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Open to Think: Four Strategies for Taking Back Your Time, with Dan Pontefract, Leadership Strategist and Author, Open to Think
There’s four handy tips to commandeer back your time. Starts with time cushioning, then there’s situational capacity, then there’s outsourcing, and then there’s realism.
1. Time Cushioning
Our first is time cushioning. This is when you’re taking parts of your day and deconstructing it, so there’s time to do and there’s time to reflect. Why does every calendar app or program that we have default to 30 or 60 minute meetings? And why do you fill your day with 60 minute meetings? Why not create a 15 minute meeting? Why not create a 45 minute meeting? Why not block out from eight o’clock to nine o’clock without meetings?
Time cushioning allows you the opportunity you to cushion your time. It’s your time. Commandeer it back. So let’s say you’ve got 15 minutes that you have commandeered into a 60 minute block. What do you do with it? Well, maybe something came out of that 45 minutes that you need to address instead of addressing it now at nine o’clock at night, because you had no time in which to do it. You’re addressing at that point. And it’s so it’s a bit of action on top of action, but you’ve created the space in which to do it. Or maybe you’ve got 15 minutes there to reflect on what just occurred from that meeting, processing, using your creative and critical thinking in the moment, but because you’ve got the time in which to do it, it makes it that much better a result after.
2. Situational Capacity
Next situational capacity. Ultimately that’s when you’re prioritizing your day. So do you have some sort of star system? Do you say, “All right. This is a four-star meeting. I better really pay attention.” Or “You know what? This is kind of a FYI.” You have to be able to understand what you put into each and every one of your actions and tasks. It’s not always going to be a 100%. So your situational capacity is allowing you the affordability to say, “Well, where am I? What’s my space? What’s my energy level? And what am I going to do in these particular situations?” So maybe you’ve got an objective that’s due this Friday and you’ve got to kind of say, “Oh my gosh. I better put some time into this.” That’s talking about let’s say a four star, four alarm alert. That’s got to get done. That’s you analyzing your capacity to get something done, but maybe there’s something that’s due later on in the month. And you’re like, “You know what? That’s a two-star.” I’m going to say, “I’m going to devote some time maybe next week to that.” But you’re constantly asking yourself, “What capacity do I have within myself in order to address these particular objectives?” And that’s something you’ve got to do on a minute by minute, hour by hour basis. You’ve got to be on top of your situational capacity.
3. Outsourcing
Well, there’s a third strategy and that’s outsourcing. And that’s not necessarily meaning you outsource things to eastern parts of Asia. What I’m getting at is parts of your day can get outsourced. So for example, let’s say that you’ve got this really good or really important PowerPoint that’s got to get created for a client. Do you have to do it? Maybe you can outsource the creation of graphics. Maybe you can outsource the creation of animations. Maybe there’s a video that has to get in there and you don’t have the time or the talent in which to do it. Instead of stressing about it, maybe your organization, or you, can find ways in which to outsource that.
And there’s lots of great places in which to do that. You can take an example like Fiverr. I created a whiteboard animation for the launch of Open to Think. It’s going to take me months to figure out how to do a whiteboard animation. So I went on Fiverr. It cost me about 500 bucks. And next thing I’ve got a two minute whiteboard animation of this introduction to a book. And I thought it was quite cool. Well, organizations can employ the same thing, whether it’s Fiverr or some other org in which to create the white space for employees to do what they’re really good at. And that then creates the dreaming, the creative thinking, the critical thinking in their role. What they’re being paid to do rather than getting to do things that actually they’re not good at.
4. Realism
And the fourth kind of handy tip I call is realism. And that is why do we say yes to everything? Is it because we feel pressured? Threatened? Is there fear? Is it because the boss always tells us, “You must do this?” Well, there’s a reality check here. We can’t do everything. And the most important thing we need to start learning to say is, “No.” Or “No, not yet.” Or “No, maybe in the future.” But no is something that we’ve given up on. We keep adding more to the plate and we’re so kind and generous. We say, “Yes. Yes. Yes, I’ll do that.” But the reality is that we can’t. And that’s what’s creating a lot of that stress.
So to be realistic with how many hours, days, weeks, months, and time modules that you have, let’s start with this. We all get 168 hours a week. We sleep eight hours a day. So there’s 56, let’s call it. So now we’re dropping down into, let’s call it about 110. And then we say, okay, we work about 40 hours a week. So we’ve got 40. And then we’re down to 70 and what do we do with those 70? But basically that’s three blocks of time. We sleep, we work and we do other stuff. In the work part of that 40 ish hours, why aren’t we using that as a way in which to say, “What can I do? Yes. And what can’t I do? No.” We say yes too much. So just look at it in blocks of time. Be a math major to your own life.
And then you be able to be a little bit more realistic with how you do what you do. When you use these four in concert, ultimately, you become that much healthier with your time and your productivity.