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Do you find yourself rushing around, perpetually late? Adding things to your to-do list just as fast as you check them off? If so, you may criticize yourself for being “bad” at time management. You may have read a thousand time management tips on how to “hack” your schedule to wedge more activities into your days but failed trying to implement them. This post is a counter to all those tips. Less hectic days are possible, but you need to employ realistic time management.
What is realistic time management? I’d define it this way: Objectively and accurately assessing how much time and energy various activities require vs. how much time and energy are available in a given day and making plans accordingly.
If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly running late and a little behind on tasks because you’re a time optimist. Maybe you don’t want to accept your limitations, or maybe you hate to let others down. (For me, it was both!) Either way, the result is perpetual disappointment as you fail to meet your own expectations.
Realistic time management is a counter to that optimism. It requires you to peel away your idealism and take an objective view of your commitments. To be honest, it’s not easy to shift your mindset in this way. But the payoff – peace of mind and a feeling of being on top of everything – is so worth it.
Reading this, you may be on board in theory but skeptical this can be put into practice. Modern life is just too hectic, right? Wrong! Read below for 10 practical tips for implementing realistic time management.
If this topic interests you, scroll to the bottom for a list of books I recommend for further reading to cultivate a realistic time management perspective.
5 Tips for Realistic Time Management
If you’ve been a time optimist your whole life thus far, how do you go about implementing realistic time management? Well, the first and most important step will be to change your perspective…
1. Adjust Your Expectations
This advice is similar to a previous post on time management and goals. If you want a really well-written wake-up call about realistic time management, check out Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, which I reference there.
Greg McKeown also gives some excellent examples of time optimism in his book, Essentialism. According to him, we “chronically underestimate how long something will really take.” He describes a colleague in terms that hit a little too close to home for me:
…she is perennially late and, to make matters worse, in a constant state of stress and guilt about it. She has been stuck in this cycle for so many years she no longer even recognizes that she lives in constant stress.
And since our entire society does this…
These days the pace of our lives is only getting faster and faster. It is as if we are driving one inch behind another car at one hundred miles an hour. If that driver makes even the tiniest unexpected move- if he slows down even a little, or swerves even the smallest bit- we’ll ram right into him. There’s no room for error. As a result, execution is often highly stressful, frustrating, and forced.
Sound familiar?
Realistic Time Expectations
McKeown’s solution was to add a 50% buffer to the time you naturally estimate. At first, I thought that was a little over the top. 50%? Isn’t that just leaving time on the table? Then I started trying it. And sure enough, all kinds of unexpected things delayed me. Yet no matter how often that happens, we still assume the best-case scenario the next time.
I realized I was resistant to the time buffer because I don’t like the idea of being early and just…sitting around. I should be doing something productive with that time! But it was exactly this attitude of time maximalism that was causing me so much stress. The fact is you don’t need to stuff every minute of your day with productive activities. And even if you want to, you’ll fail. The result is a constant state of panic.
So, your first step to realistic time management is to adjust your expectations. You cannot do it all every single day.
2. Do a Time Audit
One thing that will help you set more realistic time expectations is a time audit. I learned this strategy from Time Magic by Melissa Ambrosini and Nick Broadhurst. Check out that book for a more detailed explanation of a full-scale time audit.
The key idea is that you should actually measure how long various tasks take you. Most of us simply assume how long something will take. And as McKeown points out, our assumptions are way too optimistic. In Time Magic, Ambrosini gives the example of getting ready to leave the house. Before she had a child, she estimated 10 minutes to get her things and get out the door. Once she had a toddler, though, she found that she was perennially late. She realized she was still estimating 10 minutes to leave the house. When she did a time audit, it turns out it took 25 minutes with her daughter. From then on, she could plan her schedule based on that 25-minute estimate. And that solved her lateness issue.
How can you do a time audit yourself? Choose a day to experiment. Use the timer on your phone to time each activity throughout the day and note the results. And when I say each activity, I mean each activity. How long does it take you to get out of bed after your alarm goes off? To get dressed for work? To make and eat breakfast? You will almost certainly be shocked by some of the results.
After that, you can take Ambrosini and Broadhurst’s advice to use the data to cut out low-value activities that take a disproportionate amount of your time. Or you can simply use it to inform your schedule and expectations of how much you can get done on a particular day.
3. Schedule Dedicated Time for Relaxation
When I recommend scheduling time for relaxation, I don’t mean it as a feel-good self-care tip about prioritizing yourself. That’s certainly valid – you should care for yourself! But for the purposes of this post, I’m just being practical.
You need a certain amount of relaxation. That’s a fact. Trying to deny it will lead you to run out of energy. And then you’ll cut time out from planned activities to do ad hoc relaxing.
Think of a time when you had a particularly packed schedule. What did you do when you started to feel burnt out? I’ll use myself as an example. At one time, I was a full-time grad student and working part-time. After too many days in a row of working, studying, attending classes, reading, and writing, I would scrap my plans to work on a paper one evening and just veg out in front of the TV. Which would, of course, ruin the schedule I had set up to meet all my course deadlines.
With realistic time management, you’re realistic about your need for relaxation. Take that into account when you plan your day, week, or month. Build in evenings or even entire days off – time when you’re not expecting yourself to do anything “productive” at all. Building this time into your schedule ensures that your other goals are realistic.
If you’re interested, Time Magic has some great recommendations for how to create high-quality relaxation time that actually rejuvenates you. This is in contrast to unplanned relaxation, which tends to involve scrolling on your phone and eating junk food – things that end up draining your energy even more.
4. Prioritize Ruthlessly
To benefit from realistic time management, you have to be a bit…ruthless. If you do a time audit (see #2), you’ll get a sense of all your regular activities and how much time they take. When you review that list, do the time investments seem proportional? In other words, are the things that take up most of your time truly what you care most about?
The most objective way to go about this is to assign number values (say, 1 to 10) based on how much you value each activity. You should question anything under a 5, even if it’s not taking up that much of your time.
This goes for everything you do. If it takes 45 mins to get your hair just right, can you live with hair that’s not perfect? If grocery shopping takes hours a week, could you order online instead?
For me, a big one was time to fall sleep and wake up. No amount of moralizing about the detrimental health effects of staring at my phone before bed changed my behavior. What did was recognizing how much time I was wasting on something neither productive nor enjoyable. Now I read a book before bed, but it’s not nearly as stimulating as online scrolling, so I fall asleep faster. Then I get more sleep and don’t need to spend 30 minutes trying to convince myself to get out of bed in the morning.
These low-value activities don’t have to be small. You may realize you consider your day job low value. In that case, you’ll want to seriously consider a career change.
The point is you should consider all the things you do regularly. And be ruthless about things that aren’t benefitting your life.
5. Cap Your To-Do List
Not everyone loves to-do lists like I do. Many people have a visceral negative reaction to them, in fact. But I believe that’s because they’re writing lists that are too long. When your to-do list is too long, your tasks just hang over your head. And you feel discouraged when inevitably you don’t complete everything on the list on a particular day.
That’s why I recommend setting a cap on your to-do list. For example, allow yourself 5 task commitments per day, regardless of how big or small they are. When you think of something new to add, don’t just add it to the bottom of an ever-expanding list. Instead, seriously consider whether it needs to get done today. If it does, compare it against your existing 5 tasks for the day. Consciously choose which activity needs to be moved to another day.
If you find that you habitually have too many competing priorities leading to difficult to-do list decisions, that brings us back to the above advice to adjust your expectations, do a time audit, and prioritize ruthlessly. You’ll have to drop something.
Realistic time management means recognizing there’s a limit to how much you can do in 24 hours. Even beyond time limitations, you have energy limitations. I believe people have varying natural levels of energy, but even the driven and highly productive machines among us have a limit. Be realistic about what that is and cap your to-do list at a number that’s manageable. Instead of feeling harried and demoralized as you stare at your overflowing to-do list, you’ll likely check everything off before evening and then get to relax for a bit without guilt.
Recommended Further Reading for Realistic Time Management
I’ve referenced a few books in this post. If you’re interested in really pursuing realistic time management, I definitely recommend reading the following:
1. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
This is the best book to change how you think about time management and productivity. The title, Four Thousand Weeks, references the average human lifespan. The premise may sound a bit morbid: Burkeman urges us to recognize the limitations of our lifespans. And yet somehow the book is uplifting rather than discouraging. You’ll finish it fully committed to realistic time management and approaching what you spend time on completely differently.
2. Time Magic: Reclaim Your Time, Reclaim Your Life by Melissa Ambrosini and Nick Broadhurst
While Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks is a bit more philosophical, Time Magic provides actionable strategies for restructuring your relationship to time management. I adopted some of these and decided others weren’t for me, but it was absolutely worth reading.
I loved that they included more radical ideas for avoiding time wasters. For example, Nick Broadhurst claims to have “quit” e-mail. Instead, he hired someone to manage his inbox a few hours every week. There’s no chance that I would do this, even if I could afford it, but I appreciate when authors present truly innovative ideas. Most of us assume that a certain proportion of every day must be spent reading and answering e-mails – both at work and in our personal lives. It’s great to hear the perspective of someone who said, “What if I just don’t?” And there are many gems like that throughout the book. It will make you seriously (and realistically!) consider how you want to spend the limited time you have in your life.
3. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
I’ve recommended McKeown’s book before on this blog, so I won’t spend too much time on it here. The book urges us to be disciplined about our priorities. Like Burkeman, McKeown points out that we cannot do everything we’d like to do. There simply isn’t time. Instead, he explains how to decide what your top priorities are and let everything else go. It’s a must-read for someone interested in realistic time management.
4. Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most by Greg McKeown
Effortless is a follow-up to Essentialism by the same author. While Essentialism argues for doing what matters most and letting the rest go, Effortless provides guidance for making those “essential” tasks easy. The somewhat radical premise is that things that the most valuable pursuits don’t need to be hard or time-consuming. If you follow McKeown’s advice for making it easy to do what you care about most, you’ll find yourself with time leftover for joy and relaxation. And you’ll discover it’s possible to achieve your goals without burnout.
What’s Your Experience with Realistic Time Management?
Have you struggled with time management? Or are you a realistic time management expert? I’d love to hear what worked and didn’t work for you in the comments!
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