We talked in Chapter 1 about ‘time confetti’ – that state we find ourselves in where our time feels fragmented and bitty, projects get started but not finished, and we never seem to have big enough chunks of time to devote to what’s important.

We all know people for whom life doesn’t seem to be like this. For whom time seems to work differently. In our minds, these people live rich and balanced lives; they do an outstanding job at work and seem to fit in all the other things they love to do also, and at the same time still manage to have a life.

You may well wonder how on earth they achieve so much more than you – considering you both have the same number of hours in the day. What’s their secret?

The truth is, there isn’t one. They’ve probably simply mastered a few simple basics of Real Focus – like prioritizing what matters and good time management. They get so much done because they’re discerning about what they do. Rather than spreading themselves too thinly and trying to do everything, they just do the things that matter to them and, also, the right thing at the right time. The good news is that all this is within your reach too – it’s just having the tools at your disposal.

In this chapter, we’re going to look more closely at how to not just manage your time, but invest in it and use it wisely, focusing on the things that are truly important to you. It’s about doing less but more of the right stuff, basically, so that you too can be one of those people you may have previously envied!

KNOW WHERE YOUR TIME GOES

The first step in acquiring any new skill, or improving on one, is awareness. It’s only once we’re aware of things that we can make changes in our lives, strengthen our weak areas and play to our strengths. The same goes for time management, or as Sháá Wasmund likes to call it, ‘investing in our time’. How can you use your time more wisely if you don’t know where it all goes in the first place? If you’re not aware of how you spend it? The first step in budgeting would be knowing what you spend your money on – we can apply the same notion to being more careful and efficient with our time.

Keeping track of your time and where it goes is as much a skill as managing it well, and if anyone can tell you how best to do this, it has to be author and speaker Laura Vanderkam. As a researcher in how people spend their time, Vanderkam noticed that many women seemed to tell themselves they couldn’t ‘have it all’ if ‘all’ meant children and a big job. Vanderkam wanted to challenge this notion, and so she set out on a quest to find out how, women who did do both (earned more than $100,000 a year and had at least one child living at home) made it work.

She made a time log sheet on Excel – basically the 24-hour day split into half-hour cells – and asked the women to fill it in, going into as much detail as possible about what they were doing in that time slot. She called this project the ‘Mosaic Project’ since the half-hour slots were like tiles on a mosaic. Filled in, Vanderkam was able to see, in black and white, where the women’s time went and how all the tiles fitted together to make a life that worked. The time diary study was 1,001 days in the lives of professional women and their families.

So what did she find? In general, she found that, contrary to the belief their lives might be a nightmare as they juggled a million things at once, actually their lives were pretty good – and crucially, that this notion that the big jobs were off limits for them, was unfounded.

‘It’s all in how you perceive “having it all”. If that is having a job you enjoy and a family and friends and leisure time, then you can have it all. If it’s having a full-on job and no childcare, then you probably can’t. You have to be realistic – otherwise you feel overwhelmed.’

As Vanderkam explains, she was interested in the whole picture, the whole ‘mosaic’ of people’s lives. Rather than seeing our lives as 9–5 followed by the evening, Vanderkam encourages us to see it as 48 (half-hours) tiles with which to play with; to move around as we wish. When we start to think of our time like this, it can feel quite liberating. We begin to see our days as lots of different pockets of time that we can use and move around at will, rather than two immovable blocks of time (the day and the evening).

This opens up so many more possibilities in terms of how we use our time, and allows us to be a lot more flexible and experimental – ‘curators’ of our own ideal lives. But it’s not that we have any more time, it’s simply that we are being more creative in using what we have. Boiled down, the ‘mosaic’ approach is really just a matter of changing our perceptions, but it’s (perhaps strangely, a bit like magic!) a very effective one.

PROTECT YOUR TIME

Some might say that time is the most valuable commodity we have, but so is our energy. Even if we had all the time in the world to do what we wanted, if we don’t reserve our energies to use it wisely and to greatest effect, we risk wasting that time and losing focus on the tasks or activities that are really important to us. In this way, our time may be our most valuable commodity, but our energy is possibly the greatest currency we have. We only have so much, after all, and it needs to be treated with respect.

One of the key reasons for time and energy wasting is not having firm enough boundaries around them. Boundaries are basically what’s ok and what’s not ok – i.e. what you are comfortable spending your time and energy doing, and what you are not.

Sometimes, however, we only realize what our limits are when they’re tested. It’s then that we need to really listen to our feelings and there that our boundaries need to be placed.

Imagine, for example, that you get asked to travel two hours to meet a potential client, or you make a new friend who then expects you to have coffee with him or her once a week. You will know what your own limits are – and therefore where your boundaries should be – by how you feel: feeling discomfort or resentment are two big indicators that your boundaries have been crossed, and we all have every right to reinforce them.

Having healthy boundaries to protect our store of energy, then, is so important. How can we retain enough energy to focus and do the things that matter, if we spend all our energies on things we don’t want to do, but feel obliged to? Or on looking after everyone but ourselves?

Also, having healthy boundaries improves our self-esteem, and we work a whole lot better when we feel good about ourselves. Giving out the message that your own feelings and needs matter encourages other people to think the same. Also, being a martyr is good for nobody – neither you NOR the other person. Setting boundaries is done out of respect and compassion for the other person too. People have every right to ask for what they want but you have every right to decide if it’s right and convenient for YOU.

INVEST IN YOUR TIME

Time is our most valuable commodity, but we so often waste it or don’t use it efficiently. If our time management is wrong then everything else tends to feel wrong too. For example, if we’re constantly late for things, misjudge how long it will take to do things or just plain old lazy, leaving deadlines to the very last minute, it makes us stressy and panicked – two great enemies of Real Focus.

Sometimes, all you need to set you on the right track are good ideas. So, be inspired to take control of your time:

As we said in Chapter 1, unfortunately it doesn’t matter how good your focus is (before or after reading this book!). We can’t stretch actual time for you; we can’t create extra hours in the day. However, just as there are clever ways to invest your time (some of which are outlined above), there are also clever ways to make your time go further. Mark Forster’s ‘End Effect’ is one such way …

We hope that having read this chapter you feel more in control of your time and therefore more focused. We hope you can see that ‘reclaiming your time’ does not mean having more of it, but using what you do have, better. Hopefully you have taken specific time-management tips from this chapter that you can start trying out right away: good boundaries, time-chunking, creating the End Effect and so on. However, the most crucial thing we’d like you to take away – the ‘big picture’ thing if you like – is that in order to truly manage our time well and become more focused, we need to firstly find out what we value most, then do more of it. We at Psychologies believe that this really is the key to a happier life – and who doesn’t want that? The cherry on the top then, is being ‘present’ in that life and savouring every second. Something that we’re about to explore in Chapter 9.