Ahh, fresh laundry! Time to put all these clothes away, you think to yourself as you merrily open your closet, proud of a task well-done, only to be met by an avalanche of hand bags and sweaters tumbling down from the upper shelf. “Oh, not again!” you cry out. As you duck out of the way of the seemingly endless barrage, you trip over a runaway sneaker, dropping the basket of clean laundry, all over the floor.
That’s it. I’ve had it. Enough is enough, you tell yourself. It’s time to get real. You spend the remainder of the afternoon purging outstretched T-shirts you never wear, purses you never use, old shoes with worn heels, and outdated looks. You spend 5 straight hours digging through the mess and making bold decisions , and by the time you’re done: you’re happy with everything you own; your clothes are hung up with enough space between each hanger you so can see everything clearly; your shoes are neatly paired; your top shelf is decidedly avalanche-proof; and you’re confident that the next time you open your closet, you stand no risk of losing an eye or breaking an ankle. Finally, sweet relief.
That is, until the phone rings. It’s your friend Sally calling to ask if you want to join her and the gang for a Hamilton watch party on July 3rd. “100%, I’m in!” You confirm. You open up your planner to jot it in, only to realize you have a doctor’s appointment scheduled for the exact same time. Not wanting to disappoint Sally, you call the doctor to reschedule, only to find that the sole remaining appointment for the next two months is the same afternoon you're scheduled to do carpool pick-up. You schedule the appointment anyway, and make a note to call around to the other moms in the pool to see if someone can switch with you. Yikes! A simple scheduling oversight has now become a full blown logistical nightmare, costing you over an hour in stress and panicked phone calls.
Just as a disorganized space can cost us time and energy, so too can a disorganized schedule. In truth, we tend to squander a staggering amount of time each week mismanaging our appointments and to-dos, optimistically overbooking ourselves and trying to jam things in where they don’t fit, only for everything to come crashing down around us. Week after week, we find ourselves forced to scramble at the last minute to reschedule projects and plans, trying to figure out what we can afford to cancel or put off.
The Trouble With Managing Time
In the journey from chaos to order, people often find it easier to organize space than time, because space is something you can actually see. Stacks of papers, piles of clothing, and shelves full of knick knacks are visible. You can pick things up and move them around in your space to see how they fit. You can easily see when your plate (or your closet) is too full.
Time on the other hand, is completely invisible. It’s something you feel and it feels … utterly amorphous.
How long is a day? Well, that depends on your energy and how much sleep you had.
How long is an hour? Well, if you’re doing something you love, it whizzes by; but if you’re caught up in something dreadful, it crawls painfully along.
How long will a given task take? Well, that depends on how you feel about it. Hate doing the dishes? It must take an hour. Love surfing the net? Easy, it’ll only take ten minutes.
As long as time remains slippery and elusive, you will have difficulty managing your days. To be successful, you need to change your perception of time. You need to learn to see time in more visual, measurable terms.
Think of Your Schedule Like a Closet
In my own journey to getting organized, my biggest breakthrough came when I realized that organizing time really is no different than organizing space. Essentially, just as your closet is a limited space into which you can only fit so many items, a schedule is a limited number of hours into which you can only fit a certain number of tasks. Just as every pair of shoes you place in your closet takes up a certain amount of room, each task takes up a certain amount of time.
Once you learn to see time like you see space, you recognize that there are quantitative limits to the time you have available. Just as your closet has a finite capacity, each week gives us just 168 hours to get things done. When your closet is too full, you must choose to keep one pair of shoes over another. When your schedule is too full, you must choose to keep one task over another. Changing your perception of time facilitates your ability to more effectively plan and prioritize your days.
When you start to see your schedule as a container, you begin to think of your to-dos differently. It’s no longer about whether you like or dislike a certain task, it’s about how long a task will take and the potential return on your investment. As such, it becomes critical that we learn to evaluate our to-dos quantitatively, in terms of their size (duration), rather than qualitatively, in terms of how we feel about them. Think about it: the size of your closet doesn’t change based on how you feel about your wardrobe. So why would the size of your schedule and to-dos? Just as we can tell whether an item will fit into our closet by its size, learning to estimate how long a task will take is the only way to know whether we can fit it into our schedules.
Ultimately, changing your perception of time is the key to good time management because it serves to unlock a series of other essential skills necessary to become the master of your own schedule. It is a pivotal, time-saving mindset shift that anyone can make, opening the doorway to time-estimating, prioritization, schedule management, and more. It all starts with making time tangible.
For more advice on how to change your perception of time and how to fit your to-dos into your schedule, see these helpful posts: