Last week, I recommended tracking how you spent your time for a few days (or ideally for the whole week) as a first step in evaluating and possibly refocusing your decisions about what you do and when.
The other exercise I suggested was to think a bit about what your current goals and priorities are, not just in your work, but more holistically. Each of us will have different categories for these priorities, but some common labels might include: Research, Teaching, Family Time, Exercise, Spirituality, Friendship, Personal Growth, Relaxation, Learning, Domestic Space, or Finances. It’s also helpful to think about a few activities that could contribute towards that goal or priority. (“Friendship” is a general priority, but “meet Fred for coffee” and “phone Julie” are specific actions you can take.)
So once you have a few days’ worth of notes about the activities you actually did, go through the list and label or color-code them according to the life category they fit under. This is where your own preferences and ideas really come into play: for one person, a 4-mile run might fit under a Health or Exercise or Self-Care category; for another it might go under Friendship (if you run with a buddy) or Relaxation. And of course there’s no reason why you can’t double-code an activity: if you listen to an audiobook about investing while you run, maybe you count it as both Exercise and Improving Finances.
After you’ve labeled or coded your activities, you should have a pretty clear picture of how you are actually spending your time. I like color-coding and pie charts for this reason because it becomes glaringly obvious. You can also total up the hours you spend in a week on activities in each category. The million-dollar question is: Are you actually spending your time on the things that matter the most to you?
How do you know what matters?
This exercise becomes most useful when you give yourself the time and the permission to really explore where you are right now in your life — to set your own priorities, rather than those that might seem socially mandated or professionally useful. Sure, your university might prefer you to spend 80 percent of your waking hours in the laboratory, but you might know that for yourself, if you don’t leave enough time for exercise and a spiritual practice, your research productivity drops dramatically.
Or maybe you don’t yet know if or how that might be true for you. Maybe you don’t yet know what your life could be like if it had more balance, more variety, or more downtime. Maybe you just finished a PhD, or just got tenure, or just hit a milestone birthday, and you suspect it’s time to try doing something a bit differently.
Maybe you have recurring thoughts about “if only I had time to learn French cooking” or fantasies about chucking everything and joining the circus. Taking a few small steps in the direction of your dreams can help you figure out just how important they are.
So, if your list of actual activities doesn’t yet match up with how you’d like to be spending your time, here are a couple of strategies for beginning to bring those in closer alignment.
The Absolute Yes List
A list of six or seven life categories in order of the priority you’d like to assign them is what life coach Cheryl Richardson calls “An Absolute Yes List.” Reframing your activities in terms of what you’d like to affirm in your life helps keep you focused on what’s important to you. So, for instance, if you think that improving your health is more important to you than housework, then Exercise might be #3 and Home might be #5. Is your research the most important thing in your life right now? Is it your romantic relationship? Is it having your own time for relaxation and reflection? No one else can answer these questions but you.
Once you’ve figured out the Absolute Yes List that makes you smile and feel energized, identify a few key activities in each category. Richardson recommends writing out your Yes List and carrying it with you in your bag or posting it in various places where you will see it frequently. It can serve as a reminder to choose those activities that you really do want to prioritize, even (or especially!) when social pressures or inertia might lead you in another direction.
Time Mapping
Organizing expert Julie Morgenstern suggests that thinking of the hours in your week as you might shelves in your closet can help you make practical, concrete choices to honor your priorities. When you need to put a sweater away in the closet, if there isn’t a predefined space for it (a shelf, for instance, for all your cotton sweaters) it’s likely to end up stuffed in a corner, or balled up on the floor, never to be found again. If you don’t have a defined space in your week for each category of activity, then it’s less likely that you will actually perform those activities. What she calls a Time Map is your tool for defining your time.
Draw up a grid for the week (the same one you used when tracking your activities works well) and begin to fill in blocks of time for each life category that you’ve defined. Start with the obvious, defined things: the hours you’re teaching, office hours, soccer practice, date night, etc. Stick to the general category labels rather than specific activities, as this will help you see their relative proportions more clearly. (So, for instance, on my time map, classroom time, teaching prep, and office hours are all blocked off with the label Teaching.)
One of Morgenstern’s central principles involves grouping similar things together, whether you’re organizing physical space or time. Bundling your errands all together on Wednesday afternoons rather than doing one each day of the week improves efficiency. And knowing that you will always do errands on Wednesday afternoons lets you keep an errand list and know that you will take care of them when Wednesday rolls around. If a stray thought for an errand crosses your mind on Friday, rather than hopping in the car (unless it’s truly urgent) you can note it on the list, and not think about it again until the following Wednesday.
Although this seems obvious for errands, it’s helpful for phone calls, bill paying, or any group of tasks that involve a similar mindset or set of tools. (GTD fans know this as the context for the action.) You are probably already following this principle for other less defined activities. Perhaps you do your teaching prep in the morning and teach in the afternoon on MWF. Perhaps you schedule your office hours on the day that you also have faculty governance meetings, making it “meeting day” as opposed to “teaching days” or “writing days.”
Time maps are especially helpful for academics, I think, because we often have more autonomy over our time than people in some other professions. When you’re not actually in the classroom or in a meeting, you get to choose what you’re doing: teaching prep? research? web surfing? A time map can help you figure out what works best for your own biorhythms and priorities, and make time for the things that matter. See, for example:
- example 1 (from Morgenstern’s newsletter)
- example 2 (from Motivated Mama’s blog)
- example 3 (from Lifehacker; note that this article includes an Excel template for time mapping)
You’ll probably find that you don’t seem to have quite enough hours in the week for all the things you want to do. So, like the sweaters in your closet, you may need to declutter a few activities to make room for the ones you really love.
So, what are you spending your time on? What would you like to be spending it on? What small change could you make in your schedule that would bring your activities more in line with your own personal priorities? Let us know in the comments!
[CC-licensed photo from flickr user net_efektz.]
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8 Responses to Are You Spending Time on What Matters to You?
Natalie Houston - September 22, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Yes, tracking in and of itself can get overwhelming . . . but I only ever do it for a few days, which is usually enough to get an idea of what’s actually going on. Maybe you’ve already gotten enough data by the time you start forgetting to track it?
Rana - September 22, 2009 at 2:01 pm
I do like the idea of things like this – right now I’m tracking things like when I eat and sleep, because both have been feeling rather disordered lately – but one thing that I’ve found challenging is remembering to keep track of things! What I mean is, there’s a certain point where charting one’s time becomes one more task to juggle in an already full schedule, and it’s at that point where I tend to give up and go back to muddling along. I simply have too many interests and too little discipline when it comes to time management, even when I know what I want to do.
(In some ways this is why I like working in an academic setting; the daily schedules are flexible and task oriented, rather than rigidly defined blocks of time. I suspect that any schedule I draw up beyond the most general (“teach class” “hold office hours”) is simply unsustainable for more than a week for me. If it weren’t for my syllabi, I’d have no structure to my time at all.)
Julie Meloni - September 21, 2009 at 7:08 pm
I’m a big fan of the “phone Julie” action. And one day I hope to be able to implement a system like this. Unfortunately, I don’t want to know the answers now, because I can’t change anything (no really, I can’t). But someday!!
christa - September 21, 2009 at 2:34 pm
love, love, love this. thank you for contributing it, natalie.
Natalie Houston - September 21, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Aimee, your story is a wonderful example of how tracking your time can really help you to consider larger questions — and replace negative labels with positive ones that are in alignment with your own choices and priorities. And it’s a great idea for a first year experience course. (or an intro to graduate studies course, or teacher ed, etc etc) Thanks!
Aimee - September 21, 2009 at 11:46 am
Natalie! Thank you so much for this post. I didn’t start tracking my time until I required my freshmen to do it in a First Year Experience course. As they did the work, so did I. As it happened, I learned that I spent something like 35 hours a week sitting on the floor playing with my then 4-year old! I think this is where your discussion of priorities fits in. On the one hand, I expected that the exercise would point up for my students that they were perhaps not spending enough time on the things that “matter most” in academia– whatever that means. However, I took the opposite lesson from it for myself: Whereas I had once thought of myself as a slacker who somehow let 40 hours a week slip through the cracks when I could have been doing something “more productive,” I suddenly was able to see myself as an academic who was also a mother—one who valued those tens of hours sitting on the floor pushing toy trucks around and building Lego structures. That mattered to me. The insight helped me beat myself up a bit less in the face of other colleagues who spent the week writing another publishable essay. And that, in turn, helped my productivity, too. For, when I did sit down to work, my first thought wasn’t “slacker,” it was “mother” (Who Had Better Make the Most of her Time!). Perhaps that happened with the students, too. After all, I also learned that I wasn’t really in the position to judge them for all the time they didn’t spend studying, but to work harder at helping them succeed in our largely commuter campus where half of the population are also first-generation college students.
Rana - September 22, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Hmm. I’ll have to think about that possibility a bit.
(My first reaction was to laugh and say that it’s because I get bored and resent the responsibility.)
jmandell1 - January 24, 2011 at 9:03 pm
is it possible to export your calendar (outlook or google for example) export the data to a spreadsheet where you could assign priorities to appointments (family, career, finance for example) and create graphs based on the data???