Managing Time

Time Is a Gift

We taught you at an early age about good stewardship. When we are granted resources to manage as stewards, we don’t often own or control those resources. One resource we are all given is time. Your first duty as a good steward is to recognize that time is a gift not a paycheque. It is not owed to you; nor is it something you are entitled to. It is a gift.

Your second duty as a good steward is to accept that gift: to take the time and use it; not squander it. To understand that it is not to be taken for granted, and that we only have so much time on this earth. I have experienced many good things from adopting and maintaining an attitude of gratitude. Here are a few things I tell myself:

• I am grateful every day that I wake up, because even when circumstances are dire, the gift of time provides the possibility for change and improvement.
• While I do not always have control over the time I am given, I always have control over my choices and can use those choices to generate positive results.
• I can always be generous. We are all surrounded by people or causes in need. I have the power to use some of the time I have to give to others.

Time Spent Reflects Values

To some extent, how we use the time we take reflects what we value. You spend time on activities that produce the benefits you need or want for yourself or those you care about. For this reason, only you can determine if you are making good or bad use of time; only you can determine if you are satisfied with the return on investment (in the form of time spent). Time is a finite resource. We only get 24 hours a day, so we have to learn to manage this resource in a constructive way.

In the economy of time, profit is quantified by whatever unit of measure you value. You can move activities of deficit to activities of profit. Do you want more love and peace? More money or more freedom? More friends? Whatever you want more of, it’s important to commit the time to generate more gains in those areas. Here are some tips that might help you do that:

• Make a list of goals or areas of your life in which you would like to make more gains: your family? Your vocation? A skill you want to develop?
• Make a second list of your average activities over a week and how many hours you spend on each.
• Now draw a line between the activities in your second list that contribute to the goals and areas in your first list making sure not to draw lines when connections don’t exist.

This simple exercise can be very revealing. You may just find that you spend a significant amount of time on activities that do not further your objectives or support areas in your life that matter the most to you.

Scheduling

Throughout your journey, you will work alongside leaders who will speak words that will stay with you for the rest of your life. One of the leaders I knew at a technology company I worked for early in my career said this about me: “You have a keen ability to not only formulate a plan but to also execute that plan so that things actually get done.”

This single recognition compelled me to spend more time on strategy implementation than on design in my work. I have found the successful execution of a plan or strategy often comes down to applying simple practices applied consistently over time. Scheduling my activities for the day, the week and the month is one such practice that has contributed to my achieving my objectives.

I have also found the opposite to be true. When I don’t intentionally allocate time to goal-achieving activities, I often look back with regret at how much time I have wasted and how little progress I have made.

So, the moral of the story is that nothing important that truly matters to you will get accomplished by accident. Maintaining progress in pursuit of your objectives will rely on disciplined adherence to a system, and a schedule is a key part of that system.

When you and your sister were young, I decided I wanted to take social time with you so that we could develop a friendship beyond the normal father-daughter relationship. I allocated to each of you one evening per week for us to play, talk or go out. Of course, this was not the only time we spent together, but it was a separate time for my girl and I to connect on a deeper level away from everything and everyone else around us. What goals and objectives do you have that could benefit from your undivided attention?

Consider starting small with just one period of time per week scheduled for an activity that contributes to your objective. You will quickly see the gains you make, and that progress will encourage you to apply the same discipline to another goal by scheduling another activity. Before you know it, you will become so convinced of the power of scheduling that you will look for ways to be more intentional with your use of time every day, week, month and beyond.

Protecting Time

Your mom’s father and I spent many hours in deep conversations before mom and I were married. Often, Pops recounted stories of his experiences forging a life for himself and his family as a newcomer to Canada in the 70s. He embedded priceless lessons in these stories which always left me with a strong desire to live up to the example he set. Maybe Pops knew what he was doing!

On one occasion, he told me about an illustration someone shared with him decades before that prompted him to start the successful small business he would go on to run for 40 years. Pops spoke of dream circles. He explained that in life, everyone has, or should have, a dream circle. A dream circle contains the goals a person has in various domains including family, vocation, social, financial or spiritual. Picture all of these objectives fitting in a circle with your name at the top. Now, to realize their dream circle, a person will employ resources and enlist other people to contribute. So, at any given time, whether you know it or not, you may be working toward the realization of someone else’s dream circle, and that’s ok.

But here is where Pops warned caution. Ideally, every person will have equal opportunity to draw their own dream circle even while they are contributing to the realization of someone else’s circle. And eventually, you may outgrow the dream circle of someone else and need to leave their circle in order to fully realize your own. Wow! I can only hope and pray that this illustration turns on a light bulb in your mind the way it did in me when your grandfather shared it.

Keep in mind I am sharing this with you now without the benefit of drawing circles in the air to make the picture come alive the way Pops did at the time. But in case you’ve gotten lost in the circles, let me summarize like this. At various points in your life, you may find you need to protect your time by drawing and realizing your own circle, otherwise you may spend your entire life contributing to the circles of others. In this respect time is like water, in that it flows to wherever there is a crevasse or a gap that needs filling. If you don’t protect the time you take to realize your own dream circle, there will be no shortage of people ready to drain you to realize theirs.

Stuck in Time

You are driving on your way to an appointment. You take the highway because it’s normally the fastest route. Fifteen minutes into what should be a 30-minute car ride, you encounter traffic. All the cars have stopped. Try as you may to stretch your head out of the window to look ahead and investigate, there is no telling the cause of the stoppage and no foreseeing how long you’ll be stalled there.

It just so happens that you have stopped right next to an off ramp that would enable you to get off the highway and take local roads to get to your appointment. But those local roads will add another 30 minutes to your driving time. What do you do? This is a simple quandary drivers face all the time, the frequency determined by where they are traveling. I have often reflected on this simple quandary as a metaphor for how people respond when they are forced to wait due to an obstacle they have no control over.

Generally speaking I have found that people have a predisposition toward one of two responses. Some people, convinced that the original path remains the best path despite the setback, are willing to wait patiently until they can resume the plan. Other people refuse to remain inactive in the face of an obstacle they cannot remove and would rather use an alternative course of action over which they have control, even if it might take them longer to achieve their objective.

Your choice will be determined by how willing you are to tolerate feelings of powerlessness or lack of control while you wait for a situation to improve. Either way, your response will require patience. Whether you choose to wait on the highway or get off and take side roads, getting to your destination will take longer than you had planned.

Time & Prioritizing

People attribute the saying “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day” to the famous author Mark Twain – although there is little evidence to prove he ever spoke those words. Regardless of who said it, the saying aptly points to a remarkably effective time prioritization principle. Let’s assume all would agree that a live frog would be quite an undesirable thing to eat. The illustration instructs us to each day prioritize the task that is most important, complex, challenging, or maybe just the most unpleasant.

There are many legitimate reasons you cannot always control what you do first thing in the morning at home, school or work. Don’t fret. The principle applies anytime of day anywhere: to the extent that you can, always try to tackle the hardest things first. This way of prioritizing how you spend your time will produce several benefits:

• It will safeguard against the dangerous vice of procrastination. People who procrastinate as a habit often neglect to do the thing they said they would do later.
• Eating the frog first means spending your best faculties and energy on whatever will require the greatest effort to achieve first. You will likely produce a better outcome than if you had saved the hardest thing for last.
• If you get the frog out of the way you will likely be able to better enjoy all the activities that follow. I followed this strategy as a child, first eating the food item on my plate I didn’t like. The rest of the food tasted better afterward!

You will learn to put at the top of the list tasks that will contribute most to achieving your goals. But when everything at the top of your list seems equally important, remember this: do the hardest things first!

Time Savers

When you are young, time is said to be on your side: meaning that barring unforeseen circumstances that would cut your life short, you still have access to more time ahead of you than behind you. This means you still have more time to recover and learn from mistakes, bad decisions and time lost.

Eventually, the scale tips the other way. You reach an age where less time lies ahead of you than behind you. And realizing this tends to produce changes in us. For me, when the scale tipped the other way, I developed a keen interest in identifying time savers. Time savers are habits and ways of doing things that add time back into your day by enabling you to get more done faster, but with the same good results. That last point is key, because it’s the only way a time saver can be truly effective.

Here are some of the time savers that have been useful to me thus far in my journey:

• Begin with the end goal in mind. Whatever task or activity you embark on, ask yourself the question “what are the end goals, objectives and outcomes I want to achieve or produce from this activity?” Ensure you perform the task and activity in a way that will produce those results.
• Practice reusing, and using, leverage. Once you have identified an end goal, identify other end goals that can be served with the same tasks by making a few adjustments upfront. For example, emails can be reused if you are sending out similar messages to multiple people.
• Beware of time sinkholes: a sinkhole happens when the ground collapses into a hole and sucks everything that was on the surface down into it. Some activities are sinkholes and will suck all your time for little in return!
• Say less. Of course, there is a time and place to discuss, explore and explain ideas and plans. But you will be surprised how much time people take needlessly repeating what has already been said and is well understood instead of taking action. Be different. Say less and do more.

Timing

When you were just starting elementary school, I attended a play your teacher prepared with all the students in the class. Parents were asked to attend the presentation during lunch hour. On this occasion, mom and I could not both attend so I came alone to see you. We had just relocated to a bigger city and you were having difficulty making friends and adjusting to a new school. At the time, you were shy, reserved and always needed a little bit more encouragement to take your place.

On the day of the presentation, I came in with my work Blackberry ready to record a video that I could share with your mom and sister. The play started. Like most parents of children at that young age I was only looking for and at you. You looked stressed, like it took everything in you to not run away and hide. But then your part came, and you just lit up! You spoke softly, confidently and clearly and I could not have been prouder.

I was ready to go back to work when, to my surprise, you were assigned the task of writing a few words on a whiteboard. As you approached the whiteboard holding a fat black marker bigger than your little fingers, my heart stopped. Why? Because you had just started writing and were struggling to remember the right direction to write the letters B, D, N, P etc.

With my phone camera still fixed on you, I zoomed in from the back of the class to get a closer look at what you would write on the board. I can’t remember exactly what you wrote but I know it was almost perfect. One letter was written in reverse…and I had it all caught on tape. I remember praying that no one would harshly correct you or tease you on the spot because I knew what that would do to your budding confidence.

Thankfully no one did, but I surely thought the right thing to do as a father would be to point out the mistake as an area of improvement later. When the play ended, I rushed to hug and kiss you and to tell you how proud I was. My heart was overjoyed, and I could tell yours was too. I did not mention the spelling mistake at the end of the play that day, yet somehow, you write that letter perfectly today. “Like apples of gold in settings of silver, is a word spoken at the proper time.” [Proverbs 25:11]. Timing is everything!

Time to Meet

I recently picked you up from yet another Saturday night house party, where you spent hours talking to groups of friends. You may find it hard to believe but one day you may get paid to have group discussions. But the gatherings I am referring to are unlikely to happen on a Saturday night, and may not involve people you consider friends or topics of discussion you find interesting.

I am referring to meetings. Ask an adult how they feel about meetings, particularly work meetings, and you are likely to hear emotions ranging from hatred to delight. Gathering with people to talk about things is an inevitable part of life. The sooner you master participating and facilitating meetings effectively, the sooner you and the people you serve will realize the benefits of collaboration. That said, poorly-run meetings have the potential to decimate your treasure chess of time.

I am still working on how to make the most of my time. I too am a work in progress! Here are some guidelines I follow:

• Don’t repeat. When I am speaking to someone one-on-one, I have a terrible habit of repeating things, until the listener indicates an understanding. I try to resist this in meetings.
• Be concise and intentional. I try to use the correct yet simplest words to describe what I am talking about. I only speak when my statement or question moves the conversation, the issue, or the solution forward.
• Silence equals agreement. This is a big one. At times as a facilitator you will ask a question to confirm consensus on a decision and people will not respond for various reasons. While there are times when you need to dig deeper to uncover the underlying reasons for their silence, often you are safe to accept their silence as acceptance.

Perhaps the most effective is to agree on these and other ground rules for meetings in advance so that everyone involved knows what to expect of one another.

Time to Play

The time period from 2010-15 was challenging for me. I was traveling frequently for work as I climbed the ranks of a software company striving to make its mark in an increasingly competitive market. At home we had a precious 4-year-old girl and God would bless us with a second in 2011. Your mother was then as she is now: a steady rock who managed our household with the right balance of structure and warmth.

I could not have spent as much time on the road as I did without the firm assurance that you and your sister were more than well taken care of. Coming home on weekends after spending the week in airports, hotels and meetings across the country took more adjusting than you would expect. With mom, I had to break out of the habit of communicating with her as if she were a prospective client to whom I was trying to sell something, or an employee in need of my management guidance. With you and your sister, I had to slow down, pay attention and participate in activities that used aspects of my personality that were almost completely dormant during the week. I found playing particularly challenging.

Yes, that’s right: the idea of having to play made me anxious about coming home, but not because I didn’t love spending time with you. I loved reading to you, dressing you up to go out, sharing a meal and other activities. It’s the playing that bothered me, because I had forgotten how to play. I had forgotten how to engage in an activity just for the sake of enjoyment. Often while we tried to play, I would devise in my mind an entire sales strategy for my next work trip while waiting for you to make your move on the board game or put the next block on the tower. You probably wondered if I was hearing impaired given how often you had to repeat “your turn daddy” before I finally went ahead.

It was a business leader I met on a work trip who opened my eyes. He was lamenting he had lost touch with his teenagers. When I asked how that happened, he wasn’t sure but said “I know at one point when they were kids, I just stopped playing with them.” I came home that very weekend and started relearning to play. Today, I’m sure glad I did!