Doug Carter’s Video Blog Post
Why Most Time Management Techniques Don’t Work
Find out how you can use specific time management techniques more productively. Get better use of your time and feel better about your day by implementing a few simple strategies provided by Doug in this video blog post.
Transcription of the Video: Why Time Management Techniques Don’t Work
Do you ever notice that most time management techniques actually sound better than they work? That’s not quite true because they do work but people stop doing them.
So you’re out of control. You use one of the things you can do, one of the techniques, a time log or a block time or a to-do list. You need to schedule it and got all that stuff going on and next thing you know, you’ve got time and yet what happens is that people consistently stop doing the things that work for them that allow them to have more time. There’s a reason for it.
It’s kind of underneath the surface. It’s a missing piece, a missing piece in time management. Here’s where it comes from. So when we were kids, we had to make stuff up. That is we had free time especially in the summers when we weren’t going to school and so we have conversations like, “Well, what do you want to do today?” I don’t know. What do you want to do? Well, why don’t we go down to the park? Nah, we went to the park yesterday. Let’s do something else. Well, what? You finally agree on something and you go off and you do it.
The proverbial story about summer vacation is everybody is so excited to get out of school and go to summer vacation but within a week, they’re bored and there’s a reason for that. You had to create what there was to do.
Then what would happen depending on your family circumstances is that you start doing chores and you couldn’t go have free time until your chores were done.
Then as you progress through school, you got to the point where excitingly – not so excitingly actually. Your teacher started giving you assignments and you had homework and as you grew older, you had other things, other people telling you what to do. You get your first job or jobs. So now you’ve got this stuff where teachers tell you what to do. Your parents tell you what to do. Your boss tells you what to do and it just keeps getting more and more and more as you go through high school and if you go to college or university. You start working and next thing you know, you’ve got to the point where you have so much to do it’s hard to keep up.
So you will learn a couple of time management techniques. You apply them if you’re one of those people that can apply them by yourself and lo and behold you get control of your time and you find out that you really can do your work week in not five days but say two and a half days. You’ve got available time or if you’re working for someone else and you have worked 40 hours or whatever the sense is, that you find a way to have your off time to have more time.
There’s a problem with it and the problem is that we’re not used to having truly free time. You may be used to having unscheduled time like when you go on holiday or vacation but free time is something else.
What we really need to do is we need to be able to fill that time again. What do you want to do? I don’t know. What do you want to do? If you don’t have things in your life that you want to live into, if you don’t have things you want to get done, guess what happens. You go back to work.
You fill it with stuff that you’ve always done. Why? Because you didn’t know what to do with the free time when you had it and so you basically give it away.
So, the first and biggest of the incompletes or the missing piece about effective time management is you need to have things you want to do in your life. It’s helpful if you know who you are, what’s worth doing, who’s worth doing it with in order to have some form of a life to live into.
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