more about yourself and how you spend time than you’d ever would have imagined.
FIRST STEPS TO ACTIVITY LOG SUCCESS
Enough with the chit-chat. How to best create an activity log?
Step One: Open up a spreadsheet or create a table in a document and make sure that you’re not just recording what you do, in sufficient detail, on a given date at a particular time, but also detailing how long that activity lasts.
Step Two: Record how you’re feeling as you perform every activity you’re recording. Does it make you feel happy or sad, angry or fulfilled? Are you afraid for any reason? What do you enjoy and what do you despise?
This spreadsheet or document should be for your eyes only, so don’t hold back. Be brutally honest about what you’re doing or you’re wasting your time.
But we’re not done….
FIND THE VALUE OR FIND A REPLACEMENT
As you know, I’m both a lawyer and a certified life coach who happens to feel that your WHY is…well, kind of a big deal. So once you’re rock solid as to what your WHY is, there’s something else that I want you to track in this week’s activity log or journal exercise.
And given its relationship to your WHY, this “something else” is the most important thing you can track (other than your feelings, of course…they’re important, too).
What’s that something else?
Step Three: I want you to record the value of every activity that you perform during this particular week. As in, given your unique WHY, what’s the value of an activity in relation to said WHY?
Does that activity allow for you to live more in harmony with your WHY? Then it’s likely a high value activity. At the end of the week, when you’re reviewing everything, you’re probably going to conclude that you need to do more of that activity and others like it.
Does that activity fail to advance your WHY in any appreciable way? Well, if that’s the case then you know that the value of that activity is none. Zero. Zip. Nada.
And then of course you’re likely engaged in activities throughout your weekdays and weekends that might bear at least some relation to your WHY. So, you might want to assign value tags to each of these activities such as: high, medium, low, none.
FINDING THE BOTTOM LINE
Now…no duh, when you review your activity log at week’s end you’re going to see trends that need to be corrected, like all of the time-wasting activities you engage in that you should drop like they’re hot. You know, self-soothing behavior to reward yourself for all of the things that make you mad, sad, scared or just…meh.
Work all day at a job that you hate? You’re likely surfing the Internet at the job or online shopping off your cell phone throughout the day. Or you’re drinking your thousandth cup of coffee followed by your hundredth trip to the bathroom.
Sad about not being in a relationship (or not being in a happy relationship)? Then you may be binge-watching Netflix or stuffing your face with takeout.
Running chores that you really dread? You might stop to window shop or gossip with someone you know that you’ve run across along the way.
Afraid that you’re at the wrong job, in the wrong position at work or in the wrong relationship outside of work? You could be pacing the floors, suffering sleepless nights or drinking too much.
These are just examples, but you see what I mean.
Time’s a wastin’…and you’re a sufferin’.
ONE MORE STEP!
We’re still not done. We want to go deeper than just identifying time-wasters that don’t advance our life at work, at home, or both. Tweaking your schedule and chopping out deadweight is one thing.
But it’s only half of the equation.
Now that you’ve reviewed everything in your activity log that you recorded in terms of what you’d thought, said and did over that sample week’s time and seen the good, the bad and the ugly about it, take on the other half of the equation.
Step Four: As in record what was the amount of valuable activity that were you engaged in versus the amount of low-value or no-value activity that you, ultimately wasted your time with?
If you’ve done this task right you’ll be able to have a bird’s eye view in terms of how much of your life is spent in worthwhile activity versus worthless activity.
Whether you’re doing things in a way that could use some improvement or not, the most important pattern for you to pick up on is whether the efforts you’re expending are valuable with respect to your life’s purpose or your WHY…or not.
Then take yet another look at everything you’ve thought, said and did over that sample week, recorded in your activity log and I just bet you’ll find a correlation between all the positive emotions that you experienced and the amount of high-value activities you performed.
Similarly, I bet you’ll see a correlation between all the negative emotions that you experienced and the low-to-no-value activities you engaged in.
FIND A SOLUTION TO FIND SATISFACTION
Odds are you don’t want to gossip; you just want to get things done that you actually feel like doing because they mean something to you.
Odds are you’d rather have a positive healthy relationship to enjoy as opposed to simultaneously binge-watching and binge-eating.
And odds are that you’d rather have your workday fly by because you love what you’re doing and you’re dialed into it so much that you don’t want to pull away to troll the internet or hang out with the whiners and complainers by the coffee machine.
When people want to improve their lives through improved time management, all too often they’re attempting to do more in less time. Quantity is one thing girl–and quality quite another.
Stuffing everything into an activity log for a week and trimming here and there is nice. What’s nicer is if you see the overarching patterns of activity in your life, understand how they relate to (or fail to relate to) with your WHY and appreciate the corresponding impact of those activities on your mental and emotional well-being.
So it’s great to be on a quest to find more time; an activity log is a great tool for that.
What you delete from your life in terms of wasted time must be replaced by activities that increase both your fulfillment and efficacy.
Whatever problems you uncover have to be solved. When you seek solutions that are in harmony with your WHY, it’s easy to make the right decisions.
