Forget Time Management, Focus On Choice Management

First published on April 29, 2020

There is a brutal truth about time management. It is almost never about time; sometimes it is about distractions, and almost always it is about choice.

We can't manage time; time keeps rolling by no matter what we do. All we can manage is ourselves.

We can manage our distractions: develop and understand your ability to focus and you will get more done.

But, most importantly, we can manage our choice. The rather brutal truth about all of us who complain about time is that we are making choices about how we use our time that do not match up with what we say we want.

I was once facilitating a workshop about workplace wellbeing. As part of it, we presented an axis of control: at one end was 'completely outside my control' and at the other was 'completely within my control'.

Part way through the exercise, one of the participants (a woman with children) said something I would never have been bold enough to say. She said that the truth is, under all of it, that everything is within our control. Then she gave an example: if you are really struggling with balancing your children's care and your work, resenting the impact they have on your career, you can always put them up for adoption.

Now that, that is someone who gets it. Someone bold enough to say: I could put my children up for adoption if they are really that much trouble. When you remember that, you can remember that you choose not to. The same is true of all the annoying things about work: you could quit that job. There might be really good reasons not to, but you could.

This is the freedom of the creator. It is, as the psychologist Jordan Peterson says, a 'dreadful freedom', because within that is the reminder that we have power in our lives, that we can't just put all the responsibility for the things that are not perfect (or even good) about our lives on someone else, or our children, or our employer, or our society, or 'the system'. That it's down to us. That we have a part to play.

This is present everywhere in your work, all across the time management struggles you have. Understanding your power to choose how to respond to things is essentially what this longer read on time that I shared a couple of years ago is about. How do we live into the idea that our choices - what we say yes to and what we say no to - are what dictates what we spend our time doing?

Terry Crews, the actor and former american football player, talks about this in his interview with Tim Ferriss. He says that the life we get is the life we want.

This is because on some level we are choosing the life we get. It may not be what our conscious minds want, but we aren't just our conscious minds. We are a set of learned habits and patterns, which want security, control and approval.

The game, then, is not about time management, it is about choice management. It is about finding the ways to avoid those habits and patterns playing out something which we say we don't want but which deep down, we do.