Time Management Tuesday: The Beginning Of A Habit Arc

I spent Sunday in bed getting over something, which I'm mentioning here because Sundays have a big impact on my work life. Sundays are when I try to get a lot of personal things done and out of the way, making it possible to attend to my work life on weekdays. We have to manage all our time in order to have some in which we can work. A loss of a Sunday is a big deal to me, especially with Easter coming up next Sunday. It's a social event for my family, so I won't be doing my usual work then, though prepping for it was some of the work I was supposed to have done this past Sunday and didn't because I was in bed. Personal work is piling up. So, originally, I was going to do a woe-is-us kind of post all about how do we recover from the blow of losing time? As if I had an answer for that.

Then I realized that on Sunday evening, when I was finally able to stay awake for four hours, I posted my Weekend Links post here at OC and even got started writing a big part of yesterday's. I did it because I always do the Weekend Links post on Sunday nights. Yesterday, while I still wasn't feeling normal, I used my starting work transitional time (I've needed to do another transitional time post for a while) to work on clearing out my e-mail in-box. Because that's what I always do before I start work. I managed to get a few things done during a rough time because I always did them. They were habits.

Last fall I wrote about the difficulty in forming habits when your routine/work situation is always changing, as it does for many of us. But evidently I've managed to form a few, anyway.

As luck would have it, I happen to have a copy of  The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg in the house, and I started to read it this morning during my morning transitional time. (Not to be confused with my work transitional time, which I mentioned a few paras ago. Yes, it is definitely time for another transitional time post.) In fact, it was the intro to that book that made me realize what had been happening with me over the past weekend--that habits I hadn't realized I'd formed were kicking in.

So, I've got the book, I'm going to be reading it, and I'll be posting here about what Duhigg has to say about habit that can be applied to the Situational Time Management program I've been discussing here. I may find that there's not a lot because it appears that only a third of the book is about the habits of individuals. Fortunately, it's the first third, so we should know soon.