Do you ever wonder why you never seem to have enough time? If only there was another hour in the day. It’s a classic problem and you’re certainly not alone in what you feel, but then you look at people like Richard Branson and you wonder how on earth they manage to do so much in the same 24 hours as everyone else.
The assumption is that they have the ability to manage their time whereas you don’t. But the fact is that we’re all managing our time constantly – the reason we feel there is never enough time is because we allocate it poorly.
24 gold coins
Imagine each hour of the day and night being represented by a gold coin. Everybody on the planet is given their 24 gold coins at the start of the day and we all spend them by the time the day ends. The question is, have you spent your 24 gold coins wisely? Whatever you spent them on, was it worth it?
This evaluation is the beginning of getting to grips with time management. A coach will help you make an objective assessment of the way you spend your time and identify when it’s been poorly allocated. They will then help you develop a strategy for organising your calendar so that you start getting more value for your coins.
This requires a degree of flexibility and ‘letting go’ that is very hard to acquire on your own. We tend to have ‘comfort activities’ that we stubbornly refuse to sacrifice, regardless of what other demands there are on our time. The classic one is television. Is there a programme that you watch without fail each week? It becomes a beacon, something to pull you through, and if you have to miss it for whatever reason, you feel bereft.
Prioritisation and sacrifice
If you get in from work at 6pm and go to bed at 10pm, an hour long TV programme takes up 25 per cent of your disposable time. Given that you feel you never have enough time, is that good value? Perhaps you feel it is, but you need to look at all the activities you carry out and ask the same question of each of them. A coach will help you through this process and make sure you give an honest appraisal in each instance.
Even if you feel that your ‘comfort activities’ are valuable, there are times when you might need to redefine their value because of other priorities arising. Say a new work project comes in that requires you to spend more time than you have in the working day; the only way to give it the time it needs is to work on it at home in the evening. If that intrudes on one of your ‘comfort activities’ and you haven’t prepared yourself to make the sacrifice, you will feel resentful and stressed.
But if you can calmly re-evaluate your activities in this new context, then it doesn’t hurt to let a few regular activities go temporarily and spend your gold coins on making a good job of the new project. The outcome will be satisfaction, relaxation and a sense of control over your own time. And when you return to your regular activities, you may well find you appreciate them more – or that they’re actually not as valuable as you thought they were.
Master time with a coach
The sense of time being in short supply is compounded by the confusion and guilt that arise from feeling disorganised. A coach will help you get organised, make sure you address those pressing tasks that leave you feeling guilty when you neglect them, and clear the confusion by helping you to allocate your time in a more orderly fashion. Time is a valuable commodity. The trouble arises when we recognise that value after the time has gone, rather than before we spend it.
Topics from this blog: Coaching, CPD
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