This article deals with time, which is going by too fast anyway. So I’m going to ask just a very little of yours to tell you how to get more out of it. I promise you’ll gain time from the minutes you spend reading this.
Lots of people in my life are going around with lists of To-Do’s buzzing in their heads, and never enough time to get everything done.
My wife Vikki has a chronic complaint – “I have too much to do.”
“Time flies. It’s up to you to be the navigator.”
She has good reasons for feeling this way, taking care of our house (and me), operating a fully booked psychotherapy practice, taking care of a couple of grandchildren for some time each week while making time to study and write, and having a personal life.
I take care of fewer people than she does and I still feel like there’s too much to do and too little time.
Anyway, Vikki and I discussed this when we were in Reno visiting family a while ago and my daughter chimed in, “Me too!”
Well, she’s a working mother of two daughters, so it’s easy to see how things could pile up for her.
Then I said something REALLY dumb, and I got my head handed to me by both of the “women in my life.”
I said “Well, everyone gets the same 168 hours in a week, and some make it work and some get overloaded.”
“What do you know, you don’t change the diapers and go to the schools to meet the teachers and shop for dinner and ………..!”
Whoops. Right. I don’t do most of the stuff they do.
But hey, I’m still pretty busy myself, as demonstrated by the fact I’m finishing this note to you in an airport, and will send it out when I get home after midnight. And when I’m not being so insensitive I admit that once in a while it feels like “my cup runneth over” and not in a good way.
To make up for my stupid remark, I talked with my wife and daughter and we “unpacked” the experience of being overloaded.
And this is what you might find useful.
When I questioned each of them, I got a description of what goes on in their heads when they think of everything that they have to do.
It was a little bit different for Vikki than it was for my daughter Tracy, and when I studied my own inner experience, mine was a little bit different from the two of them.
But ALL THREE OF US had a lot in common.
The average person tries 13 time management methods
So let’s do an experiment – you can go inside your head if you are curious, and really examine what YOU experience when you feel that your tasks are overflowing the time available.
First question: How do you know when you’re overloaded???
Don’t just say, “That’s dumb! I have too many things on my list, and the buggers keep reproducing in the dark! The list gets longer, faster than I can check them off!”
Okay. You’re a little frustrated. Let me share with you what we found out about ourselves, and maybe that would be useful in your own investigation.
When I asked Vikki about her internal experience, she said that she saw oversized playing cards hanging in the space in front of her, like on a transparent wall. They had images of all the things she wanted to do and were flickering and waving back and forth in their places, like they were competing for attention. So no matter what she was trying to do, competing tasks and priorities kept distracting and pressuring her.
“Sometimes you just need a reset. Unplug, wait 60 seconds, then try again.”
My daughter Tracy, on the other hand, saw in her imagination a room with papers overflowing all the surfaces, tables and chairs and on the floor – she said you couldn’t even walk into the room in her mind, it was so cluttered.
In my mind I see movies – not just one but many — on lots of screens, like in the window of a TV store. Each one is a movie of something bad that might happen if whatever I need to be doing doesn’t get done.
Here’s an example of how one of the movies might look. If the task is doing taxes, the movie might be of my opening a notice that my bank account was attached because I didn’t do the taxes right or on time or something.
Another movie might be of someone looking disappointed because I didn’t do something I was going to do for that person. Or an overgrown yard. Or an auto breakdown because I put off getting the car tuned.
See, I really know how to have a good time!
But the thing is, for all three of us, each of our brains had unconsciously developed a way to represent all of the tasks competing for our time and attention – and — THEY WERE ALL JUMPING UP AND DOWN IN OUR FIELD OF VISION ALL THE TIME!
Wow. No wonder we each felt distracted, tired and overloaded. Too many things going on at once for any of us to focus on doing one thing at a time.
So here’s what we worked out:
Vikki found that she could imagine that the cards showing the various items on her To Do list were in a stack, with the most important task in front. Her mind seemed comfortable with that, because it “knew” that the other tasks were right there, in the pile in front of her. So whichever task she needed to do next would be in the front of the pile, which let her relax and focus on doing one thing at a time.
Tracy discovered that she could imagine that all the clutter in her imaginary room was in neatly labeled boxes on shelves or in files in the file cabinet. Then, she took a spiral notebook and wrote down all the things she needed/wanted to do. Once they were written down she could prioritize them, and give them numbers. Then she did them one at a time with ease.
Funny thing, I just called her to get her permission to share this with you, and she told me she has adopted the spiral notebook idea in real life, and was telling me how much easier it was making things for her.
I took all the TV screens with the movies on them and did pretty much the same thing that Vikki did. First I turned them all into plasma flat screens (of course), then put them in a pile, front to back, with the most important tasks in front, then immediately behind this article, for instance, is the movie about me unpacking from this week’s trip and putting the stuff for the dry cleaners in a pile by the door so I can drop them off first thing in the morning, then the printing out the notes for my 9 A.M. conference call, etc.
Whew.
All three of us had different unconscious ways of making our lives miserable, but they had similarities. After making these internal changes all three of us found, in the last week, that we were more motivated and life seemed to be a little easier.
The average office worker in the United States gets interrupted as often as 11 times per hour or almost every six minutes.
So, how about you? When you’re feeling overloaded, why don’t you take a minute and go inside your own head and notice how your brain is signaling you that there is too much to do?
What’s going on there that you didn’t notice before? Is it some confusing visual image like the three of us had? Or perhaps it’s a crowd of voices, demanding your attention and distracting you from getting the focus you need.
In the case of voices, for instance, here’s what I did with a coaching client. I had him turn the volume down on all the voices but the most important one, and had him assign priority numbers to the other ones. I then asked him what the voices would sound like if they knew they would each get their turn. He smiled and told me that they turned into voices of encouragement.
In the past year, 74% of people have felt so stressed they have been overwhelmed or unable to cope.
Believe me, it’s worth figuring out — it doesn’t take long and once you know what the “magic signal” is, you can change it like we did, so that your mind is satisfied that nothing is going to drop off your list, but you only need to focus on one task at a time.
That’s the key, so play with this and see what works for you. When you’re looking for the way your mind is working where you usually wouldn’t notice it, just “slow the videotape or the audiotape” wa-a-a-ay down.
Frame by frame. And you’ll be able to see or hear it. Believe me, it will be some sort of thing like one of the examples above.
My experience is that people’s brains automatically adjust in favor of comfort and effectiveness, once they give their internal process some attention.
Most of us get stampeded and overburdened because we haven’t known that we could actually “get under the hood” and make these adjustments.
Give it a try. You will be rewarded with immediate peace of mind, and you’ll probably be more motivated to do what you choose to do without making yourself miserable in the process. It might even prove to be fun.
See Ya,
Tom Hoobyar
