Move time around

Fit in more by being creative about when things happen

Some times of day are better suited to some things than others. But by being flexible about when things happen, you can build a full life even if you have an intense job or family responsibilities.

I’ve long had people track their time on weekly spreadsheets (days of the week across the top, half-hour blocks down the left-hand side). Folks who get into Excel would sometimes color-code their time by category: work, sleep, family time, leisure, etc. I soon noticed that people who were really thinking about their time would often have a colorful block outside where you would expect it. There might be family time during the hours of 9-5 but a work block at night or on the weekend. Rather than being big washes of one color or another, their logs resembled mosaics — carefully pieced together to make more fit.

I love this image, and if you want to find more space for something in life, thinking about how you might move time around to construct a mosaic might help you do just that.

For instance, perhaps you’d like to do more fulfilling things in your leisure time. Many people who track their time are surprised to discover that they do have a reasonable amount of leisure time. The problem is that it occurs at times that are often harder to seize. We might want to write the Great American Novel, but when you get the kids down at 8:30 p.m., Netflix looks a lot more appealing than cranking out a rough draft.

Or sometimes we have stories of when is the right time for things — and if these right times don’t fit in our lives we give up. I see this all the time from couples who’d like to do regular dates, but getting a Saturday night sitter is tough, so they do nothing. Or people decide that family dinner is the sign of a functioning family, and feel bad when work and activity schedules preclude it most days. People who need to log long hours at work assume they just won’t see young kids who go to bed early, or that they won’t be able to play on a softball team that meets Tuesday evenings.

But when we choose to be time management masters who move time around, and we take advantage of whatever agency and flexibility we have, none of these need to be big problems.