I am obsessed with figuring out how to manage my time and once I did…it unlocked my world. I know I am not alone in that feeling of everything piling up and the walls feel like they are closing in. I was the classic people pleaser and say yesser. I would smash everything I could into one day and then feel bad that I didn’t get everything done. I would lie awake and worry about the endless to do list and the things I didn’t accomplish. I would blame myself, feel massive guilt, and be quite hard on myself.
I have had a lot of conversations with all different types of people and the very thing that keeps coming up again and again is how overwhelmed and stressed out everyone is and that they feel like they have no time. What I have come to realize, is that WE are the ones who are putting the most pressure on ourselves. I realized this more than ever this year. I am not sure why, or how it came to me but it hit me smack in the face. I would hear people saying how stressed they were and when I asked them what was making them so stressed, it was all things that they had put on themselves. There were no boundaries for themselves, no time limit, no clear expectations but just trying to run around and trying to do it all. Most often, they couldn’t explain to me who was placing the pressure on them or the expectations but themselves. I was doing the exact same thing. I was the one lying awake in the middle of the night stressing myself out. I was the one creating the to do list, not setting boundaries, and pressuring myself. I was the one making decisions that would place more stress on myself and saying yes to everything. No one else was but me.
I know we all have jobs and expectations placed on us. But the truth is, we tend to place even more expectations and pressure on top of that. We are our own worst enemies. We do this to ourselves. I decided that needed to change for me. Here’s what I did:
I wrote out all of the things that were stressing me out. I got very granular. I had things on my list like fundraising for kids sports, house is messy, getting into teacher’s classrooms to team teach, hiring a teacher, eating right, etc.
Next, I analyzed each one of them to see if it was me actually placing the pressure on myself or if it perhaps was an outside source. I separated them into two columns labeled Me and Someone Else. There were things on my list that were in the someone else column but I was the one making it worse by stressing out about it. The expectations they had for me were not actually as much as I had for me. If they were in the someone else column, I wrote down very quickly the deadline and the expectation. If it was in the me column, I did the same.
The third thing I did was prioritize the top three things only. I looked at what needed to be done first, what was most important to me, and what would make me feel better if I just got it done.
I set boundaries on how much time, expectations, pressure and worry I would place on each item. I am in control of how I spend my day and so I have to ensure that I actually take that control back in my mind as well. I also set up a habit of setting up my day the night before and time blocking the three things into my day. Marie Forleo, author of Time Genius, states that we need to take some lessons from bartenders. They get to work an hour before their job and set up their stations. They do this because they are anticipating the busy that is coming and the type of things they need to prepare so they can make the most of their time and have the biggest profit. I now set up my day the night before by having my energy drink ready to go, workout clothes out, calendar time blocked, kid’s stuff by the door, lunch packed, coffee station set up, school bag packed. I do this at my work as well so that I walk in ready and very clear on how I will control my day.
The last thing I did was I found moments and things that make me happy and I started to actually do them. Take some time to pour into those experiences and moments that light you up outside of work from the get-go. Make it part of the fabric of how you do business. Make sure you also shine a light on things that are important to you outside of work. So find moments, even just a few here and there, where you can make the time for those things. Don’t lose them on your journey to building a successful career.
I felt so much shame around all the things that I didn’t do in a day. Just from changing my own internal narrative about time and the pressure I was putting on myself, instantly made me so much happier and lighter. That’s why I’m so passionate about this. I am in control, and I get to take ownership of my life. I’m not at the mercy of some imaginary time boss. I can do hard things and then put them away to enjoy my life. The simple mantra, “I am in control of my day,” has completely changed my relationship with time and lightened my stress.
Marie Forleo also taught me to catch myself when I would find myself saying, “I can’t do this.” She says to ask yourself, who told you to say yes to this? Who told you to apply for that promotion? Who decided that you wanted to be the team manager, social coordinator, be a principal of a school, and run a side business? Oh….I did…You are the one that made all these choices. So now here’s your opportunity. You can either complain about that and victimize yourself, or you can say, ‘Oh, if I created a lot of this chaos, that means I am powerful enough to uncreate it” (Forleo, 2022).
There is so much freedom to realizing that you are the driver of this chaos. Unpack that feeling and think of some small changes you might make to lighten the load. Think about how you unwire the pattern of over promising, overdoing, overgiving. By doing this, it will open of a power of staying organized, having clarity, and a feeling that you have more time. When we say there is not enough time, we literally train our brains to think that way and create that reality. Your brain believes what you tell it. There is enough time, you just have to create that reality and tell your brain that. Start to bring a conscious awareness to your unconscious programming around time. It is wild what most of us believe. This deep work makes you accountable for your decisions on how you spend your time. You have to make the decision that you are not going to allow yourself the indulgence of that toxic emotional space, because it can take over and destroy your joy, your creativity, and your days. So I don’t do that to myself anymore.
I don’t want to place guilt on myself either. I don’t want to use overwhelm and stress as an excuse anymore to take away my joy. Forleo states that when you do this to yourself, you’re expressing your identity. You’re expressing your standards. And we feel like we are at choice. When we say, “I can’t”, no matter what it is, the moment we say those words we start to feel just a little restricted. We start to put ourselves in this place of feeling a little bit victimized, as though there’s some external authority or external circumstance that’s stopping us, so it doesn’t come from an empowered place (Porterfield and Forleo, 2022).
We have the ability to change the way we think about time and what we tell our brains. This will change our thoughts and our feelings. The more you let time dictate your schedule, the harder it will be to reel it in and stick to a schedule that feels good to you. I was that person who had so much guilt but I just don’t do that to myself anymore. I realized I am in control of my own time and everything changed. The best part, I became more joyful and had more time to do what I really wanted to do.
For a free guide on how to start up and shut down your day, click here! Have you joined our private facebook group called Principals and Leadership yet?
Porterfield, Amy, and Marie Forleo. Why Time Stress is Crippling Your Success, edited by Amy Porterfield, Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast, 22 Sept. 2022.
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