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Have you tried all the traditional productivity tips to get more done each day? Are you often rushing to complete tasks and disappointed in your progress no matter how much you accomplish? There’s a simple reason for that (but one you won’t want to hear): your expectations for time management and productivity are too optimistic. If you’re in the time optimist club, you’re in good company – most people are unable to accurately estimate how much time and energy various activities take. There is good news, though – there’s a simple solution for time optimism: realistic time management.
I introduced this topic in a previous post. I define realistic time management 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.
It’s not easy to let go of time optimism. Every part of modern culture pushes the idea that we can do more if only we’re organized enough. And not only that, but we should be doing more. The realistic approach to time management is a counter to that nonsense. This perspective recognizes that we can do anything, but we cannot do everything. And certainly, we cannot do everything within a single day.
That probably makes sense to you in theory, but how do we put it into practice? My previous post covered 5 initial steps you can take: 1) adjust your expectations, 2) do a time audit, 3) schedule dedicated time for relaxation, 4) prioritize ruthlessly, and 5) cap your to-do list. I recommend you read that post first before continuing to the 6 additional steps below.
And if you’re interested in the topic of realistic time management, scroll to see a list of books I recommend to learn more.
Why is Realistic Time Management Important?
In case you skip the original post, I’ll start with why you should adopt realistic time management.
Whether you’re organized and trying to optimize productivity or you struggle to keep up with the pace of life, you likely feel stressed a lot of the time. You start your day with certain goals, and by afternoon you’ve checked off fewer than you hoped and somehow added even more.
Greg McKeown provides a useful analogy in his book, Essentialism:
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.
This isn’t your fault. It’s not because you’re anxious or disorganized or neurodivergent. It’s because you’re being told you can and should be doing more than is reasonable.
As long as your schedule and to-do list are jam-packed, there’s no room for error. The reality is things usually take longer than we expect. You hit traffic, your boss calls you into an unexpected meeting, your kid refuses to put on his shoes. So many things divert our carefully curated schedules, and yet we continue to construct them assuming nothing will. We rush around our day, feeling harried, because we’re forever late and behind.
And even when no outside force ruins our plans, we may fail simply because we were too optimistic about our energy reserves. We burn out by 6 PM and spend our evening watching TV instead of the productive tasks we had planned. Then we go to bed disappointed with our day’s progress.
When you’re stuck in this cycle of stress and disappointment, it can be hard to recognize it. Many people say that’s just life these days.
It doesn’t have to be. You can adopt a realistic time management perspective and end this cycle for good.
6 More Tips for Realistic Time Management
I previously shared 5 tips for realistic time management that will help to end the cycle of stress and disappointment. Below are 6 additional tips that can change your perspective and your life.
1. For Habits, Set Goals in Terms of Weeks, Not Days
I haven’t read this advice elsewhere, but it made a huge difference to my life. I’m sharing it because I’m guessing I’m not the only one who was approaching this wrong.
Have you ever set New Year’s resolutions to form new daily habits? Maybe it’s exercising, practicing a skill, reading, housework – the list goes on. What happened to those resolutions? For most of us, we failed and gave up by February.
Why are daily habits so hard to keep up? Well, first of all, when it comes to goals, you should have fewer of them. You simply cannot prioritize everything you want to do. You have to make difficult choices. For example, do you want to improve your physical fitness this year, or do you want to learn a second language? The reality is that you’re unlikely to do both.
Beyond that though, I was making another mistake. Even when I narrowed my goals, I was trying to make them into daily habits. I thought I would surely make progress if I did something small for each goal every single day. I’d exercise for 15 minutes before work, read 20 minutes at lunchtime, use DuoLingo for a few minutes on the bus, declutter one item daily. And after a year, what did I have to show for it? Uh…not much.
My mistake was trying to make progress on every goal every day. While turning goals into small daily habits is common advice, it results in spreading your energy in too many directions. You’re making progress daily, but the progress is so small that it’s barely noticeable. I didn’t have time to break down muscles in that 15 minutes of exercise or truly comprehend what I was reading during my lunchtime break. Decluttering 1 item per day didn’t even make a dent in my cluttered home.
Instead, I dedicate certain days to certain goals. If you’re exercising for an hour on Monday, don’t try to also read or meal prep. Similarly, if you want to learn something new, dedicate a few consecutive hours to it on specific days. This strategy allows you to dedicate enough time for real progress. Even if it’s not every single day.
2. Stop People Pleasing
Unlike #1, this is advice I’ve heard a lot. Two of the books I recommend below, Essentialism and Time Magic, dedicate chapters to it. And yet, it bears repeating. Why? Because those of us who are people-pleasers do not change easily. (If you’re an Enneagram 2 or 9, or if your MBTI type ends in “FJ,” the skill of saying “no” will be challenging to develop, but practicing will help you perfect it.)
McKeown puts it this way in Essentialism:
We have good reasons to fear saying no. We worry we’ll miss out on a great opportunity. We’re scared of rocking the boat, stirring things up, burning bridges. We can’t bear the thought of disappointing someone we respect and like.
This tip is a larger topic than I can tackle in this post but check out Melissa Ambrosini’s list of ways to say no in her book, Time Magic (recommended below).
3. “Eat the Frog”
This is another piece of advice that you’ve probably heard before. And yet it’s effective enough that I can’t not include it in this list.
The phrase is a reference to this quote from Mark Twain:
If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.
In other words, you should start your day with that day’s most daunting task. The thing you’d love dearly to avoid.
Many of us tell ourselves that it’s better to start our days with some “quick wins.” We look at our to-do list and check off the easiest ones first. Then we get to feel productive, right? This went double for me in the past, when I used the fact that I was “not a morning person” to excuse doing nothing truly challenging before around 10:30 AM. I couldn’t think well, I reasoned. I wasn’t at my best.
But as you probably know, that doesn’t work well. We often get pulled in different directions as our days unfold. It’s far too easy to say you’ll do that daunting task “later” and then find dozens of other less important ones to occupy your time. Before you know it, a few weeks have passed and now you’re even more intimidated by your task because you have limited time to complete it.
When you start your day with your most intimidating task, you don’t have time to overthink and procrastinate. You put your full energy into it, and when you complete it, you feel accomplished and on top of things. Everything else you need to do that day feels like a breeze.
4. Set Time Limits for Chores
As a mom, I could spend hours every day doing housework if I allowed myself. There is always something to be done – something that could be improved. It’s easy for me to move from one cleaning task to another for a couple of hours and then realize too late I’ve used up all my energy for the day cleaning up messes that, honestly, I could live with for another day.
If you’re generally a “tidy” person like me, that may resonate. If you’re naturally messier, you may not procrasticlean in the same way, but there’s probably some other chore or errand that routinely sucks up your time.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés says this so well in her book, Women Who Run with the Wolves:
I’ve seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write… and you know it’s a funny thing about housecleaning… it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she “should” be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.
In other words, don’t waste your precious energy on low-level house chores or errands. Don’t use these simpler tasks as an excuse to procrastinate on more important ones.
How do you avoid this? Decide how much of your life you’re willing to spend cleaning. Choose a specific time of the week when you’ll clean and set a timer. Instead of stopping when you feel things are tidy enough, stop when the timer goes off.
5. Schedule Dedicated Times for Responding to Messages
This is a tip from Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. The book makes an argument for being intentional with what technology we interact with and when. It’s a counter to our general unconscious acceptance of addictive technologies that waste our time. In it, Newport suggests treating texts like e-mails. That means keeping your phone on “do not disturb” and set specific windows of the day when you check texts and respond to them.
This is great advice, but many of us do the opposite: we treat e-mails like texts. My workplace absolutely operated this way. An e-mail warranted a response within minutes. And a Teams message? Within seconds. Newport addresses this in a later book that covers workplace “psuedo-produtivity,” Slow Productivity. There’s lots of great advice in that book, but the key takeaway here is you have to opt out of that kind of work culture. Checking your inbox and responding to messages twice a day is sufficient. The rest of your day, focus on producing high-quality work.
Designate a couple of times in the day when you’ll read and respond to e-mails and texts. Fight the urge to check a message as soon as you see it pop up. Being available 24/7 is one of the most potent ways to derail your schedule and waste your time.
Realistic time management means that you recognize focus is a valuable resource. You cannot concentrate on important work and be available to others at all times.
6. Prioritize Sleep
According to the CDC, almost 40% of US adults aren’t getting enough sleep. If you’re anything like me, you’re more shocked that over 60% are sleeping at least 7 hours a night.
We often see sleep deprivation as a necessary evil, or even a badge of honor. Cutting your hours of sleep means you’re a busy, important person with lots of vital responsibilities.
But lack of sleep becomes a painful cycle: You can’t finish everything you want to do in a day, so you cut into your sleep hours. Then you’re exhausted and can’t focus to finish everything you want to do in a day. So you cut into your sleep hours… Do you see the problem?
Prioritizing sleep is an important part of realistic time management. It means recognizing your limitations as a human being with a human body. No matter how much you try to convince yourself that you’re the exception, the fact is that you do not perform as well when you don’t get enough sleep. When you’re in the cycle, you don’t even realize how much harder everything seems and how much longer things take when you’re sleep deprived.
As an experiment, try sleeping for 8-9 hours two days in a row. If you’ve previously been sleep deprived, you will feel like you have superpowers.
In Effortless, Greg McKeown calls this well-rested state the Effortless State. According to him, getting enough sleep is one of the key requirements for entering the Effortless State, when doing the things we care about most feels simple and easy.
Prioritizing sleep also means saying “no” to other things you want to do – whether productive activities or leisure activities. But it’s so worth it to cultivate this Effortless State on an everyday basis.
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 t
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?
Are you a recovering time optimist? Have you tried any of these realistic time management strategies? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments!
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