I told you that to prepare for last week, Chris and I scheduled the heck out of it. Actually, Chris sat down with my schedule, put in work times, and even scheduled me my own Dawn Time. He's my hero!
The week went smoothly. I wasn't stressed, and I adhered to the schedule. I always had a guide for what to do (just look at the hand dandy schedule!), and I very much looked forward to my Dawn Time. All in all, the week went off without a hitch.
The only downside was that I didn't get to work out as much. So, this week I decided to perform a little schedule magic of my own, and armed with red pen, black pen, green highlighter, and daily printouts of my calendar, I ventured forth. I scheduled three aerobic workouts, one weight lifting workout, writing time (yea!), and even time to work on Write Well U.
I proudly showed it to Chris, and he almost yelped. "What did you do? I didn't schedule you that tightly. Where's Dawn Time?" (I think he just felt one-upped after seeing my carefully crafted schedule.)
"My Dawn Time is here and here," I said, proudly pointing to the writing time. Chris just stared at me.
Harumph. I thought it was a great schedule.
On with my schedule I went. Then I got to Tuesday (day 2 of The Schedule), and I realized that each day was a solid workday, starting around 8:30/9:00 and ending around 3:00/4:00. Not bad, you might say, but there was no built-in space for me to be flexible, to roam. And one of the reasons I was closing my virtual assistant practice was because it was too restrictive and demanding of my time.
Tired of the restrictive feeling already, I decided to work late Tuesday night in exchange for taking Wednesday morning off. I knew it was a tradeoff: work this night so that I could take that morning off.
Come Wednesday, and I am loving life. (It's also mighty helpful that our 4-day deluge of rain and flooding has mostly ended and the sun has come out!) I have three million ideas for my blog (I'll try to keep it down to a cool 1/2 mil), and I started to think about painting my bathroom and shopping for new mirrors.
Life just feels good, and I don't think it's an accident that the good - no, great - feeling I'm experiencing is on a day whn my day isn't filled with work from beginning to end.
So, I thought I had learned something a couple of weeks ago, but what I learned was too limiting. Here's the new stuff I've learned (My Top 10 Things I've Learned About Time Management):
- Schedules are good for me - really! I do need some structure.
- I don't work well when my work portion of my day is in a solid 6- to 7-hour block.
- As a matter of fact, I only want to work half days.
- I can't schedule time to write. If I do, then it feels like a chore. I want to write all the time, but I can't force it.
- When I'm working, I need to focus on the work. When I'm not working, I need to focus on what I'm doing, not work.
- Since my work involves a lot of phone calls, I have to take that into consideration when I'm scheduling "real" work. I can't have 3 1/2 hours of calls and then expect myself to have energy to be creative.
- For those blocks in my schedule that I've labeled "WORK," it's helpful to have a list of things to do. That way I don't have to spend time figuring out what I need to work on.
- Have one day a week with no calls.
- Occasionally play hooky.
- No matter how much I work, I must have Dawn Time. I have found that this is non-negotiable for me. It needs to be unstructured and uncategorized. (Uncategorized is very important - I can't tell myself what to do. I'm sure I must sound like a 2-year old!) This shouldn't be such a struggle; we should all schedule in time for ourselves. See what Petra has to say about this very thing over on The Virtual Wire.
For me, time management is a dynamic process, and I'm constantly learning and adjusting. And, in actuality, it's not really time management, but life management.
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