GTFU, Part Two: Time Study
This is the second in a series of Get the Fuck Unstuck© articles I've written based on a popular workshop I've been teaching for several years. (The first article can be found here.) The purpose of this series is to help you methodically uncover the things that are getting in the way of your creative and professional goals, and ultimately, to create a plan to move past them and on to the success you deserve.
In the previous article, we outlined some of the big "Time Sucks and Energy Vampires" in your life -- the big things that take up significant amounts of time, that may be roadblocks between where you are now and where you want to be. In this article, we take it a step further, and go a degree more granular, with an exercise called a Time Study.
In essence, you'll be using or creating an hourly calendar that looks a bit like a day planner. But, rather than filling it out in advance, you'll be filling it out as you go through your day. Typically just one, two or three days will be enough. By the end of the time study, you'll have a much clearer idea of how you are spending your time each day, based on methodical observation rather than guesswork.
Worth Your Time
Some people question the need for doing a time study, and I'm sympathetic to that point. It does take a bit more effort throughout a few days, rather than just a few minutes all in one burst. And in some cases, folks already are paying careful attention to their time. If you're someone who is already deep in the world of Dayminder or Bullet Journal; or if your Google Calendar is equal parts art and science, maybe this exercise is collecting data you already have.
But the exercise is here for a few reasons. The first is what we might call "the hidden value of 15 minutes", which applies to everyone, but especially to people who truly are incredibly busy and spread thin. If you're someone who is being pulled in five different directions at once, and every day when you're finally getting to bed, you realize that you didn't get any work done on your creative projects, finding just 15 more minutes a day can be life-changing. In some cases, folks who are very busy can, after completing a time study, see a few places where they can move things around even just a little. If you go from having zero minutes a day, to having fifteen or thirty minutes a day, available to work on your writing, you've gone from a dead stop to forward movement. That alone is huge.
The second is what a reality check and wake-up-call the Time Study can be. I've had clients who insist they are wall-to-wall busy and have no time to work on their projects... until they complete a time study. It's very easy to have blocks of time scattered throughout our day where we're honestly not doing as much as we think we are. You might've made a plan to do something at 8 AM, another at 10 AM and something else at Noon, and thinking back, you'd say "my morning was jam-packed." But, if you'd completed a time study, you might actually realize that you were pretty free from 9:45 to 10, and there was an embarrassingly long stretch in the late morning that you spent going down the instagram rabbit hole before noon.
If you're like me, you may have moments filling out the time study where you're actually embarrassed, and tempted to omit things you spent time on that were, shall we say, less than ideally productive. It can make you cringe when you write down that you spent 35 minutes on twitter, or 20 minutes online shopping, or whatever little things you do throughout the day that you don't really think much about. Writing these things down forces us to confront the reality underlying the story we often tell ourselves, that we don't have a single speck of free time in our days, and our chance at success is completely outside our control.
(On the other hand, you may complete the time study and really, truly, honestly see that there is not even a tiny scrap of time anywhere with which to pursue your dreams. This may be enormously frustrating, but if that's the reality, that alone is some very valuable information.)
The purpose of this exercise is not to turn you into a mindless productivity automaton that never does anything relaxing or fun, and "optimizes" your life to squeeze useful work out of every waking second. Instead, it's about getting honest. Taking a real snapshot of how you are actually spending your time -- and that's it. What you choose to do with that information, what changes, if any, you decide to make with how you spend your time... that's a question for another day. Right now, we're just focused 100% on information gathering.
Exercise: Time Study.
Use the PDF here, or just a sheet of paper numbered from the hour you tend to wake up to the hour you tend to fall asleep. Don't over think this or let the perfect be the enemy of the good!
Each day, for 1-3 days, keep a detailed log or record of how you spend your time. As I mentioned above, even though this PDF looks sort of like a schedule from a day planner, this is not about making a plan in advance for how you'll spend your time. You're writing things down only after they've happened.
As you write things down, make note of anything you spent more than, say, five minutes on. Even things that seem trivial, not important, or even mildly embarrassing from a time-use perspective. If you spent time cleaning your desk for the fourth time this week, or scrolling Instagram mindlessly, write that down. In fact, the less you want to write something down, the more you really should write it down! If something is really making you cringe, put a star or highlight by it! It may have been a stumble today, but it's nothing short of an opportunity from a long-term, getting-the-fuck-unstuck perspective.
If you write things down throughout the day, the process will be both easier and more accurate. Sitting down at the end of the day to look over your calendar and try to remember what you did and exactly when is harder than you might expect. You'll find yourself trying to remember exactly when things happened and how long they took, which somewhat undermines the effectiveness of the exercise.
One method that works for my clients is to set an hourly alarm. On a smartphone, you can set a timer for an hour (or have Siri do it for you), and hit "Repeat" whenever it goes off. Of course, you have to remember to not only repeat the alarm, but then write down exactly what you spent your time doing, too. Remind yourself that it only takes maybe 30 seconds to jot down what you've done over the past hour or so.
When you're done with the Time Study sit down and reflect. Were there any surprises? Were there things that have been taking up more time in your day than you assumed? And, were there things that were hard to write down, or made you feel a little uncomfortable considering how much time they actually took up? If so, you're in good company -- nearly everyone who does this exercise has a similar experience. Don't beat yourself up about any of it. Really, pat yourself on the back: you're taking the time and energy to really look at what you're doing, which is both uncomfortable and important.
That's a wrap on the second article in this five-part series. Next week we'll change focus from the outside to the inside, and start to uncover the mental and emotional factors that often contribute to keeping creative professionals stuck.
The Seminar
The content of this series of articles is drawn from one of my most popular worship series, Getting the F*CK Unstuck©. I'm excited to announce that, In August 2021, I'll be offering this workshop over Zoom for the first time. If you're interested, click here for more details. Have a look at my free e-book, Telling Your Story In 60 Seconds. And, if you think you'd benefit from one-on-one coaching with me, I'd love to connect with you. You can find more information on my private coaching packages here.
