Who is in control of how you spend your time?

One of the key aspects of a sense of work-life balance is feeling in control of your own time.  Trouble is, for most of us, maintaining control over our time is increasingly difficult. I’m lucky to have a super-efficient PA, Amanda, who protects my diary. Yet even she can’t prevent the unexpected phone calls I feel obliged to take, or the urgent emails that I can’t ignore without letting someone down. And no doubt, from time to time I will be interrupting someone else’s plans to focus that afternoon on a complex problem they’ve been trying for days to find unallocated time to work on; or breaking the spell of their “chill space”.

Anyone, who scores highly on conscientiousness, feels obligated to gift their time to others, even when it distracts them from focusing on their own well-being. There’s no simple answer to this – other than becoming more rigid and selfish – but we can at least monitor what is happening, with a view to changing habits that make us more vulnerable to “time impoverishment”.  Here are some simple questions to remind us when it’s time for some reflection around these issues:

  • When you see an unexpected entry in your diary, or receive an unexpected phone call, is your first reaction one of irritation?
  • Do you have lots of relatively small tasks, which you keep having to pick up and put down, because there’s not enough free space to focus on them and get them out of the way?
  • What’s the proportion of your conversations that are “want and need to have” versus “obligated by others to have”?
  • Do you frequently tune out of one conversation temporarily, while you turn your mind to another task?
  • If you split your “Urgent to do” list into “My priority list” and “Other people’s priorities for me”, what does the balance look like?

How to deal with time impoverishment is an individual matter – and a suitable topic for coaching. But the starting point has to be the realistic conversation we have with ourselves.

© David Clutterbuck 2024

 

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