How to Focus Your Time for Success

Jurgen Wolff

Everybody has patterns of behavior. Patterns can include feelings, thoughts, and images as well as actions. Not surprisingly, doing the same thing again and again results in the same outcomes again and again. Of course, there are also positive patterns. You may know people who always land good jobs or always drive safely.

People have certain patterns for how they use their time, too. For instance, some people will always tackle first the task they think will be easiest, whereas others always start with the one they think will be most difficult.

Surprisingly, people tend to repeat their old patterns even when the outcomes aren’t positive. People tend to be aware of other people’s patterns, but not their own. It’s unlikely that we will change until we are aware of our patterns.

How to Discover Your Own Patterns

Here are the most common general dysfunctional patterns:

• Get-in-shape déjà vu (sign up for gym, go for a week, quit)

• Serial job dissatisfaction

• Continuous financial discontent

• Repetitive toxic relationships

And here are some of the most common dysfunctional patterns relating to time use:

• Doing the least important work first

• Procrastination

• “Firefighting” (doing what is urgent rather than what is important)

• Letting the inner critic dominate thoughts

It’s pretty easy to see that people who have these patterns will be easily distracted from reaching their goals. How can we open our eyes to our own patterns? First, let’s be clear why we’re doing this: so we can figure out what we can do differently to get better results. With that in mind, here are six different approaches to discovering your own patterns:

1. Ask other people. We can see their faults, so guess what? They can see ours. But you have to convince them that you want them to be honest, and you have to be sure that you can hear this kind of blunt honesty without endangering your relationship. Good questions to ask include, “What do you notice about how I use time? What are the ways you may have noticed me wasting time? When do you think I’m best at it?” If there’s nobody you feel comfortable asking these kinds of questions to, ask them of yourself and jot down the answers.

2. Consider what negative patterns your parents had and assess whether you may be duplicating them. It could also be that as part of your rebellion against your parents, you took on a pattern that is the opposite of theirs but that is also negative. In terms of time use, your parents may have had the pattern of putting things off until they turned into emergencies, or they may have been such perfectionists that they never had time to do all they wanted to do. If so, how do you think this has affected your ideas about using time?

3. Think about a situation in which you’d like to understand your behavior better. Imagine seeing yourself in that situation as though it’s playing on a movie screen with you as one of the actors who can be observed. This is the dissociated state, as opposed to the associated state of seeing things through your own eyes. If you are truly dissociated, you won’t have any particular feelings about what you’re observing—no guilt, embarrassment, or anything else.

4. Use the “teach your problem” technique. In this, you pretend you have to teach someone how to behave the way you do. You have to give them exact, detailed instructions. For example, let’s say the situation you’re looking at is why you never seem to catch up paying the bills on the weekends, even though that’s always your intention. To teach someone how to do this, you might instruct them to make promises to their spouse, partner, or children that involve activities that take up most of the weekend. You might teach them to let minor tasks go during the week, so by the weekend they absolutely need to be done. You will have a list of behaviors that you can change one by one.

5. The next time you go through a pattern, map it as you go. For example, let’s say you are working at home on Friday and intend to use that time to write a report. Friday comes around, but by the end of the day you still didn’t get the report done. As it happens, make notes about the process that causes you to change your mind. For example, maybe you get up and notice that the laundry has really piled up. You decide to put it into the washing machine and then write the report. But as the washing is being done, you think that you might as well quickly give your home office a quick once-over to tidy it up so that you’ll really be able to concentrate on your writing. Just as you finish and are ready to sit down at your desk, a friend phones. Now you’re hungry so you make yourself a late lunch—after all, you can’t write well if you are hungry...and so it goes. (Note: Writing down a pattern as it happens often is enough of a pattern interruption that it will cause you to go ahead with what you originally intended—so this can be a curative exercise as well as a diagnostic one.)

6. Use the “letter from your higher self” technique. For something that you’d like to change, sit quietly and ask your higher self for some insights into your current main time patterns. Write down anything that occurs to you, without worrying about whether or not it’s really coming from your higher self.

Start now by jotting down at least three patterns that you have that are not supporting your most valuable and focused use of your time.

Understand What Your Current Pattern Gives You

One of the assumptions of a very useful psychological approach called Neuro Linguistic Programming is that every behavior has a positive intention. It’s trying to give you some benefit.

When you’ve identified a negative pattern, clarify what it’s giving you. Usually it will be some kind of protection, often a protection from needing to face change, which is uncomfortable initially and sometimes very scary indeed. Even though this protection has negative side effects, it’s the devil you know. It allows you to keep on doing the things you’ve learned to do in the past, rather than having to change.

Let’s look at a few more examples:

• The person who keeps putting off clearing out their “junk room” may be afraid of having to throw away items that have sentimental value and give them comfort.

• The person who creates something—such as a painting, a manuscript, or an idea for a new business—but never shows it to anyone may fear the same kind of ridicule they got when they were the overweight kid in the PE class. By never letting anyone judge their work, they get the payoff of avoiding ridicule.

• The person who wants to make a career change but never moves toward it gets the payoff of not having to risk rejection.

There are some simple patterns that may not have a deep payoff; they may just be bad habits that you’ve fallen into. These should be easy to change. However, when you confront a set of behaviors that are not easy to change, it’s worth investigating the payoff.

Write down the top three time patterns that work against your success and then, below each, what payoff you think it gives you.

Find Better Ways to Get a Similar Payoff

We learn by trial and error, and a beautiful plan that is not implemented will never bring in any money. However, simply telling yourself to get on with it is not likely to work. We have to come up with a way that provides much of the safety of the current pattern while doing something different.

If you’re suffering “paralysis by analysis,” continually researching and planning but not acting, take the first step that seems to make sense. Then you can look for more information as you need it instead of trying to figure out everything before you start.

Here’s the key point: It’s not enough to just change your pattern; you must change it in a way that also gives you the payoff that was provided by the old pattern. If that element is missing, the new pattern is unlikely to last very long.

The person who avoids clearing out a junk room could consciously choose several items to keep for sentimental or comfort value and get rid of the rest. The person who fears ridicule for a creative effort can test it first with a supportive friend or colleague. The person who wants to start a new career but is fearful of failure can break the process down into safer chunks.

Approach the whole thing in the spirit of play and experimentation. We are social scientists seeking what works—or, if you prefer, we are heroes on our own journeys of learning.

Next, jot down at least one idea for how to do this for each of your three patterns.

How to Avoid Overcommitting

A typical negative time pattern is overcommitting your time. If you do this, you end up stressed because you have more to do than you can accomplish, so you cut corners and end up delivering a disappointing product or service, or you miss your deadlines and disappoint the people waiting for what you’ve promised, or you drop one or more projects entirely, which upsets people even more and could result in losing your job or losing clients. By trying to do too much, you fail to focus fully on anything.

If we map this process to understand exactly what happens, we discover that when someone asks you to do something, you tend to say yes immediately, or you mentally say yes when you think of a new project yourself—you get to work on it right away, and maybe tell others all about it. Unfortunately, what you don’t do is consider how this is going to fit in with everything else you’re already committed to achieving.

What’s the payoff of doing this repeatedly, even if you’ve realized in the past that it generally ends badly? There are two:

• If it’s someone else asking you to do something, you may not want to upset or disappoint them, so you just say yes.

• If the project is really appealing, you get so excited by it that you think about it in isolation, rather than in the context of all the things you need to do, and you don’t want to miss out on something that could be great.

In each of these cases, the culprit is your imagination. You imagine that the person will be upset. You imagine that the project will be really exciting, and you imagine how disappointing it would be to miss out on something.

Insert a Pause

To buy yourself some time to overcome your usual emotional response, take at least a few minutes (or a day, if necessary) to consider whether the new project could fit into your schedule. But do not commit to actually taking action on it for at least a week (unless you have nothing else to do). When you come to decide whether you really want to do this new thing, draw a mind-map of all the projects you are already doing, and consider how much of your time each of these will take. If you have a history of being too optimistic about how quickly you can get something done, add another 25% or 50% to your first estimate.