“Time management” is a concept that I’d always struggled with. Not in the sense that I couldn’t meet deadlines or that I was late to meet friends. In fact, if you talk to any of my friends from my 20s and 30s, they’ll tell you I’m obnoxiously early to places just to be sure I don’t make anyone else wait.
No, my struggle comes from something else… never feeling like I have enough time to do everything I want to do.
After a lot of personal development work and self-reflection over the last several years, though, I realized that it’s not “time management” I had to work on. Instead, it was something that you’ll hear people call “priority management.” That is, it was deciding where I want to spend my physical and mental energy. Now I want to spend the majority of my energy outside of work on fitness, family, and friends. It wasn’t that way as of 2.5 short months ago though.
How I Learned to Manage my Energy, Not My Time
For a decade, all my energy seemed to be seeped out by my job, first at a telemarketing agency with a 5-person digital marketing team tasked with enough work for 10 people. Next was at a digital marketing agency where I was still on a small team with enough work for at least 2 more people to have regular, full-time duties.
I decided that my physical and mental energy outside of work would best be spent on networking and job searching.
Now I am in a new position, at an amazing company that truly supports their employees’ physical and mental health, and thereofre where it is infinitely easier to manage my energy, as I inherently have more of it. The path here though was met with challenges, and here’s how I tackled a few of them.
I Let Go of Resentment
If you’ve ever been in a job you hate, or at least had tasks that felt like they just dragged on, you know what it’s like to feel resentment. Any time you have to do another one of those assignments or make that phone call, is another reminder you aren’t where you want to be, and you “shouldn’t” have to deal with this.
Something that I discovered, both in my professional life and outside of it, is that this resentment I was feeling towards unpleasant work or tasks was leading to me rushing through them. Guess what happened then? I made mistakes that needed to be fixed, and then my task that I didn’t want to do in the first place took me even longer.
It’s hard to give someone tips on how to do this themselves. For some, it may take therapy. For me, it was years of life coaching until one day it finally “clicked.” I don’t want this to sound easy, because it wasn’t for me, but “letting go” of resentment and instead focusing on what I was thankful for about the job (income, a fantastic team of people, job stability during a global pandemic) helped me care at least 10% more about my job… enough to stop making mistakes that added more time to tasks instead of subtracting time.
I Set and Enforced Boundaries
I believe that setting boundaries can be one of the kindest things you do for yourself, and sometimes even for the people who you set the boundaries around.
When it comes to my calendar, I do something called “time-blocking,” where I plan how long something is going to take me and actually block out that time (I like Google Calendar the most for this) for that specific thing.
Where boundaries come in is actually sticking to that plan I created with my calendar. Unless it’s urgent, I try (and fail plenty, don’t you worry) to be extremely mindful of that time I set aside, and hold firm to my boundary of “I’m not available” if someone makes a request of me that will take more than literally 2 minutes of my time during a time I have blocked off for an assignment or task.
This said, something I want to do more of when it comes to my calendaring now is planning self-care, and fun! I don’t feel bad about being rigid with my schedule, but I would like more of it to be filled with stuff I do for me, just for the hell of it.
I Made Myself Take Breaks
I would set an alarm, be it for 15 minutes or an hour, and I would take scheduled breaks. Even if I wasn’t being as productive as I’d liked. Sometimes especially if I wasn’t productive—it was usually a sign I needed to walk away and probably get some fresh air and sunshine.
I Timed Myself
One thing I noticed when I set out to do a task is I often either underestimated how long it would take or went the completely opposite way and overestimated how long it would take. So I started timing myself. How much time should I really allow for that blog post? I even did it with tasks outside of work… does it really take me 20 minutes to swap out the litter in my cat’s litter box? (No, by the way, the answer is no.)
Then, I went back to that calendar where I time-blocked everything and made it more realistic. Another thing I did was give myself a 5-minute buffer for every 15 minutes of work. So if I thought something could realistically take me 45 minutes, I’d give myself an hour.
A Work in Progress
I’m not a time management expert, or an energy management expert for that matter. I’m just someone who found what worked for her.
I don’t shame myself for procrastinating anymore, nor do I shame myself if I didn’t finish everything on my “to-do” list… I just take it as a sign that I need something at that moment… to be more realistic with how long stuff takes me, more and better sleep, to get more exercise, to fuel my body with food, or hey maybe it’s a 2nd (or 3rd) cup of coffee that I need!
I’ll always be a work in progress, as will you. I’d love to hear… do you have any great time energy management tips you’d like to share?
Joyfully Jendependent 