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Crunched for time? Try writing a Not-To-Do list
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I came down with a cold last week and I don’t have time to get sick. For one thing, I don’t have an hour to kill at the doctor’s office, waiting for the ten-minute visit where he might write a prescription or he might just tell me to go home, rest and drink plenty of fluids.
Rest is another thing that I don’t have time for.
In April of this year, my husband and I became working parents. Our lives, which had been busy before with work, volunteer stints, hobbies, travel and socializing, have become jam-packed with work and baby and not much else.
So Jim Collins caught my interest when I read a Q&A with him about work-life balance in Business Week recently. He advocated that everyone have a stop-doing or not-to-do list to compensate for our endless to-do lists. It’s sort of like reconciling a checkbook or balance sheet. For every new item I add to my to-do list, I’m supposed to move something else over to my not-to-do list, so that my overall time commitments stay level.
I spent the holiday weekend considering this accounting of my time.
I know the things that are firmly anchored on the to-do list: nursing my daughter and being the one to feed her dinner and put her to bed at night, writing my blog, my column for TheStreet.com and my various feature assignments, dinner with husband on most nights and my Saturday morning yoga class.
I know that all kinds of things have slid over to the stop-doing side of the balance sheet without my consciously putting them there. My summertime pedicures went away, mostly because Labor Day was on the horizon before I got around to scheduling one. Socializing with friends hasn’t fallen off the to-do list, but it’s slid way down to the bottom—unless these friends also have kids and want to catch up at the local toddler playground on a Friday afternoon.
Concerts, plays, wine-tastings, restaurants and dinner parties have move firmly to the stop-doing list, as has shopping (for any thing other than diapers). After all, these things after all require time and money. Need I say more?
On the professional side, coffee and lunch with colleagues, panel discussions, workshops and evening networking events have fallen by the wayside—unfortunately. So has glancing at the newspaper on most days. And my volunteer commitments are on hold for a while.
The reality is that at the office these days I have exactly as much time as I need—or maybe even a little less time than I need—to do my basic job. If setbacks pop up—say a nasty cold, a computer glitch that eats up an afternoon, or an editor who changes his mind about what he wants in a story he assigned to me—catching up is nearly impossible. Overtime and working weekends have also shifted to the stop-doing list, of course.
It seems that to some extent, to-do and not-to lists tend to balance themselves.
We generally make the time for the things that are very important to us no matter what schedule shuffling we have to do. And the things that don’t really matter fall by the wayside without our even missing them.
I go to great lengths to wedge 30 to 45 minutes of exercise into my curtailed workday because it makes the rest of the day more productive and energizes me for my evenings at home. While pedicures and similar indulgences are nice to think about, the fact is that for the time being I can live without my toenails being painted Eternal Red.
But there are things that fall off the to-do list that really shouldn’t. There are also things that are firmly entrenched in our routines that we really ought to let go of.
For me, a self-employed journalist, coffees and lunches and networking are important. Like my lunchtime walk, they take me away from my desk for time that I don’t think I can spare. But the fact is that they make me better at my work when I’m back in the office, and they generate the new clients and assignments I need to keep my business robust.
If I’m going to make the time to get back to those things though, what will I move to the stop-doing list?
Email. Sure I need it, but like most people I spend too much time reading and writing it and it often eats up my productive hours.
As you’re coming back from your holiday weekend and planning your family's fall schedule, take an accounting of your own to-do and stop-doing lists. Find one thing you’d like to add back to the first. And if you think hard enough I’m sure you can find something to slide over the second to make some room.
And should you figure out how to carve out enough time to recover from a cold, let me know.
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