A friend forwarded me an article that she thought I’d be interested in about why we’re so bad at planning our time.
She’s right, I was interested.
It spoke of something that I realized a few years ago and was a huge factor in why I had some time management problems at the time and when working for someone else.
It’s the assumption that I had 40 hours to do my WORK.
But it’s just not true.
By the time you count the time spent in:
- daily meetings (we had a standing daily morning meeting)
- other meetings
- time spent checking and responding to email
- bathroom breaks
- chat/conversations with co-workers
- phone calls with clients
- handling the things that just pop up during the day
- setting priorities for the day/week/month
Well, you’re lucky if that leaves you with 25 hours to actually do WORK for the week.
That doesn’t even take into account things like deciding that you’re going to write a blog post for the week and estimating that it will take you 30 minutes to write it. But you’ve forgotten to account for the time it will take to do make it an email or publish it to your blog or coming up with a catchy (yet descriptive) title and any other little details that go into it that make that 30-minute task closer to an hour (or more).
In this week’s Wednesday LIVE with Evie, below, I talk about this.