Is your schedule chaotic? Mine often is. It feels like most months I try some new method to get control of the whole thing. The repeated need for this testifies to my success! So the question is, how do you establish a routine whilst managing a chaotic schedule?
It is well documented that establishing consistency is essential to covering any ground at all towards achieving our goals.
Whether it is meeting requests, the unpredictable demands of family life, phone calls, emails, lack of sleep, poor planning, it feels like everything is conspiring against us in this. Our schedules are chaotic and they feel totally beyond our control. Most of us face this exact dilemma. There are just too many calls on the public purse so to speak.
Say you are trying to write a book or establish a blog for example. You’ll get nowhere with this if you don’t actually have time to sit down and write. And, as I often quote the Merovingian from the Matirx Films “If we do not take time how can we ever have time”.
This exact issue was raised is by someone I follow on Twitter. They are trying to write a book. Their schedule is chaotic. They had no idea how to bring these two things together. There are a few approaches to this dilemma that I have come across over the years.
Ian Fleming famously would closet himself at his Goldeneye resort. He would go there for months at a time and spend the larger proportion of his day hidden away and writing. Then there is the guy who spent thousands of dollars on a return flight to the other side of the world. It gave him roughly 15+ hours each way to write with no possibility of the normal distractions.
You see, here is the inescapable truth, if you want to get something done, you need to give time, attention and focus to it. For most people who want to write, this means you need to establish a writing routine.
But it isn’t just writing
There are many different things for each and everyone of us that this idea applies to. In fact, for most things that you want to achieve, the secret is to consistently and regularly give time to it. Here are a few ideas for you to consider.
- email and comms
- exercise
- time with family
- calling parents
- deep work on projects or coding etc.
- study, learning and self development
Whatever it is that you want to do or keep on top of, to establish a routine for how and when you will do it, is the only way I know of to succeed. Too many of us take the approach of hoping to get to something as and when you have time. You NEVER will.
I cannot stress this strongly enough. If you do not intentionally and specifically plan out, in advance, WHEN you will do something, then the opportune time to do it will never come along.
The question then becomes, how can I give time and focus to something, consistently, when my schedule is chaotic?
The chaotic schedule
When we say chaotic what we really mean is either unpredictable or uncontrollable. i.e. we cannot predict what we will need to do and when and we cannot control what we need to do and when. Honestly, this isn’t true. No matter your position and role and life (and I actually mean that) there is always quite a lot that you can do to in order to deal with this. They might not be things you want to do or things you are prepared to do. They might be things that have significant consequences that are so costly that they are not worth it. But, the option is there.
So, I say, your schedule is not as chaotic as you think.
Where does the chaos come from?
The chaos we feel normally comes from one of two directions and they both have a similar root cause.
The first is there actually being too many demands on your time.
You have 24 hours a day. That’s fixed and that you cannot change. So, if you have more than 24 hours worth of stuff, including things like sleep and eating and going to the toilet, then you have a problem.
Most of us feel chaotic as we feel like there is more to do than we have time to do. Actually, there are a few things that contribute to us feeling this way but we will get to that.
Next up, we have the desire to please.
Things get unpredictable and uncontrollable when new stuff, or immediate stuff, starts to take precedence over the existing stuff on our plate.
The meeting request comes in and we say yes without thinking. The email pings for our attention and we drop everything to read and respond. We are in the middle of a household task and we see something else that needs to be done so we stop what we are doing and attend to that. On the way to dealing with that, we notice something else so we again drop the task in hand to deal with the new input.
It’s not the only cause, but often in a work environment one of the main causes of this reactive approach is the desire to please others. So whatever comes at us, we drop everything and focus on it. It’s a chaotic way to go about your work.
My caveat to this is to say the the desire to serve and be helpful is inherently good. But, for everything we pick up to help someone, we end up dropping something else which may be unhelpful to someone else. I am reminded of the time that a friend left me stranded outside a pizza takeout with two pizzas going cold for over an hour as he opted to give someone else a lift a home and they lived 35 minutes away.
The only way to establish a routine whilst managing a chaotic schedule
In truth, there is no complicated answer to this conundrum. The answer is very simple. And it’s kind of a brute force approach.
If you think about, the only thing you can do is establish your boundaries.
If you look at the list below, everything on it is about establishing boundaries. Some of these are natural boundaries that you just need to identify and accept. Others are focus boundaries that you need to decide and maintain.
1. Know your limits
The first step to taking control of a chaotic schedule is to know your limits. Also known as, understand and accept the natural boundaries that you have. All of us have at least three of these.
- Time. Your time is not infinite. At the ‘macro’ level of our finite earthly life, none of us will live forever. So, at the macro level, the reality is that what we can achieve in our lifetime is limited. At the more micro level, you have 24 hours in a day. That is fixed for us all.
- Energy. In the same way, your energy is a finite resource. This in turn means that some of that limited time has to be used in order to replenish your energy. If you assume the average of 8 hours of sleep per day and 90 minutes or so as a minimum required for food prep and consumption, you reduce your supply of time to 14.5 hours per day. But, we all know that if we try to keep going to 15+ hours a day, every day, it is not going to work. Your energy is finite. If we do not recognise this, our body will bring it to our attention in ways we do not like and cannot ignore.
- Focus. This is linked to energy. Whilst physically, we might be able to keep going for 10-15 hours in any given day, mentally we cannot focus that long without a massive drop in cognitive output. i.e. the quality of our work will drop and our efficiency will too.
We know these things are limited. Each and every person reading this will be able to agree with me. But yet we often operate as if they are not true. Somehow they don’t apply to us. OR, more likely, they do apply to us but use that classic line Next week things will slow down. So we say yes, yes and yes again.
Any parent will know the difficulty of teaching your children to share. Sharing is good. But, let me give you an example.
Suppose a friend is going through a difficult day and you offer to buy him a packet of his favourite biscuits. You buy a packet of 20 chocolate hobnobs (arguably the greatest biscuit ever invented) and set off to your friend’s house.
Along the way you bump into people you know and some ask for a biscuit. Your friend wont need all 20 and so you have some to spare. Others don’t ask but they clearly need one and they are your friend too. So you share with them as well.
When your friend hears the doorbell ring and opens it he is greeted by you and an empty packet of biscuits. You had a finite amount of biscuits to share out. You gave them all away leaving none for your friend.
Time, energy and focus are the same. You want to have time to write, but if you give your time to other things, you will eventually run out leaving none left to write your book.
2. Be realistic about how long things take
My experience is that we tend to look at ourselves as if we are Superman and will get green lights all the way. So whatever we set our minds and hands to do, we will be to do it in the minimum amount of time possible and nothing will disrupt this.
So, if my commute takes 7 minutes on a perfect run, we allow 5 minutes and expect to still be on time.
This is the second part of the natural boundary equation. The first – know how much time you have. The second – know how much time things will need. Then it is just simple maths.
A more realistic approach when allocating time to something in our modern world is to determine how long you expect something to take, then add on another quarter to a half as a minimum.
How not to deal with this…
One of the ways we try to get round the natural boundary of how much time we have is just by reducing the amount of time we allocate to everything. So, I have 8 hours of time today and 30 things to do so each thing gets 16 minutes. But if each of those things requires 30 minutes in truth, then 14 of them need to go.
Don’t kid yourself that you can do it all.
But, I hear you say….all of them need to be done! I hear you and I understand. But if doing them all is impossible you have a problem.
And this is where humility comes in. As a Christian, I put it to us all that our views on our own time, the importance of the work that we do and the necessity we place on much of these things suggests a lack of humility. We just think of ourselves more highly than we ought in this regard.
And so, we come to the key part of this.
3. Develop a system
I won’t say much here. I need to include it though as the next two parts hinge on this.
One of the reasons things feel chaotic for us is because we just are not clear on what we have to do, what we are committed to and what we are responsible for.
Indeed, you cannot make any decisions on your priorities, with any degree of confidence, if you are not at least reasonably convinced that you have an accurate picture of what’s on your plate. This means a reasonably accurate ‘inventory’ of what you need to and want to achieve and also an understanding of what each of those things is.
But don’t get obsessive here. Humility again. You will never develop a system that gives you perfect knowledge of everything you need to know.
So don’t try.
4. Set your priorities
“Life is like a box of chocolates….you never know what you’re gonna get!”
A famous line that is totally inconsistent with my life experience.
Every single box of chocolates presented to me, that I can remember, has pictures of the chocolates and a reasonable description of each telling me what to expect. All that remains is for me to examine that and then make a choice.
Most days will throw something unexpected at you to varying degrees of severity, I accept this. Some things life throws at you cannot be anticipated and are major life changing events. This requires a whole post in an of itself.
However, the vast majority of our lives are not really like that.
Your system for managing your work/life/time operates a little bit like that sheet on the box of chocolates. It tells you what is there and what’s involved, all that remains is for you to make a choice.
Most of us fall down because we don’t have a system and we don’t make any choices.
So, to revert to the issue at hand of being able to write a book….make a choice. Make writing a priority.
If exercise is something that you want to do, make that choice. If it’s keeping on top of communication or calling your parents every week or spending time with children, whatever it is, identify it, understand it and make a choice.
But, what does it mean to make a choice? What does it mean to set a priority? You cannot say yes to anything without also saying no to other things. And so, the strength of your commitment to whatever you choose as a priority is only seen in the boundaries you set up to protect it.
4. You MUST set boundaries
You must set boundaries in terms of the total things you take on.
There is no point in saying that writing is my priority if we have also agreed to 10 meetings. We cannot prioritise a client project if we also have 15 other projects on the go at the same time. Given our natural limits outlined above, the first step to making a choice and setting a priority is saying no to other commitments that might threaten this.
The principle of love and servant heartedness requires us to be a little flexible on how protective we are, but these principles work both ways. If a friend was recently bereaved of their father and we offered to go round to see them, it would not be loving to declare on arrival that we only had 10 minutes as we had also agreed to help someone else move house. There is no hard and fast rule here but we have to realise that being loving will sometimes mean flexing our boundaries and at other times it will mean guarding them.
You must set boundaries in terms of your routines. For someone who wants to be consistent in exercise, writing, focussed work, handling their communications anything like that, protecting your routines is critical. Whatever it is, you need to mark out time for that thing, consistently and then guard it ferociously.
If you want to establish a writing routine, for example, you might decide to write for 2 hours every day, or write for 3 hours but only 4 times a week. Those would be reasonable plans. If you aren’t going to visit a ranch for 6 months or take flight across the world, the most common way to write a book it is to establish a pattern or routine of writing time along these lines.
You have to then make the choice to protect it.
So, you plan to write for 2 hours every morning from 9am – 11am. Here is what you need to do:
- Schedule that time on your calendar.
- Do not book anything else during that time. If someone requests to meet you or asks you to do something, say no. Don’t treat it as less important because it is a commitment you have made to yourself. Remember, this is often the kind of thing that no-one will hold you to account for. They might hold you to account for delivering the results but not the method. If you were a teacher, no one would expect you to be available during lessons. But, as an office worker, they will not expect you to spend an hour each day responding to all the emails you get. They will expect you to keep on top of it.
- Restrict your availability during that time. This is the belt and braces of it and again, a point where we often fall down. We have no meetings planned but people pop in to see us or the phone rings or our devices bleep and blurp at us like a crazed R2-D2. Before you know it, your time is up, nothing has been achieved and you feel like that walk with the biscuits from the shop to your friend’s house was actually a run through seagull valley with an exposed plate of biscuits on your head! Restrict your availability. This means thinking through the actions you can take to protect your focus during your time slot. This might mean going to a library or cafe, or putting your phone on airplane mode or do not disturb.
How do we establish a routine whilst managing a chaotic schedule?
This is the only way. The only way is to establish your boundaries.
Determine the natural limits on your time, energy and focus. Understand what all the commitments and responsibilities that you have actually are. Make a choice on which of those commitments and responsibilities you are intending to give your time, energy and focus too.
Protect that choice.
Establish boundaries.
There is no other way that I know.
