Do I Manage My Time or Myself?

I’m not a natural calendar-loving kind of gal. In fact, I spent many of my adult years resisting all things calendar. I mean, I admired those who had beautiful, color-coded calendar. The ones who always mailed out birthday cards on time and in time. My friends who didn’t forget dental or hair appointments. I could see the value in running a good calendar, but I just wasn’t into it and didn’t put it on my important things to do list. Let’s be honest: I didn’t have an important things to do list – for a really, really long time. I pretty much woke up every day and apart from work, ambled through my day doing whatever pleased me at the moment. What a luxury, right?

It may sound like a luxury to be calendar free, but imagine missing appointments, forgetting planned outings with friends, double-booking yourself right and left. It creates disorder and stress. Chaos. Unnecessary chaos. And why? Because I was unwilling to discipline myself. That’s pretty much it.

Now the word “discipline” may have been the trigger to make you tune out. Don’t do it. Don’t be afraid of discipline. A measure of discipline could be your new best friend. And even you folks that have discipline down pat and live by your calendar may have a thing or two to learn here, so stay with me.

Along the way in life, after missing enough appointments, disappointing friends, disappointing myself, I finally began to manage my time and my calendar. What I mean is that I finally began to care enough about my commitments to put them on a calendar. That was a great start. In my direct sales business, I learned more about this, as well as leadership skills, and began to see the benefits of good time management. I’ve come a long way in a few years of making the effort. In this day of technology, I’ve become a bit of an addict to my phone calendar. It’s a marvelous tool and I embrace it. With some good mentoring along the way (thank you, Sean Smith), I’ve learned to set alarms in my phone for important things and not be victimized by my own poor memory.

As recently as last night, I set an alarm to “Get off social media” at 930 pm. I set the alarm after realizing it was 1045 pm and I was violating my own goal to be social media free after 930 pm. Out of integrity to myself, I texted my accountability partner, identified the lesson and made a plan.

In my role as a college student, I’m reading Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and am trying out a new-to-me concept of calendar management. Covey teaches that instead of focusing on time management, we can benefit from personal management, a practice of examining our roles in any given week and the goals associated with those roles then plugging them into our calendar. The main idea here is what I’ll call learning to tell my time where to go as opposed to being a victim of the clock (or calendar). I control my use of time -  and only have myself to blame if I don’t have time for life’s most important things.

In practice, while the teaching is to do this for the week – and I will, I decided to try it out for today. Instead of starting with the calendar, I began with my roles to fill today:

Wife, college student, business woman, fun woman, healthy woman (Yes, I put those on my list. Why? Because they are very important to me and if I don’t put them on the list, I will end up tending to the urgent and ignoring the important.), home manager, volunteer, etc. I have a lot of roles to fill today!

Beside each of these roles I listed what I sought to do, my goals for the day in each area. My next step was to plug them into the time I have today. It was so clear. I could look at what was most important and most urgent. Some urgent things are important, like my assignments that are due tonight, so they take priority. Some things are on the calendar already, so they have to stay. Because I aspire to be my healthiest version, I made sure I put a walk on my actual calendar. I booked it, as my accountability partner in coaching says. And so, it will be done. In fact, my walk is scheduled for 11 minutes from now, so I will wrap this up. Blogging made the cut today and it’s a good thing it was on my list or else my busy day would’ve eclipsed this personal commitment that’s important to me.

Last thought – are you managing time or are you managing yourself? It’s a valid question.