About nine months ago I wrote a blog post that first touched on my changing relationship with time. I shared that my perspective on time has changed primarily since becoming a mother and also reflecting on entering the last year of my twenties. I went on to write a post about the parenthood skills I was bringing to work after ending my maternity leave.
Now that I have been back at work for about seven months, my relationship with time has morphed and changed yet again. The key concepts I discussed in my parenthood skills I was bringing to work blog post were around prioritization, decision making, and slowing down. Now that I’ve been back at work for nearly as long as I was out, I have more thoughts to share and practical suggestions that hopefully you can make use of too! A big source of inspiration and guidance for me is the book Uptime by Laura Mae Martin, so if you resonate with any of these concepts I highly recommend checking it out.
Not all time is created equal
When I reflect on the biggest thing I’ve learned since coming back to work it’s that not all of my time is created equal. What I mean by that is some hours are really good for certain tasks and terrible for others. For example, the first few hours of my day are when I am at my peak of focus and energy. Blocking off time to work on a task or presentation at the start of the day yields better results faster, rather than doing the same work later in the day.
The practical change I’ve made it blocking off my “power hours” as Laura Mae Martin refers to them and moving meetings out of those times as much as possible.
Another concept that supports this idea is deciding what you are going to do ahead of time and acting like your own assistant to set yourself up for success.
For example, if I decide the night before that in the morning I’m going to work on putting together a strategy document to communicate with my team about a customer, I create a block on my calendar with links to all of the relevant documents. Then, when I sit down in the morning to do that task, I don’t open my email or messages and get distracted by other people’s requests. I’m able to go directly to my calendar block, open up the documents I need (eliminating the time waste and potential for distraction), and get right to work.
In an ideal world I’d be able to build my schedule completely around when I am at my best for a certain task, but that’s not reality. The idea here is to protect your time for your purposes as much as possible, but to be flexible to when you do have time for certain activities, especially when others are involved.
Top 3 priorities
More than ever I’ve found that I have to look at myself as a complete person at all hours of the day rather than viewing myself as a professional during “work hours” and a person during “off hours.” Time is limited, each moment counts, and the only way I can ensure that I am spending time where it matters to me is by knowing what my priorities are.
In Uptime, the author specifies that you should have 3 priorities across all dimensions of yourself that are best to be revisited quarterly. She also explains that once you define those priorities you need to document the actions that support those priorities and ensure there is dedicated time in your calendar. Actually writing this out has helped me tremendously, especially when I’m feeling scattered.
When there is too much going on, coming back to your list of priorities and actions will help you quickly determine what you should be spending time on.
For me, I have two work priorities and one personal priority. That’s appropriate for me as a salesperson in Q4 (typically our most intense time of the year), but I expect that to change over time.
Treat your email and tasks like your laundry
This is an analogy that changed my perspective considerably. When you do laundry there is a sequence of steps you follow and you don’t mix those steps. You put all of your clothes in the washing machine. Once they are all done, then you move them to the dryer. And once that is all done, you sort and fold them and put them away. You don’t stop the washing machine part way through to take out a few items and throw them in the dryer. You don’t remove some things from the dryer only to start it back up again. It’s the same with your email and tasks!
Instead, Laura Mae Martin says you should have a specific time to sort your emails and tasks into buckets (Respond, Revisit, and Read) and then a specific time to work through those buckets. This helps you get into a flow with like tasks, prevents you from randomly checking your email throughout the day when you don’t actually plan to do anything about it, and ensures that you don’t miss important actions.
From a practical standpoint, I use Google Tasks to sort my emails and tasks into the suggested categories of Respond, Revisit, and Read, and assign a day to each so I know when I’m doing it.
This shift in mindset has helped me be so much more intentional about what I spend my time on and how quickly I can get things done with higher quality output.
There are so many other takeaways I could go on and on about (like how to structure a meeting effectively, how to say no and determine if an ask is actually worth your time, and how to set productive boundaries), but I highly suggest reading the book for yourself if you want to learn more.
It’s very much still a work in progress for me to stick to the principals even though I know how useful they are. However, making these changes for a small majority of the time is making a huge difference.
It still feels like I’ll never have as much time as I did before becoming a mother (and maybe that’s true!), but there is no doubt that I’m spending my time more wisely than I ever have and I’m only getting better at getting more results for my work and for myself!
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