{"id":4221,"date":"2023-04-17T17:05:29","date_gmt":"2023-04-17T15:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jnhcoaching.de\/?p=4221"},"modified":"2023-04-17T17:05:29","modified_gmt":"2023-04-17T15:05:29","slug":"owning-your-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jnhcoaching.de\/de\/2023\/04\/17\/owning-your-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Owning Your Time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hello Friends!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a fairly quiet period of Wintering for most of Q1, Q2 has exploded out of the gate.\u00a0And I confess I am confronted too often with the concept of time: how to manage it, how to budget it, and how to own it.
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So it was no surprise that one of the latest episodes of my favourite podcast,\u00a0The Long and the Short of It<\/a>, had an episode on exactly this topic. They have an eerily prescient ability to release podcast episodes on topics pertinent to me, in the same way that Amazon and Google start showing you ads for things you have only been thinking about!\u00a0\ud83d\ude09
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In a clear indication that this is indeed something I should be looking into, the Long and the Short of It did an episode called\u00a0Time Audit<\/a>. Never\u00a0heard of a time audit?\u00a0Me either! Here\u2019s how it was described in the pod:
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\u201c…one of the things that I’ve done [\u2026] is to do a\u00a0time audit\u00a0and to basically make an account of how you’re spending your time on any given day. And holy guacamole, this is a scary and illuminating prospect.\u201d
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I believe it! There are so many aspects of this to explore. Time blocking. Deep work.\u00a0Meeting overload. So\u00a0I thought this would be a great topic for this week\u2019s newsletter. I don\u2019t know anyone who would say they have their time or their calendar completely under control. Definitely room for improvement here!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUDGET YOUR ENERGY…<\/mark><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Step 1 to owning your time is to first identify where exactly your time is going! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And part of that is also to figure out how that correlates to your energy. It isn\u2019t just about plotting out all the meetings you had in a day. It\u2019s also about recognizing what gave you energy, and what drained you.

As this article from a performance coach<\/a> makes clear, \u201cMost of us manage our finances carefully, making sure we have enough money to get us through the day, or the week, or the year. But [\u2026] we don\u2019t manage our<\/em> own energy<\/em><\/a> in the same way.\u201d<\/em>

I often talk with my clients about people<\/em> being energy givers or energy vampires, but that\u2019s something we need to think of in terms of tasks and meetings too! We need to create a budget for our energy in the same way as we budget our finances.

One of the excellent suggestions in the article was to \u201ccombine activities in a way that mitigates some of the debits<\/em><\/a>. Could you follow Steve Jobs’s example and <\/em>have a meeting while taking a walk<\/em><\/a>? If you have a long commute, can you spend that time listening to an audiobook, podcast, or music that energizes and refreshes you? Combining energy-draining activities with energy-building ones lets you put a little back into your energy budget instead of just depleting it<\/em>.\u201d 

I am definitely going to try this!

Another aspect of that time budget is to know what you do<\/strong> want to fill your time with. How often do you reflexively grab your phone to scroll mindlessly while waiting for a Zoom minute to start, for example? Another of the practical suggestions in the Long & the Short of It podcast was to \u201cstart a running list of things that I want to do if I have extra time. And some people have broken that into categories, like, “People I’d like to call if I had fifteen minutes,” or, “When I have more than twenty minutes, lay down and take a nap,” or, “Pour myself a cup of tea, but really savor the drinking experience,” or, “Look out the window.” It could be anything. But to your point, when we don’t really know what to do, we just start doing things to distract ourselves from the fact that we don’t know what to do<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another thing I am going to be trying out!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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DEEP WORK…<\/mark><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have really recognized lately how much I need time and space for deep work. Creating a\u00a0Keynote<\/a>\u00a0or preparing for a new\u00a0coaching<\/a>\u00a0client is not something that can be squeezed in between other things, 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there. Since the start of the year, I\u2019ve blocked Mondays from meetings as my \u201cCEO Days\u201d \u2013 the time I need to do the deep work necessary to show up as the coach and entrepreneur I want to be. It\u2019s been very effective, and I\u2019m so glad I have been able to make this happen. It isn\u2019t easy to hold that time \u201cfree\u201d (I don\u2019t have the day off \u2013 I have the day free of meetings. There is a huge difference), but it is well worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of companies are also encouraging Meeting Free Fridays, for exactly this reason \u2013 so that people can have some undisturbed focus time. Is this something you have at work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was gifted Deep Work<\/a> by Cal Newport for Christmas, and it\u2019s a great read. While I think it is potentially self-evident why we need time for deep work, this got me thinking: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don\u2019t cultivate this ability, you\u2019re likely to fall behind as technology advances. [\u2026] as we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key currency.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Increasing complexity is one of the top business challenges for leaders. And the best tool to handle that is deep work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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DEEP WORK’S NEMESIS – THE MEETING…<\/mark><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How much deep work is anyone able to do in a meeting? None, obviously. That isn\u2019t the point of a meeting. However, we are unfortunately increasingly falling into the trap of over-reliance on meetings as our main form of work.\u00a0
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How intentional are your meetings? How much thought went into the structure, agenda, and purpose?\u00a0
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I really loved this podcast on \u201cmeeting culture run amok<\/a>\u201d discussing how unproductive many (the majority?) meetings are and how challenging it can be to think from scratch about why we have meetings and what they should contain. Some companies have even gone so far as to declare meeting bankruptcy \u2013 eliminating\u00a0all\u00a0<\/strong>meetings and then starting from square one. Sounds appealing in some ways, doesn\u2019t it?!\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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MEETING HYGIENE…<\/mark><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you have five minutes \u2013 and \u201clisten to a podcast\u201d might be one of those things you identified above in your time audit with which you\u2019d like to fill your time! \u2013 there is a brilliant TED podcast<\/a> on making meetings count. I really just wanted to transcribe the whole podcast it was so helpful!
 
The key points:
 
1. Ask yourself: do you really need the meeting?<\/p>\n\n\n\n