CrazyBusy TIME/LIFE MANAGEMENT
Key Principles to Managing Modern Life
Do what matters most to you.
A person’s not doing what matters most is the most common casualty of an excessively busy life. Don’t spread yourself too thin. People often head into their day like a spray, where the megaloctopus quickly entraps them. Gemmelsmerch, the force of distraction, is so powerful today that if you don’t deliberately protect time to do what matters most, it is likely you will not do it, or at best not give it the time it deserves. Focus on what you like the best and on what you do best. There is not enough time to try and get at what you’re bad at or spend time doing what you dislike (unless you must). Technology has allowed us to do so much more than we used to be able to do that it is tempting to try to do everything we’ve always wanted to do. This will run you ragged, whether you are a child or an adult.
You must choose. You must prioritize. In order both to do well and to be happy, you must say, “No, thank you,” to many people and activities.
Create a positive emotional environment wherever you are.
Positive emotion is not a frill. Emotion is the on/off switch for effective mental functioning. The best way to create a positive emotional environment is to work on keeping up positive relationships with people wherever you are. When you feel safe and secure in your surroundings, when you feel welcomed and appreciated, you think better, you behave better, you work better, and you are better able to help others. Failing to recognize this crucial fact is the chief reason so many people buckle under the busyness of modern life. When the emotional atmosphere is less than positive, people lose flexibility, enthusiasm, the ability to deal with ambiguity and complexity, patience, humor, and creativity. They become less intelligent than they otherwise are, as well as less trusting. Therefore, they become less able to cooperate, plan, delegate, organize, anticipate, participate, and perform all the other functions essential to thriving in a busy environment.
Find your rhythm.
When you find your rhythm, you allow much of your day to be taken care of by the automatic pilot in your brain, so that the creative, thinking part of your brain can attend to what it is uniquely qualified to attend to. You find your rhythm by combining many of the suggestions here: creating a positive emotional atmosphere, doing what you like and do best, prioritizing your use of time and using your morning burst wisely, getting rid of leeches, and so on. When you are in the rhythm, you are in what athletes call “the zone” and the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” Whatever you call it, research has proven that this state of mind elevates all that you do to its highest level.
Don’t waste time screensucking
A modern addiction, screensucking is like smoking cigarettes: Once you’re hooked, it is extremely tough to quit. Denied a screen for long, a screensucker can have a modern variant of a nicotine fit. He can start pacing, looking for a place to log on or switch on. I see people on airplanes or in church who are clearly showing signs of screen withdrawal. They are twitching, scratching, looking around, reading something for a second, putting it down, looking at their watches, and in general feeling the pain of not being able to soothe themselves with a screen.
While screensucking doesn’t carry the health risks that smoking cigarettes does, it can seriously limit a person’s productivity and mental growth.
Do whatever you have to do to break the habit. While we don’t have a “patch” to help people quit screensucking, we do have the combination of insight and structure that can do the trick. The insight is simply the recognition of the problem. Structure refers to any change in your behavior or environment you institute to help you quit. For example, moving your screen to a different room, or putting an alarm clock next to your screen to signal when you’ve gone past a certain amount of time, or programming your computer to beep every ten minutes, or training yourself to work for an extended period before you allow yourself a “screen break” all might help. Be creative and devise your own methods of breaking the screensucking habit.
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Next Steps
For six more tips on managing modern life and a wealth of other information, read CrazyBusy.
Purchase the CrazyBusy 31 day workbook
Make a list of all the things you both enjoy doing and are best at, and a list of everything else you do in a day. Put a time value next to each activity, and decide for yourself if you’re spending your time the way you ought to be.