By Michael Kastelnik, Psy.D. – “Time management” is a funny phrase. To see what I mean, take the concept of management as largely understood in a business context. Companies all over the world spend a lot of time and effort to make sure their laborers can get the job done. Sometimes the mere presence of managers helps to keep people honest and ensure they are actually working and not slacking off or engaging in some other activity that is bad for business. This all makes sense with managing people that you can influence, but it makes less sense with such an invaluable yet intangible resource such as time. Nevertheless, there are other aspects of our lives over which we have more obvious control, albeit some of us more than others. I’m talking about things such as energy, stress and attention.
Like with many aspects of life, managing energy levels is relevant to the conversation. As such, any advice on improving time management will include the usual components of self-care such as proper diet, exercise or comparable activity, adequate sleep, maintaining wholesome relationships and stress management. In fact, stress management is a complex skill in itself and it may be fundamental to time management inasmuch as you need to have just the right amount of arousal to complete a task, according to the Yerkes-Dodson model of productivity. Too little concern for a task will literally get you nowhere, while too much concern can lead to progressively worse outcomes. Mistakes can occur. Burnout is an outcome when people are putting in more effort with no more output in the product. And, of course, health problems occur in the short term and over time when people get too stressed. Physiology is simple enough to regulate with activities such as slow, deep breathing or jumping jacks, while mental stress relief may involve something like journaling about concerns.
Attention is another resource that may require more discipline to regulate. We all tend to focus on things we find interesting and space out on boring tasks. Becoming your own behavioral therapist and limiting the interesting things to serve as a reward for the more mundane tasks could not only help you get your work done but could also build a resistance to forming unbalanced habits with things that exploit our attention, such as electronic devices.
In addition to short-term tactics to stay on task, it is also necessary to step back and make sure we are balancing efficiency, the ability to do tasks using less time, money or energy, with effectiveness, which is a positive contribution to our goals.
For example, let’s say you have a goal to build a stone wall on the front of your property. If you know you have a lot of large stones in your backyard, you may decide to start by gathering those stones and bringing them to the other side in the most efficient way possible. You could figure out how to reduce the likelihood of injury by lifting the rocks with a certain technique. You might utilize a simple machine, such a wheelbarrow, to do it quickly with simple machines like a wheelbarrow. You may be tempted to feel so proud of your method that you move the rocks to the backyard again because you can. Maybe that last activity sounds far fetched, but the point is that if the emphasis falls too much on efficiency, you may lose sight of other important things such as implementing the rest of the steps needed to complete the wall, maintaining it, and having a rationale why you are building it that you can instill in your children, who could in turn maintain or improve the wall when their time comes. The point of this example is to show how we need the ability to pause from our work periodically or even regularly to make sure we are growing in virtue and working towards worthwhile goals and not simply keeping busy.
So, what can we do if managing our time seems like such a complex task? We can pray that the Holy Ghost enable us to use His gifts such as wisdom. We can ask for counsel from respected elders and mentors on how to grow in prudence regarding particular problems we would like to solve. We can start where we are and acknowledge what we have some control over, such as self-care and attention, as well as those that we don’t control and could therefore benefit from avoiding worrying about, such as the passage of time. This is the Serenity Prayer in action. While we may not control time, there is a lot we all can do to make the most of it.
