Respect Yourself and Take Back Control of Your Calendar
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.
by Elizabeth Grace Saunders http://99u.com/articles/7288/respect-yourself-and-take-back-control-of-your-calendar
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