Here it is, halfway through my series on Work Life IMBalance, and I’ve pretty much proven that I’m really good at sitting on the “life” side of the teeter-totter, with an occasional shift to the work side. As I was thinking about this post, I’m trying to decide if this means I’m no good at balance, or an expert at imbalance. I’m kind of leaning towards the latter.
I would love to say that I’m going to be switching the focus to the work side for a while, but I’ve got two more weeks where I’m going to be in the life category pretty solidly. Right now, I’m on the first of three flights that began in Bangor, ME. I will fly to Detroit, then to Atlanta, then finally to Wichita, KS. From there I’ll have an hour drive home (assuming somebody from the household picks me up). Tomorrow I’ll unpack, do laundry, and begin the process of packing for a six hour drive to Ft. Leonard Wood in the middle of Missouri. Several family members are headed that way to see my oldest son graduate from Army Basic Training. The way the Army structures things, we’ll be able to see him for the first time in 10 weeks for a couple of hours on Wednesday and then for a few more hours on Thursday. On Friday he’ll ship out for his Advanced Individual Training (AIT) at Ft. Sam Houston. Honestly, we don’t know how much we’ll be able to communicate with him while at AIT. During Basic training, he was limited to two phone calls during the entire 10 weeks, and letters were sporadically delivered to him. I did a pretty good job of writing to him four to six times a week, and he did a great job writing back (considering his limited time available).
During the laundry and packing I’m going to try and catch up on the mail that’s arrived at home over the last week while I was gone as well as address any issues with the project proposals that I completed. As of this morning, I haven’t heard back on any of them. Frankly I was hoping to work on them while I was at the airports or on the planes, but I need the client feedback first.
Over the prior six weeks, I’ve written about the conscious decisions that I’ve been making. It’s been an interesting exercise to really seriously consider every work vs. life decision and take the time to make those decisions. I’ve also written about how I’m recording the deferred decisions for later action.
For the last two days, I was able to spend a lot more time working on the deferred work decisions. You may have noticed that I finally caught up on the blog posts, since I was three posts behind. I had worked on each post some, but hadn’t completed any of them. Since I was supposed to be posting every week, it was frustrating to me when I realized how far behind I’d gotten.
So with a pretty hefty helping of resolve, I attacked a lot of the deferred tasks and got quite a bit done. My daughter had Cross Country meetings much of the day yesterday, and I used that time to focus on the tasks that needed to be addressed. It was pretty motivating to have a list already available of the things that needed done, and in many cases, I was able to complete the entire task and check it off the list. I’m enamored of putting things on lists, but I’m even more motivated when I get to check things off the lists. Yesterday I got a lot of “work” stuff done, and I also accomplished a number of tasks that had been hanging around for quite a while. By the end of the day I was pretty pumped.
Today my initial flight was delayed 45 minutes, and while that was frustrating, the easy accessibility to power and free WIFI at that Bangor Airport turned into an opportunity to get even more work done. I decided to focus on all “work” things. Since I’d arrived early for my flight, I got in nearly two hours before boarding the plane.
And that leads me to this week’s discovery about Work Life IMBalance. In my mind, lots of the tasks that I have to do take large chunks of time. I often procrastinate starting something because I’ve reasoned that “I don’t have enough time”. Over the past few weeks, I’ve discovered that I need to break my tasks down into smaller chunks that take less time. I’ve been focusing on that for three weeks now, and it’s amazing how much more willing I’ve been to start things, anticipating that I can accomplish them.
A great example is this post. The flight from Bangor to Detroit was scheduled for just under two hours. By the time we took off, got clearance to use electronic devices, and went through the delivery and retrieval of soft drinks (Pop or Soda…which is it in your part of the country?), there was under an hour left to the flight.
Normally I would just pull out my iPad and continue reading whatever book I’m reading. But I had decided to read up until the retrieval of trash after the drinks, so I’d gotten in some reading. I looked at my Evernote and Wunderlist (the two ways I’m keeping track of tasks) and noted that I needed to work on this blog post. Boom, 45 minutes of thinking and writing in the plane. I jumped at the opportunity, In the past, I’m not sure I would’ve made this time as effective. Yet, by having the task already outlined to do, all I had to do was decided to do it.
And that’s the other big discovery. Having the tasks broken up into small pieces is great, but nothing is going to get done unless I can let go of the “not enough time” idea. So I’m working on trying to make use of the scraps and bits of time that are available. I’ve decided that partially completing a task is better than a complete deferral. It’s much better than just procrastinating everything and ending up in a funk over all the things that need to be done and not enough time to do them.
For the remainder of this week, I’m going to focus on working in small increments, on bite-sized tasks, that I’ve already outlined. That means that I will need to continue to record tasks as they appear, and especially record them when I consciously choose to do something else. The deferral will still occur, but if I can manage to record those outstanding items that need to be done, I’ll be way ahead of the game.
What methods have you found useful to help stay on your productivity track?
