Time Management Tuesday: What Are Your Bad Work Habits Doing For You?

My sister subscribes to numerous magazines that get passed on to me. Oprah is included. I find Oprah odd because it carries articles on how to be your best you along with others promoting purchasing quite expensive things. I feel there's a mixed message in there. Pricie stuff is inspiring? You can ignore that part, though, and just read the multiple pages on books the mag carries every month.

While I was making my way to the book section in the January issue, my eye was caught by some  lengthy material that seemed to be about dieting. Dieting is not managing time. However, remember that procrastination, a major aspect of time management, is a self-regulation issue and similar to overeating (as well as gambling and trouble with managing money). I've found that a lot that's written about these other problems with self-regulation can be used to address managing time.

Say, for instance, the shortie Oprah article Bad Habits? They're Actually Solutions. (Sorry, the Oprah Magazine website doesn't carry a lot of its print content, so no link for you.) Deborah Grayson Reigel is referred to in it. Grayson Riegel argues that bad habits are solutions we come up with for dealing with some other problem. They're just not very good ones. "Diet Coke provides energy when you're tired; fast food saves time when you're too overscheduled to plan, prepare, and cook a meal;" The trick is to identify the problem your bad habit is solving and then come up with something better to replace it.

A True Life Example From My True Life

Don't think this bad-habits-as-solutions-to-problems business can possibly relate to time management? When I read that article, I immediately recognized a former bad habit in myself. And, of course, I'm about to tell you all about it.

I used to spend an hour to an hour and a half in the morning going to a couple of news sites and Salon and then playing several hands of on-line solitaire before I started to work. I would often play solitaire until I won. A couple of times. This was pre-Facebook and Twitter, by the way. I rationalized this by describing it as being part of my pre-writing process. I needed this to relax. Then I would work, work, work.

I was unable to shake that behavior until I was working on the Time Management Tuesday project and started reading about transitional time. Transitional time is that time we need to move from one project/activity to another, especially if it requires a big mental shift. Spots of transitional time occur off and on all day. If you work outside the home, you need to transition to the workplace once you get there and then transition again when you get back home after work. If you've ever dealt with kids getting home from school, you've probably seen big transition issues with either unpleasant behavior or exhaustion.

In my particular case, that bad morning work habit wasn't so much about procrastination as it was about difficulty making the transition to work. I was able to replace all that on-line reading and game playing with fifteen minutes of office clean-up each day. I seem to like that and appreciate the benefit. It got something positive done, and I was able to slip into work afterward.

This past year, I tried replacing the fifteen minutes of office clean-up with a twenty-minute writing sprint. Disaster. Everything fell apart, and I was back to a troubled transition. I'm doing office administration again now and much happier with it.

I still need to come up with a new behavior for the end of the work day, when I tend to blow off time checking out various sites on-line. This month I'm trying to "reward" myself for the end of the workday with a short yoga practice. I've been having trouble fitting that into my life, anyway, and I find transition time to be one of the few ways we really "find" time that we can do something with. Jumping up from the computer to get onto the yoga mat may take care of my afternoon transition.

So, think about your bad work habits. You know you have at least one. What is it actually doing for you and how can you replace it with something better that will do the same job?
 

Time Management Tuesday: Trying To Remember What We're Supposed To Be Doing

Last year I did a Time Management Tuesday post on Remembering That We Were Going To Practice Self-discipline. It was an argument that the self-discipline required to manage time required remembering that we have time management/self-discipline plans.

I remembered the memory aspect of time management last week as I tried to move forward in getting back to work after weeks of being off my game due to a nearly month-long cold, a retreat week, and surgery preparation and recovery. How many things I was I doing back before this whole thing started.

I remembered the unit system first, both sprinting and the forty-five minute segments, which was hugely helpful. Then I recalled my plan to limit reactive, noncreative work to Fridays in order to prevent things like marketing from taking over all my work time. This week I remembered that I use some morning transitional time to maintain my office. Unfortunately, it's been a while since I've done that. Planning fell apart at the end of December, and while I do recall it from time to time, I haven't been able to get back to that, either.

Managing time does require remembering a lot.

I had my best workday in weeks yesterday, spending multiple units on one big writing project. And I managed a sprint over the weekend on a new essay I started last week. On Saturday I also dragged Computer Guy into helping me with some reactive work. Remembering the unit system, sprinting on weekends, and keeping reactive work out of the workweek all figured in to what I've been able to do in the last week or so.

Time Management Tuesday: A Break To Remind Ourselves About Transition Time

I have to take a break from my quest for discipline because my next step on that search is reading Kelly McGonigal's The Willpower Instinct, which I just picked up today. I haven't learned to manage time so well that I can have it read by midnight, forget about giving it any thought.

So while we're waiting for me to see if there's anything in The Willpower Instinct that we can use, I'm going to refer you to one of last year's posts about transition time. Why? Because if I ever become self-disciplined, it's one of the things I hope to get control of. I'm not doing much better with it now than I was when I wrote about it back in July of last year.

I  find it interesting that I  see so little written about transition time. This post from Attack Your Day is the best thing I found today, and it's what I found last year, too. I sometimes see a bit written about it in reference to groups needing to spend time moving from one activity another, but there's not much out there on individuals losing time while they're making transitions from morning routine to work, work to evening routine, etc.

Time Management Tuesday: Transitional Time And The Cluttered Office

A few years back, I read that people often waste/loose time during transitions. Transitions occur when you're moving from one project/activity to another, especially if it requires a big mental shift. Getting started in the morning is a transition from sleep to day. Getting your work day started requires a transition. Ending the work day requires a transition.

Transitional time is probably another example of the importance of beginnings and endings, only in this case not so much because of being excited about starting something new or being discouraged at the end of a unit of time. Just the opposite, in fact. With transitional time, we're talking about the difficulty of changing to a new thing. We're not excited about it or maybe feeling much of anything at all.

Over the years I've had periods when I had a long "pre-writing ritual" each morning involving checking my e-mail, hitting two news sites and a couple of on-line magazines, and then playing a few hands of some kind of computer solitaire. When I'm wrapping up work late in the afternoon, instead of shutting down and heading off for some life maintenance task (making dinner, for instance), I'll often check news sites again because something might have happened during the day, right? Then there's the whole issue of getting up off the couch in the evening and heading to bed. That can take me a good thirty minutes.

Those are all transitional times. I'm making the transition into work, from work into personal time, from personal time to bed. And it's rarely productive.

One of the few ways we can actually "find" some time is to make better use of transitions. Recently, I've been using the unit system during my morning transition into work. I give myself a fifteen-minute unit of time to work on decluttering my desk, which we've been talking about recently. I definitely can't give a multi-hour block of time to this. But fifteen minutes a day over a week is an hour and a quarter. If I ever finish, I can continue to use my morning transition to keep the desk under control. Or, perhaps, to work on emptying my e-mail in- and out-baskets. Yeah, I have trouble with that, too.

I haven't been able to get the transition at the end of the work day under control yet, but someone who can might prefer to use that time for de-cluttering the desk. That's recommended by many clutter/time management experts, though I find it a rough time to try to do that, myself.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been trying to use the personal time to bed transition to do ten-minutes of house pick up. I was getting into that, but I found I was having trouble sleeping. Could be co-incidence. My family is littered with troubled sleepers. I'm wondering, though, if the surge of activity so late in the day is over-stimulating. I will keep you posted.