In the last article, we discussed how to use your There to prioritize your time and pick activities guided by your personal mission. But after choosing what you want to spend your time doing, you have to integrate it into your schedule. In this article, we will explore how scheduling your time can help you achieve your top priorities.
Flexible with a Plan
Planning your schedule helps you to make time for the things you want to prioritize. The exercises in the previous article would be for naught if you did not actually carve out the same for those priorities.
For some people, they need to improve on their ability to make a schedule and stick to it. Others might need to learn how to be more flexible with theirs. Especially for a manager, or other roles that involve being available to other people, you need to have the bandwidth in your schedule to accommodate a last-minute meeting or check-in. How tightly you can schedule your time will depend on your responsibilities to others.
Avoiding the Emergency Cycle
Scheduling your time helps you avoid the emergency cycle that commonly occurs when people implement the There-Here-Path as more of a here-there-path, where they start with their current problems and seek to solve them.
Using techniques like time blocking, where you set aside part of the day to work on a certain task, can help keep your focus on your There and overcome distraction by the urgent. Like the task that cried wolf, there will always be something begging for your attention. And sometimes there are fires that need to be put out, which is why we hold our plans loosely. But focusing on the here will keep us in an endless loop and stop forward progress. Time blocking your schedule helps you carve out time for There tasks and demonstrates that they are a priority.
Time and Attention
It is not only our time that we give to our priorities, but our attention as well. There’s not much point in having time set aside for a task if you do not pay attention to the task during that time. Using your time well is just as important as scheduling it to reflect your priorities.
I personally find using a pomodoro timer helpful when I’m struggling to pay attention. Knowing that I only have to focus for 25 minutes helps me overcome the inertia to get into the task, and then having a timer on my breaks helps me get back to work when they’re done. I often find that once I’ve put on the timer, I end up focusing for much longer than I had set it for.
In his book, Deep Work, Cal Newport notes that you need lots of time set aside to really accomplish this deep work. If you are constantly being interrupted or jumping between tasks, then it’s impossible to enter the kind of headspace that some tasks require. This is again where time blocking can be helpful. We like to say that systems demand behavior. If you want to participate in deep work, you have to create a system that allows you to be able to.
Scheduling your time can help you avoid distraction and focus on the things you prioritize.
Gracie McBride is the Content and Systems Development Coordinator at The Crossroad.
