the anti-romantic approach to the good life
Your life feeling pretty stable these days? Congratulations: You’re not in emergency mode, you’re not underwater, you’ve got a lasso around your life. Now you have a chance to build a new ship, to spend time in ways that are more intentional, more aligned with your zoomed-out aspirations for what you want from life.
My solution for accomplishing this is completely unromantic: Time management. Specifically, the key is to translate things you want more of in your life (even things as abstract as “be nicer to mom”) into events on a calendar.
Aspirations for self-enhancement — more exercise, more meditation, more time one-on-one with each of your kids, and so on — typically fail because other things creep in. The key to preventing this is to translate all of these aspirations, crass as it may seem, in terms of hours. Putting things in terms of hours, then concretely plotting those hours on your calendar for the months ahead, allows you to get ahead of your schedule. Budgeting time for your higher aspirations will force you to confront conflicts: You’ll notice in advance when something needs to give. The alternative is magical thinking (maybe this will finally be the year that I start journaling).
A five-step approach to using time management to reach your aspirations:
First determine what really matters to you. As Tim Ferriss suggests, don’t spend December 31st writing a new year’s resolution; instead do a backwards-looking year-in-review. Carve out a few hours, pull up your calendar from the year, and make a t-chart on a blank sheet. Moving week by week through the past year, take note of what felt unusually good and bad (in terms of your broader aspirations for meaning and satisfaction). The key is to do this all in one sitting for the whole year; this makes it more likely that you uncover novel self-insights. (Real example from someone I’ve done this with: Whoa, I get an unusual amount of satisfaction from hiking near fall foliage and running water.)
Then plan out when you’ll do the things that matter most to you. Create a doc with all 52 weeks of the upcoming year laid out, and pick out specific dates when you’ll make time for those most important experiences. Already you’ll start to notice trade-offs and conflicts that need to be resolved. Hiking your thing? Want to ensure you go for a hike in a far-off location at least 8x in the coming year? Pick out those dates now. In the alternative world in which you schedule hiking trips one at a time throughout the year, it’s scary how easy it is to mindlessly get to the end of the year having made far less time for it. Fill your calendar doc now with all the big rocks. Once it’s in good shape, save this doc! Finally, add all those events to whatever calendar you’ll actually use in the upcoming year.
Next, build out your recurring events. Fill out you recurring monthly, weekly and daily activities with the things you’ve identified that bring you deep satisfaction. Again, plan these out for a specific time on a specific day.
Note: Some of the negative activities you identified in your year-in-review t-chart are foreseeable. Calendar these in advance, too, if you can control their timing. This can help take the edge off negative obligations by situating them in less disruptive times.
As life gets in the way, reschedule the things that matter. Of course, you’ll have to move things around when you actually show up to that random Tuesday 4 months from now when you meant to pull your kid from school for a special adventure but instead have to talk down a crying employee while simultaneously texting your plumber that your toilet’s overflowing. But in that case you can treat it more like a meeting (i.e., considering relative importance, rescheduling it for a better time soon, and so on), which makes it more likely to happen.
Finally, check in with yourself. Regularly — no less than every other month — plan check-in times when you return to your original t-chart and original calendar schedule to ask, How’s it going? What might I do?
That’s it! The whole magic of this system is in moving beyond vague statements of things you wish you had more of in your life, instead replacing them with events on your calendar.
-Ben
