Chapter 3
Time Management
Ah, time. There just never seems to be enough. And yet, rather than a true lack of time, the issue is almost always how you choose to spend it. You’ve probably heard suggestions about the effectiveness of tracking your time to figure out where it’s really going. The concept is the same one that money experts advocate for tracking your spending. The easiest way to see where your time goes is to keep track of it for a week or so by writing down what you do each day, preferably in 15-minute increments. If the refrains of your life are “I have no time” and “I don’t know where the days go,” or if you feel as though you are always running out of time, this is probably a very useful exercise.
Many of us already have a pretty good idea of how we spend our time. E-mails, snail mail, scheduling appointments, carpool, shopping for and making meals, exercise, and doing laundry may take up big chunks. If we are honest, Facebook, TV, and surfing the ‘net likely use up more than we’d readily admit. (Did we just date ourselves? Is it still called “surfing the ‘net”?) Over and over, we’ve heard women say time (or the lack thereof) is their biggest issue. We are here to tell you that there really is enough time to do the things you want to do. What most women could more accurately say is, “I’m spending my time in the wrong way. I’m doing things that aren’t that important to me, that don’t move me toward my goals, and that end up making me feel rushed or empty or frustrated.” It’s so easy to fall into that trap, and it’s the number-one reason we walk around lamenting our lack of time.
Show us a woman working a reasonable (to her) number of hours a week toward a specific goal she has set for herself and we’ll show you a woman who feels productive and exhilarated. Show us another woman working that same number of hours a week with no target, no plan, and no focus, and we’ll show you a woman who feels stressed out, frustrated, and short on time. What’s the difference between exhilarated and exhausted? The only difference is intentionally choosing to spend time on your priorities.
When you are running your business and managing your family, you really can’t afford to aimlessly while away hours of time. And why would you want to? Reclaiming those hours could not only give you time to fit in the things you have to do but could also allow you to finally paint or run or knit or learn Spanish or, well, you get the idea. One way to think about your time is to see it as currency: You have 24 hours a day to spend. Take away the time you need to sleep, eat, run your house, get groceries, take care of your kids, and nurture your marriage or partnership if you are in one, and you’ll discover the amount of time that you have left to budget for both your business and yourself. As we never tire of saying, when you are a mom entrepreneur, your priorities are your boss. Because you don’t have a boss at an office telling you what to work on, let your priorities dictate your to-dos instead. They provide a framework for how to spend your time effectively. It’s so easy to feel like a victim of too little time, but when you align the way you spend your time with the things that are most important to you, you begin to feel as though you have a lot more control than you are used to.
What if you could reclaim your days and use them in a way that makes you feel productive and more—dare we say the word—balanced? Did you notice that we didn’t say you will be balanced? That’s a promise we can’t make because perfect balance doesn’t exist for more than an instant. But feeling more balanced? Yes, we can help you there. First, let’s look at some of the reasons you may feel short on time.
You know the saying “old habits die hard”? We are creatures of habit, and even when we know that something we do isn’t being done in the most effective or the most efficient way, sometimes we just keep doing it because it’s what we know. It’s what feels comfortable. Think for a few minutes about some of your habits that chip away at your time. Do you always check e-mail first thing in the morning and find that when you’ve finished, half of the morning has been taken up by reacting to what others want you to do? (Hello, boundaries!) Or what about keeping a set lunch date with someone every Monday even though you know that it makes Monday after Monday feel unproductive and rushed? There are also seemingly harmless habits like checking Pinterest 10 times a day.
Take a few minutes to think of the habits you have that take up too much of your time. Write them down, cite the problem(s) they create, think of at least one way to break yourself of the habit, and then write down the benefit to be gained if you do.
The last step of this is probably the most important one. By articulating the benefit to be gained by changing your ways, you are more likely to adapt your behavior. Here’s an example:
Habit: I put my phone next to my desk while I’m trying to write.
Problem: I keep getting interrupted.
Way to break myself of the habit: I’ll put my phone in the other room instead.
Benefit: Uninterrupted writing time.
You must have at least one habit that isn’t serving you, so here’s your chance to remedy that.
Our choices lead to another major time drain. How often do you automatically say yes when someone asks you to do something? Every time you say yes to something, you are giving away your time. Sometimes that’s exactly the right thing for you to do. Saying yes to something you are excited about or to something that you really want to do, even if it’s not that exciting, is great. But keep in mind that each yes means saying no to something else. Think about that. Saying yes to helping with the school auction could mean saying no to something else that is even more important or more meaningful. Luckily, you’ve gotten clear on your priorities, and referring back to them will help you decide which things are a yes and which things are a no. And no doesn’t have to be no forever, because sometimes you have to say no to something that is important and that will eventually be a yes. Sometimes it’s a no for now because the timing isn’t right. Sometimes it’s a no for now because you’ve inadvertently said yes to too many other things.
What about the “important” things that consistently slip to the bottom of your to-do list? Perhaps that’s a hint that those things aren’t what’s most important right now. Saying “I don’t have time” for something really means that you are choosing to spend your time on something else for now. And that’s okay. For instance, Erin would like to learn to play the piano. You wouldn’t know that, though, because she doesn’t ever sit down to do it. What can she learn from that? Simple: it’s not a current priority. It is important to her. She intends to do it someday. But right now, while she has school-aged children and is running a business while writing and promoting a book, piano just falls to the bottom of the list.
Another huge factor that can contribute to your feeling that you don’t have enough time is lack of planning. So many of us start the day without a real plan. We sit down to work and we don’t quite know where to start. We have a huge project to get finished, we need to return some business calls, and we want to work on our marketing plan, but we haven’t set a plan to do any of those things so we start by checking e-mail. We might look at Twitter. We find an article that we decide to read. We go back to e-mail and reply to a few of them. We read one that requires action on our part and, because we aren’t ready to take action, we leave it in our inbox. By now, we need to go to the bathroom or get another cup of coffee. Before we know it, it’s time for lunch and we’ve not accomplished much at all. That’s when the icky feeling sets in: What a waste of a morning. I wanted to get in some exercise. I meant to call that distributor to figure out what’s going wrong. And even though I checked e-mail, I didn’t respond, so they are all still there, plus I’ve gotten 15 more.
That’s why it’s so important to plan your time. We’ll talk more about how to do this later in the chapter, but let’s start with one simple thing we encourage everyone to do: Get in the habit of spending a few minutes before you finish up working for the day to make a plan for the next day. Ideally you would map out your whole day, but even if it’s only jotting down what you want to do first thing, go ahead and put it on your calendar. Most of us like to have our marching orders so we can hit the ground running without having to think too much about where to start.
Sometimes—not very often, mind you—we find ourselves with extra time. For example, a client can’t make a scheduled call or a meeting gets cancelled. That extra time often ends up being wasted because, again, we haven’t planned for it and we aren’t sure what the heck to do with it. That’s where Hit Lists come in. A Hit List is a list of ideas on a particular topic that you’ve created in advance. It’s your best resource when you find yourself with time to spend because it provides either to-dos or a list of possibilities that you can access right away. We create business Hit Lists for non-urgent but necessary administrative jobs, marketing tasks, and business ideas we want to try, just to name a few. The point is to think ahead, write these lists down, and then use them when you need them. That way, when you arrive 15 minutes early to an appointment or you finish a project an hour earlier than you’d planned, you’ll know what to do.
By the way, you don’t have to limit Hit Lists to work-related tasks. We recommend Hit Lists as a quick way to come up with all sorts of solutions: easy dinners to make, rainy day activities to keep your kids busy, summer activities around your town, small household projects, nonurgent errands you need to run, birthday gift ideas for your kids’ friends, books you want to read, books your kids might like, and family movies you want to watch. Capturing all of this information on lists will save you time and energy and will keep the ideas from swirling around endlessly in your head.
Take a look at the sample Hit List one of our clients created when she was struggling with running her company after her second child was born. We all know that babies don’t understand a thing about time and don’t follow the appointments we put on our calendar. It’s a constant challenge to try to work at all when you have an infant nursing every couple of hours. And yet, there are things you can do to make some progress. Her Hit List of tasks that were aimed at boosting her presence on social media (shown on the next page) gave her quick reminders of things she could do whenever she found 15 minutes of free time. Why not make a Hit List of 15-minute tasks for yourself right now?
Now let’s talk about boundaries. Boundaries is a term therapists often use to help their patients teach others how to treat them. Using boundaries is a way to make sure that the way people speak to you and interact with you match up with what is tolerable to you. We are going to talk about boundaries more in terms of managing your time, but the idea is similar. We’re going to encourage you to become comfortable with boundaries because it’s up to you to make sure yours are protected. Creating boundaries can sometimes seem selfish or silly or (fill in the blank with another word that will make you less likely to enforce them). But here’s the thing: sticking with the boundaries having to do with your time lets you more easily accomplish all that you are setting out to do. And guess what? Sometimes, when it comes to boundaries, you will be protecting yourself from you!
Here’s an example that comes up time and again with our clients—and we’ll admit it, with us too. Let’s say you know you have six hours to work on Wednesday between all of the other activities on your calendar. Six hours is a lot of time if you are really focused and productive. Six hours is not a lot of time if, during those hours, you are also doing laundry, catching up on personal e-mails, and accepting phone calls from friends. When it comes to boundaries, you really need to make a promise to yourself that work time is work time. Likewise, if you want 5 to 9 p.m. to be family time, make sure that you aren’t answering work e-mails or scheduling work calls during that time. We’ll cover this a bit more in Chapter 7 but for now, think about how you let others and yourself cross your time boundaries and steal precious time away from either your work time or your personal time. Take a few minutes to write down the common culprits or situations as well as solutions for them.
For instance, if your children interrupt you when you’re working, setting up some ground rules and consequences or rewards around that is a way to overcome the interruptions. Or, if you can’t be trusted to stay off social media during the time you are supposed to be making sales calls, closing your browser and disabling alerts would be good solutions.
Lack of time is actually lack of priorities.
—Tim Ferris
In her book, 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, Laura Vanderkam writes about everyone having the same 168 hours each week. She suggests that it’s not that we have too little time but that we don’t allot our time in a way that would allow us to get done the things we really want to get done.1 It all goes back to what we’ve talked about: priorities. As a mom entrepreneur, your priorities need to dictate how you spend your 168 hours. (Do we sound like a broken record yet?) That said, taking ownership of your time is sometimes easier said than done. It means breaking old habits, making good choices, setting boundaries, thoughtfully scheduling your time, and really honoring what is most important to you.
Knowing that you can choose differently and design your time in a way that will work for you, let’s do a simple exercise to figure out if how you spend your time matches up with your priorities. In just a few minutes of work, you’ll know where your time and priorities are in sync and where they aren’t. Get out your pen and paper.
As in the graphic, you’ll want to create two columns. On the left side of your paper, write down your four priorities from Chapter 1. On the right side, list all of the ways you spend your time. For now, it’s most useful to look at the major chunks of time rather than writing down every tiny detail of your day. Your list may include some of the items you see on the sample, so look at that for ideas. Be sure to include all of your regular commitments. Now, draw a line from each activity to the priority or priorities that the activity supports. For instance, if you listed health as a priority on the left and exercise on the right, draw a line to connect them. Or, if you listed a priority of financial stability on the left and work on the right, you may be able to connect those, assuming that your work brings in enough income to increase your financial stability.
Once you’ve had a chance to complete the exercise, you’ll likely find that you need to make some adjustments. Notice which of your activities are not connected by a line to one of your priorities. Those are the things you do that don’t support your priorities. Make a note of them. Next, notice if there are priorities that are not supported by activities that routinely show up on your schedule. Jot those items down as well. Next, think about changes you might need to make so that you can spend your time in a way that better matches with the things that are most important to you.
On the sample we provided, you’ll see that marriage is listed as a priority but there aren’t any activities that directly support that priority. Perhaps the person whose list this is could add a weekly date night to her schedule. She is doing several things that support her priority of family: carpooling, volunteering at school, homework with kids, and shopping, planning, and making meals, so that priority is sufficiently taken care of by those activities.
When we were writing this book, getting it done so we could get it into your hands was a huge priority. However, you wouldn’t have known that by the meager amount of time we sometimes spent working on it. Heeding our own advice, we adjusted our activities (the way we spent our time) to include many more book-related tasks, which then matched up nicely with our priority of finishing the book. Suddenly, we were saying yes to writing the book and no to other things that seemed interesting or exciting but that took time away from writing.
Calendaring
Now that you have a better idea of the activities you should continue doing, what you need to add, and what you need to eliminate or minimize, it’s important to plot out your to-dos on your calendar. There are so many calendar options out there to choose from. Pick the one that you are actually going to use. If that’s an old-fashioned paper planner, use that. If it’s a Web-based calendar that the whole family can access, fine. Mobile calendar apps are handy because most of us keep our phones with us at all times. Just pick one that works for you and stick with it.
The easiest way for most people to start is to put in the recurring events they know about. So, if your son has soccer practice every Tuesday and Thursday from 3 to 5 p.m., put that on your calendar. Most of us have a fairly standard morning routine; for example, Lara blocks off 7 to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday to feed herself and her kids, prep lunches, and get the kids to school. (See examples of her daily and weekly calendars on the next two pages.) Get all recurring events on your calendar before moving on.
The next phase of calendaring is adding in the tasks you have to do. These are the tasks that are non-negotiable, and they will be unique to you. You might say that exercise is a non-negotiable. Get it on your calendar, then. Time to work is a likely one, because if you are this far into this book you probably own a business or are about to start one. Refer back to your priorities if you need help coming up with some of your non-negotiables. And because our schedules are often built around our children’s schedules, consider how the end of the school day, extracurricular activities, and helping with homework fit into your daily routine.
Lara’s Daily Calendar
Another non-negotiable we like to put in right away is the time that we will sign off for the night. It may seem extra curriculars, homework, dinner ludicrous that you’d have to schedule the end of your work day, but if your calendar says that your work time ends at 9 p.m., you’ll probably allow yourself to be done with work by 9 p.m. Funny little creatures, aren’t we?
Now that you’ve plotted out the most important tasks and activities and the ones that are already scheduled, how do you decide what else shows up on your calendar? Here are some criteria you can use to help you decide whether or not something deserves a spot.
Does it honor my priorities?
Is it part of a plan I’ve already made?
Is it something I really want to do?
Is it something that moves me toward my goals?
Is it part of my self-care routine?
Does it use my strengths and/or am I looking forward to doing it?
You can even use the tool we talked about earlier. By putting this on my calendar (saying yes), I’m saying no to that. With the tools we’re teaching, your calendar should now reflect all that’s important to you as well as actions that will lead you toward all that you want.
When you are plotting out your calendar, be sure to pay attention to what you know about yourself and your energy levels. For instance, if you know that you get sleepy around noon, don’t schedule a hardcore workout during that time. Or if your mind starts wandering around 3 p.m., that’s probably not the time to attempt to solve a big issue that’s been nagging you. Some people feel their most energized in the morning so they hit the ground running and take care of the most important tasks on their lists first thing. Other people need a bit of time to wake up first so they go through e-mail and read the paper before launching their day. Make your calendar work for you by scheduling yourself in a way that works best for you. (We even know one mom who works late into the night, gets up to help her kids in the morning, and then naps once they are off to school.)
Speaking of energy and natural rhythms, remember to build some down time into your calendar. In The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz illustrate that managing energy, rather than time, is actually the key to a productive, fulfilling, and successful life.2 In their book, they demonstrate how our energy ebbs and flows and why it’s crucial to acknowledge and honor that. We are not built to work 12 hours straight. Some people can toil away for hours and hours without a break, but we have to think that those of you who can do that are the exception. There is nothing wrong with taking some time for yourself—in fact, it’s essential for your self-care, as you’ll see in Chapter 4. The problem arises when we create a conflict for ourselves by not scheduling in the down time we need. In that case, we are likely to revolt. Suddenly, when we have set aside two hours to spend working, we’ll find ourselves guiltily reading a magazine or browsing Pinterest. What do we do next? We berate ourselves for being lazy or off task, of course. It’s a cycle we recommend you avoid by leaving time on your schedule for breaks.
The important thing is to know how you function best and to build the necessary breaks into your schedule. You need to be really honest with yourself about your need to recharge. We’ll talk about this more when we talk about self-care, but just know that you will need down time here and there, so don’t schedule your days with back-to-back-to-back activities if you can help it. And, just to catch those of you who are looking for loopholes to sabotage yourself: Building in breaks is not an excuse to browse the Internet or check your e-mail every 10 minutes. We are not giving you permission to lounge the day away on the couch, either. What we are saying is that each of us has our own biorhythms that control when we can do certain types of work, and it’s fairly easy to figure out what they are.
To make sure we are using our time well while also acknowledging our needs for breaks, we like to reward ourselves for our hard work. Did you work hard all morning, accomplishing intentional to-dos? Let yourself spend lunch poring over a book or magazine that you’ve been looking forward to reading. Or do whatever it is that you love to do.
Schedule time to work, time to exercise, time to relax, and time for whatever other activities make up your life, including date nights, errands, and phone calls with friends to catch up. If there is a place for it on your calendar, it’s much more likely to happen. And while we are on the subject, really honor the items on your calendar and therefore yourself. Make your fun appointments just as significant as your work appointments. Schedule them and keep them.
Here is one last tip for you when it comes to scheduling. Even though we just said to honor your calendar commitments, we do know that life sometimes gets in the way. To help remedy this, consider overscheduling yourself for some tasks. By that we mean, put them on your calendar several times. For instance, if you want to work out three times a week, put it on your calendar five times. If you need to run some errands, schedule it during several different open times during the week so that if something gets in your way the first time it’s scheduled, you can actually do it the next time it shows up. It’s a trick we learned a while back. Try it to see if it works for you too.
Finding More Time
Let’s talk about ways to find more time. Of course, you can’t really find more time, because, as we mentioned, we all have the same 168 hours each week. That said, there are ways to seemingly make time stretch. Most of these are not meant to be used on a long-term basis, but we all have occasional projects and deadlines that take an extra push to finish. If you find yourself needing to make the day seem longer so you can accomplish something in the short term, here is our list of ways to do that. We bet you can come up with others as well.
Get up earlier
Stay up later
Let some things go for now (reading the newspaper, chatting with neighbors, Facebook)
Get singularly focused on whatever needs to be accomplished (limit multitasking and transitions from one task to another)
Delegate
Hire a temporary VA (virtual assistant) or intern
Ask for help
Managing your time may require a shift in thinking or it may require some bigger shifts in boundaries and choices. The idea is to take control of how you spend your days so that you can create a life that makes you happy and fulfilled. If you make any necessary changes and still find that time doesn’t seem to be on your side, we have a suggestion for you: Rather than beat yourself up day after day over the things that you did not get done, acknowledge that you are one person, that you can only do so much, that you are likely accomplishing quite a lot, that your days are full, that you need and are entitled to breaks and fun and time to do nothing, and that you are doing the best you can. The to-do list will never go away, so instead of entering into a 50-year abusive conversation with yourself, maybe you could shift your thinking and give yourself a nice little pat on the back at the end of each day for a job well done. Sometimes that simple act of surrender to what is will be enough to shift things so you can end each day feeling accomplished.
We can strive to get smarter and more efficient about how we use and spend our time, but it’s always going to be a challenge to manage it. That’s just par for the course. Part of the challenge is a natural one given our lifestyle as mom, wife, neighbor, business owner, and so forth. But the other part is that our society seems to reward busyness. These days it’s almost as though people have entered into a competition to see who is the busiest. We want you to know that busy does not equal important or worthwhile or valuable. There is no prize for being the busiest. So set your sights on accomplishing the things that are most important to you. Take care of the things that have to be done. And then use at least some of the time that’s left over to play, to relax, or simply to be.
Bottom Line
Good time management starts with taking orders from your boss: your priorities.
Spending time on the things that are most important to you will make you feel as though you have the time you need.
To make the most of your time, you may need to break some old habits and create some new ones.
Some planning and scheduling go a long way toward making sure the most important stuff gets done.
Using Hit Lists for quick tasks that you can do when you find “extra” time in your day can make you even more productive.