All tasks take time

How to be realistic in your mental accounting

When I talk with people about time, many mention a feeling of time scarcity. People feel like they are constantly behind, and not able to get to anything optional. Even a day that looks reasonable on paper can wind up descending into a sense of frenzy.

There are as many reasons for time management challenges as there are people, but a common problem is that many people don’t account for all the things they are going to need or want to do on a given day. All tasks take time, and if that time isn’t accounted for, at least in the mental schedule, then the inevitable result is feeling constantly behind.

Put it on the calendar

This is one reason Kelly Nolan’s “Bright Method” has proved helpful for many people. Kelly, a time management expert (and an upcoming guest on Best of Both Worlds!) teaches people to put everything on their calendars. You should definitely check out her work to learn the specifics, but the rough idea is to look at all you do and account for the time it takes. Do you shower, dress, and do your hair in the morning from 6-6:25 a.m.? Onto the calendar it goes. Do you make your kids’ lunches at night? That goes onto the calendar too for the amount of time it takes. If you take out the garbage on Thursday night, and it generally takes you 15 minutes to gather the trash from around the house and get the cans out, then you block out 15 minutes on Thursday night (say, 8:15-8:30 p.m.) for that task. At work, you will similarly account for all the repeating tasks you do, plus the steps you need to take toward any goals you intend to achieve.

Now obviously there is some nuance here. It’s not that the cans have to go out exactly at 8:15 p.m. But they do have to go out. And so if the kids or your partner wants to do something on Thursday night that happens at 8:15, they and you together need to account for where else the trash can go in the schedule. The answer isn’t that you just stay up late to do it, or forget it, or conjure up additional hours in the day. All tasks take time.

Looking backwards

I don’t use this method, but I do it to a degree in reverse — through my time logs. I account for where all my time goes as part of tracking my time. So I see, as I review my logs, exactly what fits in a day and what does not. Through 11-plus years of tracking and paying attention, I’ve gotten pretty realistic about this. So when I make my list for any given day or any given week, I don’t set the expectation for myself to do more than will actually fit. I know how much time the have-to-dos take, and I have a good idea of when the want-to-dos will fit.

So you can look forward or you can look backward, but when you recognize that all tasks take time, and you account for this time, you can feel much more relaxed. You don’t feel constantly behind. You know what fits, and you make choices based on that reality, rather than some fantasy where the trash cans just magically fly themselves where they are going.

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