Stop Rushing! 5 Ways to Beat the Mental Strain of Time Management

In many ways planning is everything. Choosing what you spend your time on controls what your day is like. The average of what your days are like determines what your life is like – how much sleep you get, how much exercise you do, and how much time you spend interacting with people.

All these choices that are taken in the planning process dictate your mental state and your overall experience.

This is why I believe planning your week, month, year and beyond to be so crucial to maintaining physical and emotional health and a positive experience.

So why then do you need to be careful when diving into planning your life – whatever the timescale or context?

• The Inherent Problems with Time Management
• Take Some Regular Time Away From Your Schedule
• Plan With These Principles In Mind
• Avoid Spending Longer on Tasks Than Scheduled
• Stop Rushing

Part 1- The Inherent Problems with Planning and Productivity

I am an avid user of the waking-up app created by Sam Harris. If you do not know of it or haven’t heard of Sam Harris, I would strongly recommend you consider browsing the information he has to offer. I think he has collated an incredibly powerful selection of information on his app and podcast.

The reason I mention this is because an audio snippet popped up on the Waking Up app with a conversation between Sam Harris and Oliver Burkeman – a writer for the Guardian who ended up delving deep into the self-help realm and eventually writing a book titled “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals”.

The book challenges conventional opinions and advice on time management and as the title mentions, puts time management into the context of a life – on average four thousand weeks.

This conversation between Sam Harris and Oliver Burkeman came to my attention at a time when the constant rush of getting through my to-do list was becoming very discomforting – and it wasn’t healthy.

It also made me consider – why am I rushing. What is the point of anything I’m doing? Is it THAT important to get everything I had on my to-do list for the day done? Not really.

As long as I enjoy the day it doesn’t make or break my life if I get that report for work finished that night, or the ironing done, or that gym session in. That’s not to say these things don’t matter. They do.

I definitely want to go to the gym to maintain my health, and heck even to try and look good. I definitely want to turn up to my work meeting the next day having done my report so I’m not unprepared and I stand in good stead in my job which is paying my rent and feeding me.

However, it becomes quite apparent that everything important to me on my to-do list does not fit into the time I have available. Things must be prioritised. Even then, there can be times when there are equally important tasks to complete that I don’t know how to choose from, and something has to go.

Without this understanding, I believe planning – and particularly strict planning with little flexibility -can cause a very negative and unpleasant mindset:

• The mental discomfort we feel when we haven’t finished our to-do list.
• The mental discomfort we feel when we have a large or unstarted to-do list.
• The way we negatively impact others when we are inflexible in our plans.
• How our mood diminishes when we haven’t hit our productivity goals.
• The constant rushing (rushing to the next meeting, rushing to eat, rushing to our next destination, rushing our work/hobbies). Recommended reading: Type A Behaviour and Your Heart by Meyer Friedman and Ray H. Rosenman.
• The constant need to plan or rearrange things when unplanned events or interactions occur.
• The discomfort we experience when circumstances outside our control throw our plans in the bin.

Even with prioritisation, you can find you still do not have enough time for everything that you want to do. There is an opportunity cost to everything.

By choosing to spend time planning your week – you may be foregoing an opportunity for an hour at the gym, some time to prepare some healthy meals for the week, or an hour spent with someone close to you.

Some things to be aware of which Oliver Burkeman summarises nicely:

• Actioning your to-do list creates more actions.
• You can never fully empty your to-do list (there is an infinite amount for you to do).
• Parkinson’s law: work expands to fill the time given to complete it.

Part 2 – Some things that have helped with the mental strain I have been experiencing:

1.) Take some time away from a strict schedule regularly.

I think it is really important to give your mind and body a rest regularly from its strict schedule. That means time off work every once in a while, and also time away from your strict regime and habits.

Give yourself one week in 6 months where you don’t have to complete a to-do list. You just experience life as it comes at that time. You eat when you’re hungry, exercise when you feel like it, and interact with people when you feel like it.

Essentially I like to avoid the mental discomfort from points 1, 2, 3, 4 and 7 during this time. It also helps me to become used to spontaneous occurrences and plans changing – which I think is a good thing. Because there is so much of life we can’t control.

In fact, I’d argue that almost all of life we can’t control. Our circumstances, where we’re born, our family, our personality, our genes, our thoughts etc…

In their conversation, Sam Harris and Oliver Burkeman consider a planning sabbath – one day of the week away from your strict schedule which I think is a very interesting idea.

2.) Plan with these principles in mind:

1. Actioning your to-do list creates more actions.
2. You can never fully empty your to-do list (there is an infinite amount for you to do).
3. Parkinson’s law: work expands to fill the time given to complete it.

Keeping these principles front of mind when planning or actioning your to-do list can help reduce the discomfort and mental resistance you experience when working through your tasks.

Another planning approach I’ve mentioned before which I think is relevant here – is that of planning in double the time you think a task will take. This helps to avoid rushing and gives you sufficient time to focus on the task at hand.

3.) Avoid spending longer on tasks than scheduled.

A tactic I am experimenting with using currently is one also suggested by Oliver Burkeman. This is where no matter how long a task is taking, you don’t go past your allotted time for it. There are some times when this isn’t useful. Such as for tasks that you MUST complete by a certain deadline for example.

But for any important task with no hard deadlines, I am having some success with just stopping as soon as the time scheduled for it has finished. No matter what distractions I have encountered when doing it. Then whatever you have done is done and you can revisit in your next planning cycle.

4.) Stop Rushing! Embrace, accept and enjoy your incomplete to-do list.

This is not something I think you can just start doing. I am not able to embrace my incomplete tasks for the day fully. Even as I’m writing this I feel guilty I haven’t been to the gym today which I’d planned in. I haven’t even gone out for a quick run which I normally do if I don’t make it to the gym.

These last two weeks I’ve failed to get up at 6:30 am at which time my strict morning routine is supposed to start. It’s turned to 7:30 am and normally the first 30mins have been enjoying my cup of tea instead of getting ready for the day. One day I didn’t get up till 8:30. But the things I’ve done in place of them have been really enjoyable.

Spending my time not rushing – enjoying my morning cup of tea has been nice. The guilt from not being productive, much less so. However, I am slowly getting better at reflecting on my day and having a smaller emotional reaction to incomplete tasks. I think this shift requires a change in perspective. The finiteness of life is how Oliver Burkeman tries to achieve this.

But I also think It’s helpful to see it as a wider mind shift. That of enjoying the present, enjoying the tasks you are doing rather than rushing through them and enjoying the process of scheduling and failing to adhere to it perfectly as a process that’s ultimately out of your control due to the infinite amount of events and variables that go unaccounted for when you create your plan.

SUMMARY

I think Oliver Burkeman does a really good job of switching the traditional view of time management – how much we can get done in a day, week or month – and putting it into the context of a lifetime, or as I like to think of it the average of all days.

I think by viewing task prioritization and schedules through this lens we can help to avoid some of the mental pitfalls that can easily come with planning that I’ve tried to outline above. I think there are ways we can avoid the discomfort and feelings of inadequacy that can come from scheduling tasks and failing to complete them.

If not looking upon these failures positively, at least from a neutral standpoint where we don’t judge ourselves and with the understanding that there is an infinite number of worthwhile things we could be doing.

Time management is necessary to help you spend time effectively to maintain mental and physical health and I think there are many benefits to improving it and increasing efficiency in our lives.

But ultimately, I think we need to view it as an ever evolving schedule that will change constantly based on external factors and that we will never fully be in control of our to do lists, or ever fully complete them.

If you’re interested in how to plan flexibly so you can adapt to external factors outside of your control when they arise, I have a blog post here that attempts to address just that.

Leaving it there for now,

Cheers,

Alex