Beyond this being the title to a fantastic Metallica song from 1984 (yes, the year I was born. yes, I’m a baby. it’s fine.), this is also my tactic with time. I wrote about the fact that Time is a thief recently and this idea has been on my mind a lot this week.
I recently took over supervisory responsibilities for my team from my old boss, who had been my boss for eight years. This is in addition to my normal work duties. Because of that, I’m working 10-12 hour days (or longer) every day.
I lament none of this. I feel honored at the opportunity and consider it the privilege that it is to be able to work this hard, to have my value be noticed by my company.
That said, I’m getting virtually no writing done, despite thinking about it all the time. It is taking all my TIME to keep up with work and my family. Time is very much acting the thief that he always does.
So how do you combat a lack of time in your life? Go on the offensive and fight fire with fire.
You have to steal your time back. For me, this manifests as late nights and early mornings. I steal time from my sleep schedule to get all the things done that I WANT to get done. And I want to make a distinction there. All the extra stuff I’m doing is done at great lengths because I WANT to get it done. This supervisory role is currently an interim position. I WANT it to work out to become permanent so I’m bending over backwards to make it happen. I WANT to become a published author so I’m taking time every morning when I could be reading or relaxing some other way to write this blog. I am careful to say that I NEED to do all this because, frankly, I don’t. I would be setting an unreasonable expectation if this was to be my permanent work ethic. Right now, I’m doing extra to get to a new steady state. Once there, I can relax a little bit. The writing in the morning thing, that’ll be extra forever, but I’m okay with that. As to reading, I steal time whenever I can get it to refill the well.
We all only get 24 hours in a day. If you need more hours to do things you want, you have to take the fight to Time and steal back however much you need. Where can you steal time for your wants? Doctors offices? Audiobooks while you drive? Short break during work for pushups? What are your ideas?
May the tide carry you to safer shores
BSG