Don’t you just love blogs titles with forceful verbs implying that you can escape whatever is ailing you? Or destroy the glass ceiling, annihilate doubt? My vicious spiral is multi-tasking and bad prioritization. This is my attempt to break free from it. “Attempt to break free from your time is money mentality“ doesn’t have the same impact as a title though.
My vicious spiral: having multiple concurrent demands for my attention. And then being unable to satisfy all of the demands, feeling bad, and being unwilling to do anything useful. So say that I’m supposed to be getting back to the office to be on a conference call (which is underway right now), and my daughter didn’t want to go to day care, and my son was crying at the same time. Multiple things demanding action at the same time. And here I am, supposed to be on a conference call, instead writing about the first 90 minutes of my day.
There are a few tricks to dealing with demands and prioritization. One is to separate the urgent from the important. The theory is that there are many unimportant things that seem urgent, if not to you, then to the people demanding them. There are also many things that are not urgent, are important, and will become urgent if you don’t do something about them. If you categorize things demanding your time as urgent or not urgent, important or not important, then you can figure out what to do.
Unimportant things – well these simply don’t get done. The trick is to realize that uploading that video of my daughter driving my car last night is actually important, not just a luxury. Yes, it is recreational and it is the kind of activity that feeds my soul. Strong words perhaps – I find it’s essential to my happiness.
Urgent things – these get done if they’re important, and the aim with this categorization technique is to focus on doing important things before they become urgent, so that you have the luxury to do things with less deadline pressure. One example of this is getting my son a passport before we head off to England in December. I could do the same things as with his elder sister – wait until the absolute last minute and pay a premium for the rushed emergency passport, or I could just go ahead and take care of it three months in advance.
So how do I apply this rule to the dropping off wailing children at day care example this morning? Well, with difficulty given my current programming. If one of my children is in distress they need my attention. Which works well until you have two children in distress, and only one attention to give. I asked a friend how she managed with her two kids when their father was off for four days at a time flying for a commercial airline. She answered, “There’s alot of crying. Sometimes all three of us are in a puddle of tears.” While this approach could certainly work, I’m looking for something with less crying.
Being over analytic, I suppose that I would have taken care of some of the important things for my children before they became urgent this morning. The problem is, I had never been a parent until about two years ago, so I don’t always know what these things are.
This is the best model I’ve come up with so far: to learn to live with crying. Or at any rate, to differentiate between the important cries and the urgent cries. I struggle to balance the clean and simple time management thinking with warm and emotional parenting. In most of the business self-help literature I’ve consumed, there’s the notion of spending quantity time over quality time with your family. You spend quality time at your business, as it’s limited.
Now I’ve started reading parenting self-help literature. (Please comment with any recommended titles!) I enjoyed this article about spending quantity time with your children. It discusses guilty parenting – the act of spoiling your kids as you feel guilty about them being at the bottom of the list of priorities. Spend more time with your kids, fit your work schedule around your life schedule, and realize that time is the most important thing we have. Time is life itself, to quote this article about Islam and time.
I just glanced at the clock, and the conference call has just ended. I made the right choice to defer the important call and focus on the important matter of expressing my approach to parenting. I resisted the temptation to be half on the call and half working on this. It made me feel better, and able to look forward to an evening with the kids while the wifey is working. Quantity time – and there will be crying and that’s ok.