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One recent weekend I attempted to whittle down my inbox. Five hours later, I had nailed maybe 15 percent of my unread mail. Some of this stuff actually requires a thoughtful response! I vowed that I would respond only to the most pressing emails, but everything seemed pressing. The question became, whom will I make wait for a reply?
I'm the girl who always cleaned her plate as a child, who never let any peas go unappreciated. The thought of unread email is like throwing out perfectly good peas. There are people starving in China, and contacts who are waiting for replies! Blowing people off kills me. Unread email gives me agita.
The point is: my organizing system isn't working for me. I need to absorb information that is less immediate but equally important to my job and my life, and I need to build in time for the projects that demand less of my attention but require attention nonetheless, such as research and blogging.
And I have to be able to put it all down when it's time for dinner.
There's a strange irony in the fact that while I'm struggling to find time for personally fulfilling tasks, I will always find time to read anything--from books to playing cards--that relate to time management. Along with quick glances at my horoscope and ego feeds, if I catch the word "time management" online I'll check it out. Some people follow sports, Britney, or politics; I follow organized people.
I was sent Jennifer Louden's book The Life Organizer: A Woman's Guide to a Mindful Year and approached it like I do most reads: by placing it on the pile of "Definitely want to read" titles that have been gathering dust. I have an inefficient sense of fairness about books; I try to read them in the order I receive them, often neglecting the inner voice that knows which books I really want to read.
This Sunday I said to hell with it and picked up Jennifer's book; this act in itself was meaningful, because it illustrated much of what the book is about, letting my inner voice manage my time.
Now before I suffer your eye-rolling please understand that I know every single caveat you have about this approach. We can't like everything we do--there are things we have to do whether we like them or not. I may not like paying my bills, for example, or sending invoices to advertisers, but if I don't do this I won't have cash flow. Understood.
But taking a more internally driven approach to time management takes away much of the stress that comes from feeling controlled by our to-do lists--from the fear that we are losing our original intent in our quest to stay on top of things. Frankly, being off-course on my personal compass is far more stressful than not reading all of my email, though I've rationalized this stress as silly and continue to flip through the many requests being made, refusing to acknowledge the screaming in my head to please, PLEASE stop typing.
I don't have answers about how to manage it all. Getting really, really sick seems to do the trick, but that strikes me as drastic. But there are a few things that I've found help in the ongoing quest to manage my time:
1. Get others involved in your plans.
I told my husband that I would keep our dinners and several nights per week sacred. The first few times I fudged on this promise. As we sat there on the couch honoring our sacred time together, I couldn't help thinking, "I could SO knock out a few emails during re-runs of the Sopranos". Then rationalizing: "These are re-runs for Chrissakes, why give this show my undivided attention?" Then saying to my husband: "I thought that we would actually DO something, not just sit here."
This lesson was not learned before my husband had to literally kick me out of the house. "Go take a walk," he said. "Now. Goodbye." Don't let it get to this.
Now I understand that the point is not to trade off one productive activity for another, but rather to decompress. Who cares about what you could accomplish if you were not sitting on your butt, enjoying the less cerebral aspects of life? The point is to trust that there's value in decompression.
My friend and fellow BlogHer Contributing Editor Britt Bravo made a point of getting a few of us bloggers together with Deb Roby to
