Time Management Tuesday: The Impact Of Stress On Time Management

My family member the archivist has, for many years, been studying and preserving old television. For the last twenty months, he's also been the daytime caregiver for a baby, now toddler. Recently he said that he frequently can't work during toddler nap time, because he's worn out from the twenty-four hour a day stress of dealing with what a child should be eating, how he should be sleeping, whether or not he is sick, why he is crying, and keeping him safe and alive. When he gets a break because someone is napping, the archivist finds himself collapsing in front of the TV or with his phone. The stress of Dad Life often makes it difficult for him to take advantage of his small amounts of work time.

This was very interesting to me, because I had just experienced a drop in my stress level after many years of dealing with another family member's illness. I had less to do, less hanging over my head, and less to worry about. Was this new lack of stress, I wondered, going to have some kind of positive impact on how I managed my time?

What Time Does To Stress Is Not The Same As What Stress Does To Time

I went out looking for information on this situation and didn't find much. There's a lot written on weak time management skills causing stress, but far less on stress causing a collapse in time management. One article I did find, How Stress Affects Your Work Performance by Christina Hamlett at the Houston Chronicle's website, deals with stress in traditional work places. A couple of points that could pertain to people who work for themselves:

1. Stress contributes to job burnout and strained relationships. What happens with people who work alone and have no relationships to strain? Maybe burnout was what was contributing to my family member collapsing during nap time instead of working. Or my struggle to get up in the mornings because here's another day of problems, what's the hurry? Or get up off the couch at night to go to bed.
2. Stress affects ability to remember things, evidently both short- and long-term, and makes you easily distracted. Do I have any new followers on Twitter this morning? I should look again this afternoon. Have any of my friends posted pictures on Facebook? Oops. Gotta go check my blog stats.
3. Stress pounds away at your health. It's hard to work if you're sick. Or going to the doctor. Or the pharmacy. Or using the Internet to research what's wrong with you, which kind of relates to what we were just talking about with being distracted. 

 

Some Why From The Time Management Tuesday Archives

Speaking of archives, as we were earlier,a few things we've talked about here at OC's Time Management Tuesday feature could relate to what's happening when we're stressed enough to blow up our ability to manage time.

• According to our old friend Kelly McGonigal in The Willpower Instinct, people who are distracted have poor impulse control and are less likely to be able to stay on long-term goals. Stressors...hugely distracting. And then there is the What-the-Hell Effect. In the case of people under stress, the more worn-out they get and less they do because of it, the worse they feel about their ability to get anything done and...What the Hell? They might as well watch TV during work time. They might as well stay in bed another half hour.
• Timothy Pychyl in The Procrastinator's Digest says that a big part of the reason procrastinators procrastinate is that they're giving in to the need to feel good immediately. Say what you want about social media, it can be an immediate feelgood. McGonigal also writes about how undermining feeling bad can be in The Upside of Stress. People who are shamed or frightened by their doctors over things like weight, smoking, or drinking, frequently engage in those behaviors even more, because now they feel bad. They're humiliated and frightened, and the quickest way to escape those feelings for them is eating, smoking, or drinking. Well, people under stress feel bad. Often for years, if the stressor is child rearing or eldercare. TV, bed, and the Internet are immediate feel goods. Work, not so much. This spring I've noticed people on Twitter tweeting that they're having a bad day and asking to see images of cats, because that will make them feel better. I'd rather look at celebrity gossip on my tablet while lying in bed in the morning or plastered to the couch at night, but to each of us our own immediate escape. 

 

So What?

Well, exactly. We've got some why, but can we do anything about stress's impact on our work time? I've got a couple of things in the OC archive that might help, and I've started a summer blog read,  The Upside of Stress, which I mentioned above. I know I've said I was reading it before, but I must have gotten distracted or stressed or something. I'm really reading it now.

More to come.

Time Management Tuesday: Your Mindset Can Impact Procrastination

Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson wrote a post at her website last winter on procrastination called How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don't Want To. Among her suggestions and my take on how they apply to writers:

Promotion vs. Prevention Focuses

A promotion focus encourages someone to work to better themselves. Will working today mean meeting a deadline or enable you to make a submission? Will studying today enhance the quality of your writing? Will just putting in time writing enhance the quality of your writing? That's all about promotion.

A prevention focus encourages someone to work to maintain what they have and prevent loss. Will working today help me to maintain my tenuous place on the writing career ladder? Will it help me to stay published? That's about prevention.

Halvorson argues that choosing a focus can keep you working.

Do You Have To Feel Like Working In Order To Work?

This is a question of particular interest to writers and other creatives because there is a stereotype that we have to be inspired in order to work. There are muses that are supposed to visit us. Personally, I think this is a very old-fashioned attitude, at least as far as creative people are concerned. I never hear it from published writers or anyone serious about publishing. Actually, I only hear it from people who don't do creative work, and even then rarely. I don't hear about writer's block, either. The realities of publishing have moved most of us past that.

If-Then Planning

Timothy Pychyl also talks about if-then statements, calling them implementation intentions.  You plan ahead to deal with problem situations--form an intention and plan how you'll implement it. I, for instance, plan to keep working until a timer goes off. Halvorsan says, "...if-then plans dramatically reduce the demands placed on your willpower... In fact,  if-then planning has been shown in over "200 studies to increase rates of goal attainment and productivity by 200%-300% on average."

Time Management Tuesday: Taking On Procrastination

Okay, my lads and lasses, today I am finally taking on the subject of procrastination. No, I have not been procrastinating about doing so. I have been studying the subject. Back in October, I began to wonder if what a lot of us call procrastination had become a catch-all term. According to Timothy Pychyl who maintains the blog Don't Delay at Psychology Today and is the author of the very fine book The Procrastinator's Digest A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, I was right. According to Pychyl, procrastination is not just "putting off work for whatever reason," as I stated here in October. It's not just waiting until the last minute and working madly to catch up. It is more than a habit.

Pychyl says that true procrastination "is the voluntary delay of an intended action despite the knowledge that this delay may harm the individual in terms of the task performance or even just how the individual feels about the task or him- or herself. Procrastination is a needless voluntary delay." It has a very specific definition within psychology.

True procrastination, Pychyl explains, is a self-regulation issue. Individuals are not regulating their behavior in order to achieve goals, meaning they are risking not achieving those goals. He doesn't describe procrastination as a time management problem. Instead, it's similar to gambling, drinking, overeating, and trouble managing money. Real procrastination, the hardcore stuff, involves individuals choosing to do something that will, essentially, harm them, meaning not doing the work toward a goal that would benefit them. You can procrastinate about going to the doctor, getting started on a diet, working on a book, submitting writing to an agent or publication.

All these things have value to the individual who wants to do them. Thus, choosing not to do these things is harmful.

A big part of the reason procrastinators procrastinate is that they're giving in to the need to feel good immediately. Yes, loosing forty pounds would make my health better six months from now, but if I eat three cookies now, I'll feel good immediately, so I'll put off starting the diet until tomorrow. Yes, finishing writing this book I've been working on would be a very positive thing because my editor has already voiced interest in it, but feeling good about finishing that won't happen for a couple of months and I can feel good about talking with some friends on Facebook right now.

Pychyl's book is extremely well organized and clearly written. He discusses various aspects of procrastination and strategies for change. Procrastination is much, much more than just a time management issue. However, I think there is one classic time management technique that writers could combine with one of Pychyl's strategies in a very helpful way.

Pychyl talks about implementation intentions. Essentially,  with implementation intentions you're planning ahead what you're going to do in specific situations. (And you know how I love the whole situational thing.) He suggests using an "if-then" format for phrasing the intention you plan to implement. You've heard these kinds of things before relating to other behaviors that require self-regulation. "If I'm going to a party, then I will eat something before I leave so I won't get there hungry and overeat." "If I'm meeting friends at the casino, then I'll only bring $30 of gambling money so I won't risk losing more than I can afford."

Writers concerned about procrastinating can try combining an implementation intention with the unit system. "If I want to stop working while the timer is on, then I'll wait until it goes off."  There are two helpful aspects to this scenario: 1. We've talked about relatively short units of time here, under an hour. So if  procrastinators have to rely on their intention to get them through the unit, they shouldn't have to work long to make it to the end. 2. The break between units can serve as a reward. Whatever they do in the break can make procrastinators feel good now, and they can also feel good because their intention worked for them.

This feeling good thing is important because Pychyl says procrastinators often suffer self-esteem issues over procrastinating. So another plus I see with using the unit system to help procrastination is that if people can't make it through the short unit, they've lost only a small amount of time, and they can start again the same day.  The unit system gives many opportunities over the course of a day to meet the implementation intention, feel good, and actually get some work done.

The Procrastinator's Digest is a marvelous book. If you have an e-reader, you can get it dirt cheap.

Time Management Tuesday: Starting Down The Self-Discipline Road

I'm searching for self-discipline, in my undisciplined way. While I'm not discovering a lot written on self-discipline, I'm finding more on self-control. Psychology Today, for instance, maintains a blog on the subject. What I'm finding, both at the PT blog, Don't Delay, and elsewhere is that writing on self-control often relates to dealing with problems, such as over-eating, smoking, etc. and not some kind of development of over all self-control.

I guess you could say that the self-discipline/self-control aspect of time management that I'm interested in also deals with problems--problems with staying on task, putting off work, and organizing time, for starters. These past few months I've sometimes thought about managing time in terms of budgeting, the way we think of money, another common control problem. Mainly what I've thought is that we can't budget and save time for use in the future, the way we can money. (Or maybe we can. Hmm. I will have to think about that for a future post.)

Some recent posts from the PT blog Don't Delay that might be of interest to us:

Self-Control Is More Than Strength and Brute Resistance--Dr. Timothy Pychyl, Don't Delay's keeper, writes about Backsliding: Understanding Weakness of Will . He talks about "skilled resistance" and "applying particular self-control skills in particular situations." Yes! Yes! I want to find skills I can learn!

External Supports for Your Willpower--This post is about "extended will" and "distributed willpower" and how people support their willpower by "offloading" some of their mental work/working memory to their environment. An example is using writing for creating lists. I assume breaking your work into 45-minute units, as we discussed earlier this year, and using a timer to do that is another because you are relying on something outside your mind--the timer and even the concept of the unit, perhaps--to assist you.