Partnering With Time

Time management consultant and writer Kenneth Atchity shares his philosophy of "making the clock or your life your clock" to help manage time e ectively. By Kenneth Atchity

Make the clock of your life your clock

Managing your work doesnt work for a simple reason: work is infinite. Good work only creates more work; bad work creates more work, too. So the more you work, the more work you will have. Its basic common sense that you cant manage an infinite commodity. What can you manage? Time. You not only can, but must, manage your time because time is all too finite. They say, "If you want to get something done, find a busy person." The busy person succeeds in getting things done because he knows how to manage his time. We all have the exact same amount of time at our disposal, 60 minutes each hour, 24 hours each day, 168 hours each week, 8,740

hours each year. If you put one hour into a project each day for a year, youd have worked on it for 365 hours more than enough time to write a book, build a house, launch a new product, plan and execute a new campaign. "If you put a little upon a little," said the ancient Greek almanac writer Hesiod, "soon it becomes a lot." Where Do You Find the Time? One memorable day in Manhattan I was delivering a broken antique wall clock to my favorite repair shop. As I completed my drop off and turned to leave, I noticed an ultra-modern stand-up clock constructed of shiny pendulums, a different metal each for hours, minutes, and seconds, all enclosed in a sleek glass case. It was simply the most beautiful timepiece Id ever seen. Then I realized: it had no hands. At first I thought, no wonder its in the shop. Its broken. Then I studied the clock more closely. No. It was designed that way. It was a timepiece that Salvador Dali would have been as thrilled with as I was. And it reminded me that time is a free force. It just happens, whether you do anything about it or not. Its up for grabs. It doesnt belong to the company, or to the city you live in, or to anyone but you.

The question is where do you find that free time? That's something busy people are asked regularly. Heres their secret: busy people make time for the activities they decide to prioritise. One good way to wrestle with that challenge is to ask yourself: "where do I lose it?" Youd be surprised. I ask clients to make a chart of their weekly hours and use it to determine how many hours they devote to each activity in their cluttered lives. Maybe youd be surprised, or maybe not, that most people have no idea where the time goes. They come up with a grand total of 182, or 199, or 82 hours of activity until I remind them that they, like every other human, have only 168 hours each week to spend. Then we get serious and analyse exactly where theyre lying to themselves about the time: forgetting about the endless phone calls with friends, or the true amount of time in front of the television, or the accurate time devoted to the daily commute, or the time doing absolutely nothing but staring out the window. When we get the time inventory accurate most people are surprised at the truth. But the truth is the first step to freedom, and managing your time effectively is the greatest freedom of all. I call it "making the clock of life your clock". I believe in this philosophy so much I havent worn a chronograph for nearly thirty years, despite owning a vintage wrist watch that belonged to my father and an even older pocket watch that belonged to my grandfather. The only chronograph I carry around with me is one that allows me to make lifes clock mine: a stopwatch. It makes the Spanish proverb, la vida es corta pero ancha ("life is short but wide") come true. You can get an app on your cell phone!

The Stopwatch Method of Time Management The stopwatch method of time management is simple. You use it to make sure that your Priority Project is getting the amount of attention you want to give it to move it and your personal success ahead with certainty. You know that the wall clock, or the one on your wrist or displayed on your cell phone, has a way of running away with your day. You say youll work on Priority Project from 7 to 8 a.m. and something is certain to come along to disrupt that hour almost as though life were conspiring against you. Whats really happening is that youre letting life interfere with your personal time management. Of course when the interference occurs, you tell yourself "Ill catch up later", or "Ill start again tomorrow and this time protect myself from interruptions", but over the years we discover that life runs rampant over any such resolutions. The stopwatch method works best in a life jam-packed with stimuli and distraction. It allows you to "steal time". While clocks on wrists and walls record public time, your private prime time happens only when your stopwatch is running. The stopwatch allows you to call "time out" from the game everyone else is engaged in. Simply promise yourself you wont go to sleep at night until, by hook or by crook, youve clocked one hour of working on Priority Project on your stopwatch. Turn the stopwatch ON when youre working on it, and OFF when you get interrupted. Your stopwatch minutes may be gleaned over a six-hour period, or over a 24-hour period. You "steal" them when you can: waiting at the dentists, commuting on the ferry, when an appointment hasnt shown up yet, when your cell phone dies and no one can reach you until youve replaced or recharged the battery, when your date for the evening calls in sick. It takes a

Kenneth Atchity, time management consultant and writer

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Best Practice Management

Issue 94, August 2013

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few days to get used to this process, but once you do youll recognise the power it gives you over time. Optimum Attention Span (OAS) How do you know how much time to devote to Priority Project or to any activity, for that matter? Thats a function of what I call Optimum Attention Span (OAS). For some activities, like watching your favorite sports event or shopping, it might be extremely wide; for others, like listening to your boss complain or to your spouse nag, it might be miniscule. The trick is to determine what the OAS is for that Priority Project. At the start of any project, it tends to be smaller; as the project gains momentum and begins to appear reachable your OAS expands. So when planning to write that report, give yourself 30 minutes to 45 minutes on the stopwatch during the first week. But reassess your OAS at the end of each week because, like everything else worthwhile in life, it changes and evolves. By the fourth week you may well be up to an hour and a half. Dont Forget "Linkage" Isnt it hard to work in fits and starts? You might very well ask that very good question. The answer is that its actually easier to work that way than it is to work without stopping if you employ the time-management technique of linkage. Heres how linkage works. The phone rings, so you have to turn off your stopwatch. But you let it ring one or two more times, taking that time to make a mental decision about what youll do when your stopwatch is running again that is, in your next Priority Project session. And heres a useful secret: it

doesnt matter what decision you make. The minute you make it, as you answer the phone and go on from one activity to the next, your mind starts thinking of better decisions than the one you made; in fact, your mind becomes increasingly motivated to get back to that Priority Project because it knows exactly what it will do when the next session begins. Youve created an automatic linkage, that makes restarting when your stopwatch is next running, no longer an occasion for blockage. Instead, youre fully ready to jump in and get as much out of that next session as possible before its interrupted by lifes next distraction. And, yes, have a desk drawer filled with stopwatches so you can employ a different colored chronograph for each major activity youre engaged with. The stopwatch method will truly make the clock of life your clock.
Dr. Kenneth Atchity (Georgetown B.A., Yale Ph.D.) has been teaching time management throughout the United States and Europe for decades. He has written twenty books, the most recent of which is a novel, The Messiah Matrix (messiahmatrix.com). One of his thirty films is the Emmy-nominated The Kennedy Detail. His companies include aeionline.com, thewriterslifeline.com and storymerchant.com.

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