Best Practices in Time Management
I teach fiction writing all the time, and everyone always wants to know about the sexy stuff -- spinning wild plots and creating fab characters and developing great themes and all that.
That's all good and necessary stuff, and I love teaching that. But I'm reminded of a line I read in an old Tom Clancy novel years ago: "Privates talk tactics; Lieutenants talk strategy; Generals talk logistics."
It's possible I've remembered it wrong, but that's the gist of it. The point is that the real pros in the military worry about logistics -- maintaining supply lines, building roads, fixing bridges, and other hideously boring and unsexy stuff.
Over the past couple of years, I've come to see that I need to deal with the boring stuff better. It's not that I suddenly decided to like boring stuff. It's just that I finally realized that the quicker and smarter you deal with the boring stuff, the more time you have to do the fun stuff. And the more money you make, which incidentally pays the mortgage so you can do the fun stuff without feeling guilty or going broke.
As a lot of my e-zine readers know, not long ago I did a series of teleseminars with Allison Bottke on organization and strategic planning and branding. Doing this kind of thing is like eating your Brussels sprouts. It's yucky but it's good for you, so just do it.
I did it and a whole bunch of others did it right along with me and Allison. I'm glad I did it, because now my office is clean, my accounting is in great shape, I have a corporation for my writing business, I have a strategic plan, and I even know what my "brand" is.
Lately, I've decided to tackle my out of control schedule. People always ask me how I get so much done. My answer is that I work too many hours, which is both tragic and true. I've been wanting to fix that, and the easiest way seemed to be by improving my time-management skills. So I've been studying hard on that lately.
Time-management is like flossing. Everybody knows they SHOULD do it.
Everybody knows HOW to do it. Everybody SAYS they do it.
98% of everybody is lying.
The funny thing is that there really aren't any secrets to time-management. Really. Do you want to know everything there is to know about time management? I'll tell you right here:
- Decide what goals you want.
- Set priorities.
- Make an action plan.
- Follow the stinkin' action plan.
- Deal with any obstacles that pop up.
- Ride to glory.
It's that simple. Everybody knows these steps. Everybody has heard them a billion times, although sometimes the ideas are all dressed up in tuxedos and you can barely recognize them. Very few people actually follow these steps. Look around you. How many people do you know who are riding to glory? Not a lot, right?
What's wrong with this picture?
I can't speak for everybody, but I've generally got stuck on Door Number 2 -- setting priorities. Goals, I can handle. I've got great goals. Scads of 'em. Megascads. I have more goals than I know what to do with.
And that's the problem, at least for me. Too many goals, not enough time. The magic trick of time management is to strip your goals down to fit the time you actually have. Because you are not going to be able to go buy some more hours at the Time Store. What you have is what you have.
Let me distinguish between "goals" and "tasks" because this seems to trip people up.
We all have zillions of tasks that come up every day that need to be done. The bills have to get paid; the dentist must be visited; the brats must be driven to soccer practice; the cat must be dry-cleaned; and on and on. These are tasks. They're part of daily living. None of these are goals.
Goals are things you want to ACHIEVE, not things you want to DO. Here are some goals:
- Climb Mount Everest.
- Pay off the mortgage.
- Lose 30 pounds.
- Write a novel.
All of those are spectacular goals, at least for some people. We all know people who want to achieve these kinds of goals "someday."
Some people actually achieve these goals. The great majority of people who do are people who wake up one day and say, "Forget about all my other goals for the moment, because I really, really, REALLY want to climb Mount Everest." (Or pay off the mortgage. Or lose 30 pounds. Or write that novel.)
The day you do that is the day you focus. This is absolutely critical. Focusing is NOT about deciding that you don't want those other goals. Yes, you still want those other goals. Just not RIGHT NOW.
Focus is about choosing one goal to work on NOW to the exclusion of all others. Focus is about saying "yes" to one goal and "not now" to a thousand others.
The day you decide to focus on one goal is the day that you start making serious progress toward that goal. Because when you decide to focus, you are putting the rest of your life on hold, and you are making the commitment to take action to reach your goal in the shortest number of steps.
This is not easy. It's merely critically important. Listen, if it were easy, the world would be full of Mount Everest alumni, debt-free homeowners, slender people, and published novelists. The world is not full of those kind of people. The world is full of people who talk about how they'd like to be that kind of person "someday".
I don't want to step on toes here. The fact is that I'm preaching to myself right now, reminding myself AGAIN that if I want to achieve ANY of my goals, then I need to focus on ONE of them and work at it until I reach it.
I've been getting better at all of this time-management stuff lately, in part because I started using a tool to help me do it -- to remind me to do all the stuff I know that I should be doing, and to remind me to focus on my goals every day.
As far as I can tell, there are about five billion time-management tools out there. My advice is to use whatever works for you. I found one that works for me. It's free. It's fun. And I really, really like it, so I've been telling everyone I know about it, even though it has kind of a dorky name.
It's called Simpleology 101. The reason it's free is because it's the first of a series of three courses on managing your life.
Simpleology 102 and 103 are not free. The folks who created it figure that if you like 101, you might buy 102 and 103. They figured right with me, because I really like 101, so I bought 102 and now I've got 103 and I intend to work my way through all their courses. But here's the important point:
I use Simpleology 101 to plan my day, every single day.
That's, right. Every day. I never miss. Why would I? In 15 minutes, I work through the "Daily Target Praxis" and I set all the targets I want to hit for the day. And I KNOW without a doubt that those are the most important things I could be working on for that day, because I defined what's important. I made the long-term goals. I made the medium-term goals. I chose the short-term goal. My goals are MY goals. They're exactly what I want and need to do TODAY.
Here's a link in case you're interested: Simpleology 101. In the right margin, you'll see a signup box. Fill in your first name, your last name, and your email address and click the button. Do NOT be put off by the fact that the page may give you a bit of a hard sell to sign up. Simpleology 101 is FREE. Can you beat that price?
I was put off by Simpleology for months. Part of the reason was that I didn't like the name. It just seemed too . . . simplistic. And also, I was afraid the whole thing was too dumbed down. It's very easy to follow, and I wanted things to be more complicated. Well . . . it turned out that life isn't always complicated. Sometimes it's pretty simple. Time management is dead simple. The Simpleology scheme is dead simple and dead useful. So I'm using it and LOVING it. It works for me.
The fact that I use Simpleology every day means that I'm focused every day, I'm taking action every day to meet my goals, or else I have a jolly good reason why I'm not. (Some days, life just happens and you have to deal with the unexpected. So deal with it -- as fast as possible -- and then get back to the things you really want to do.)
The key thing is that I've focused myself down to ONE GOAL right now. Lots of side tasks, but ONE GOAL. I have an action plan to meet that goal, and every day, I take steps to reach that goal.
So I have decided that Simpleology 101 is officially a Best Practice for Time Management. Please note that Simpleology 101 is a time management program for everyone, not just for writers. The Simpleology people do not know and do not care that you're a novelist. They know and care that you need to get your time in order so you won't be suffocated by the billions of things that everyone else is telling you that you have to do RIGHT NOW.
What about you? Is your life focused right now? Do you have ONE GOAL that you're shooting for? Is the goal something you really want, or is it something you're not jazzed about?
Like I said, this time-management stuff isn't sexy. But it forces you to think about whatever goal IS sexy -- at least for you -- and it reminds you to take action to reach that goal in the shortest possible time.
And THAT'S pretty sexy, no?
