Your
time is your life. So when you surrender control of your calendar to
other people, you put them in control of your destiny. Our digital world
has broken down the natural boundaries on how and when people can tell
you what they think you should be doing.
And with shared calendars, others can literally spend your time for you—if you let
them. This means, it’s essential that you maintain a vigilant and
active role in protecting and allocating your time in alignment with
your priorities.
This may seem improbable if you’ve lived at
the mercy of other people’s whims for years. But as a time coach, I’ve
seen that you can take back control by carefully setting expectations.
Try out these tactics to avoid being overbooked.
1. Say ”no” early and often.
The best way to have more time to work on projects that matter to you,
like updating your portfolio or finishing a series, is to spend less
time doing everything else. This will require saying, “No,” early and
often. (If you’re looking for some tips on how to do this nicely, 99U
has you covered).
If you really don’t want to do something at
all, it’s unlikely your desire to do it will increase by delaying the
activity. Saying, “Not Now” when you should say, “No,” leads to you
carrying around the emotional burden of the task until you complete it
and a huge amount of resentment when you finally do the work. (Plus you
run a high risk of turning it in late due to your resistance to the
project so you probably will annoy the person on the receiving end too.)
When in doubt just say, “No.”
This will require saying, ‘no,’ early and often.
2. Balance structured and unstructured work.
As a creative individual, you need to have a regular influx of fresh
ideas and opportunity for experimentation to achieve peak performance.
Companies like Google with its 20 percent time give employees the
freedom to devote part of their paid hours to special “unstructured”
projects to encourage innovation. But too much time meeting with other
creatives, tinkering with pet projects, and reading about new concepts
can lead to a misallocation of your time resources, i.e. you don’t get
your core “structured” work done.
To make sure you don’t spend
80 percent of your time on the new and novel, you need a structured
approach. For example, I enjoy networking meetings and consider them a
priority. However, I purposely limit myself to a couple of networking
meetings or calls a week because if I take on any more, I will have
insufficient time to serve my clients and run my business well. If you
participate in a shared calendar system, you can control the pacing of
unstructured activities by blocking in time to do different elements of
your work, which then forces people to schedule around your top
priorities. If someone else does your scheduling for you, let him or her
know that you can only take on a certain number of calls or meetings in
a day or a week so you don’t end up with insufficient time to complete
critical structured tasks.
3. Make progress, not deadlines.
Sometimes finishing a project by a certain time really does matter, say
when you need a presentation ready for an upcoming conference. But
often times, it doesn’t. When you unnecessarily place deadlines on
non-urgent work, you create loads of avoidable pressure.
Control the pacing of unstructured activities by blocking in time to do different elements of your work.
On a micro-level, this means stopping yourself from giving precise
completion times for requests. I’m not advocating procrastinating.
Instead, I’m advocating giving yourself breathing room. For example,
instead of saying that you’ll return something by tomorrow, say that
you’ll get it to them “soon” or “by next week.”
That way if you
have an unexpected issue come up tomorrow, you’ll have the flexibility
to get the task to them by the following day and still meet the
expectations you set. To ensure that this ambiguity doesn’t lead to
stress and procrastination, block in a time on your calendar to get the
work done. You should have a clear idea in your mind—and your
schedule—of when you want to do the activity. But by not sharing this
level of detail with others, you leave yourself the option to make
necessary adjustments without disappointing anyone.
On a
macro-level, this could look like restructuring your client
relationships. So instead of simply setting an end deadline for the
finished project, you could give progress reports on regular intervals.
For example, instead of stating, “Your website will be running by April
1,” you could say, “Every two weeks, I’ll e-mail you with an update on
our progress and items for you to review.” This gives you the ability to
consistently move forward on a project without having to perfectly
estimate the end point.
4. Take off the cape & lose the tights.
You can “take one for the team” every once in a while. But if you pride
yourself on being the person who kills herself or himself to make up
for other people’s delays, you’re on track for burnout. You also
encourage those around you to not push themselves to deliver their part
on time because you’ve trained them that you will pick up the slack.
To overcome your super hero complex and help the entire team operate
more effectively, focus on clear expectations and consistent follow up.
For example, when you pass a file off to a colleague, you can say to
him, “Jim, I’ll need this back from you by Friday to have everything
ready for production on Tuesday.” If this person has a tendency toward
missing deadlines, set a reminder to touch base with him on Wednesday
afternoon and then Friday morning to check in on the work. Then if he
still doesn’t complete the work by Friday evening, it still leaves Jim
the weekend to get everything wrapped up and ready for you by Monday
morning.
If you pride yourself on being the person who kills herself
or himself to make up for other people’s delays, you’re on track for
burnout.
If you struggle not with a colleague but with a
client, you can use a similar strategy. For example, if in the above
scenario Jim was a client, not a colleague, you could use the same
system of setting expectations and following up. Additionally, you could
explain to him that a delay in his approval could lead to either rush
printing charges or a later shipment.
***
You teach people how to treat you, so respect others and respect yourself enough to take back control of your schedule.
–
Over to You…
Do you let others control your calendar?
How have you learned to protect your boundaries?
source :99U
