Feb

Time Management: Setting Boundaries

By Michelle Quillin for New England Multimedia.com

Can You Relate?

"I'm late! I'm late!"

Some days I get so much done I fall into bed accomplished and satisfied, knowing my time was well spent and productive, vowing to do it again the next day, and the day after that. Everything clicked, my time management skills worked wonders, and I managed to meet every goal I set.

Other days I get a late start, find myself off-track and under the gun until I finally call it a night, and vow to get back in the saddle the next day.

Then there are the days that are a complete wash, leave me feeling defeated and frustrated, angry at myself.

The Defeated Days are usually caused by one thing: I’ve allowed boundaries to be blurred or downright crossed, and for no good reason.

You love people. I mean, you really love people. But the people in your life don’t see what your life is like from the inside. They don’t know that you have more than a few people in your life who want a piece of your time, more than a few people you want to talk to, and people you have to spend time with if you’re going to be successful and be able to make a living doing what you want to do.

OK, yes, they do know. But they’re not aware of the jockeying for position all of those other people are doing, and how much you wish you could meet every need and still get your other goals met.

They don’t know that in the ten minutes you’ve been typing that blog post that was due three days ago, and looking anxiously at your massive to-do list, that the dust bunnies gathering in the corners of your office are starting to grow legs and your refrigerator is beginning to look like it did when you were in college. In that same ten minutes, your phone has rung not once, but three times from three different people. You’re dreading checking your voicemail, because there are phone calls from yesterday you still haven’t returned.You’ve had four new emails come in and twenty Facebook updates and invitations to attend events and join causes and groups. The blogs you subscribe to, while very valuable in wisdom and information, are piling up in your inbox waiting to be skimmed for nuggets. You’ve got a phone appointment with a new client in two hours, two prospects waiting for calls back, a networking meeting you really should go to, and a support ticket you’re waiting for a call back on.

Oh, and your child has a soccer game, your wife says she’s lonely, and you haven’t talked to your mother in two weeks.

Feeling anxious yet?

Truth is, getting at lest 8 hours of work done a day has become a battle against technology that has now made you available to everyone, anytime.

Short of pulling a disappearing act and changing your identity, what can you do?

If you want to be in control of your time, you have to learn Rule #1 of Time Management: Setting Boundaries.

Boundaries protect you from people who unknowingly are keeping you from achieving your goals. They’re a Time Management strategy that will ultimately protect others from the meltdown you’re bound to have if you don’t set firm boundaries and stick to them.

Over the years of wearing a few hats at once, I’ve learned to set boundaries, communicate them lovingly, and stick to them. Boundaries are what keep me smiling when most people would be freaking out.

Five Boundaries I’ve Learned To Set

1) Learn to say “No.” I heard a pastor once say that for everything he said yes to, he had to say no to something else, and that something else was usually his family. When someone asks something of you, ask yourself, “What will I have to say no to if I say yes to this?” and then make a decision. I don’t know why, but saying “No” seems to be the most difficult thing for nurturers/caretakers to learn how to do, whether they’re male or female. But if you don’t start saying “No” — and practicing saying “No” with no excuses — you will never get control of your time. Other people will control you, and you’ll begin to resent them and even avoid them.

2) Decide how many hours a day you’ll devote to your work or career, and then stick to it.Yes, flexibility is good, and you need to keep yourself open to opportunities, but for the most part, stick to a schedule each day. Schedules are boundaries that will keep you from wasting time, and they come in handy for communicating boundaries to your friends and family. Schedules also help you deal with clients or vendors who talk too much and go off on tangents. Your set schedule will remind you to bring ramblers back to the point, and will keep you from being a rambler yourself, because you’ll keep in mind that you only have so much time left to get done all you need to get done.

3) Don’t take personal calls or answer personal emails during those hours you’ve determined to devote to work or career, unless you’re desperately in need of a short ten-minute break. If you make or take a phone call, tell your friend that you have just ten minutes, and then when that ten minutes is up, get off the phone. If they say, “Just one more thing” and try to keep you on the phone, you say, “No, I have to get back to work now.” I’ve had friends who will not let me off the phone, and my heart for people keeps me from being rude and just hanging up. Instead, those are friends I don’t call when I only have ten minutes, because they don’t respect boundaries. They probably just don’t understand.

4) Keep a calendar next to your desk and make sure you have one day a week when you do NOTHING but spend time with friends and family, if they’re not work. My day is Sunday, but yours can be any day you want. In order for me to set firm boundaries for myself and others every other day of the week, I need a day when I’m not doing any work, and that includes being around people who are draining. That’s a boundary in itself. Having a day of rest is a Time Management strategy that keeps me from becoming a slave to my work and neglecting the healthy relationships that keep me human and connected. I am beyond blessed to have the most amazing, loving family and friends, but I realize not all of us do. Make your day of rest a day of rest in every way.

5) Use A Time Map. There are so many ways to do this, and I’ll cover them in a post on Time Management, but basically Time Mapping means clearly delineating specific times each day and/or week for specific tasks/goals. You tweak and adapt your Time Map when it’s not working anymore, or when you’ve added new things that need to be fit in to your goals.

My latest Time Mapping strategy is this: I drew a clock face on a dry erase board next to my desk, and blocked off parts of each hour for specific things that are important to me so I can meet my goals for each day without fail.

Here’s what my Time Map Clock looks like:

My Hourly Schedule

The ten minutes before each hour is for “personal” connections. I connect with friends or family during that ten minutes of each hour. The next ten minutes immediately after that is for “chores.” Chores can be anything non-work related that needs to be taken care of. For example, if you work in a home office, go do a load of dishes, throw in a load of laundry, do some filing, vacuum a rug, pay some bills. If you work for someone else, clean your desk, empty your garbage can, organize your paperwork. Ten minutes. That’s it.

I put my “chores” time directly after the “personal” time strategically. If I’m on a personal phone call and need a couple of minutes to finish it up, I start a chore that I can do while I talk. If I have to, I strap my phone to my waist and use a headset. But doggone it, my goal is to end that phone call before that next ten minutes is up. The only time I wouldn’t end it is if the person on the other end is in crisis and it’s got to be dealt with then. And believe me, it’d be a real crisis to keep me on the phone. If there’s no crisis but the friend needs more time, I promise to call them back when I take my next break.

The next ten minutes after “chores” is specifically set aside for Twitter, because I’m building new relationships and need to devote time for reading Tweets, retweeting, replying, and tweeting my own stuff. I’ve found that if I leave Twitter running in the background and go at it all day, I don’t get much else done, so this is a boundary I’ve set up to protect myself from my love of connecting. I can’t wait for the day when I can connect with others all day with no negative ramifications on the rest of my goals. If I play my cards right, that’s going to happen.

The other thirty minutes of each hour is strictly for work. As you can see, I have a list written on the dry erase board next to the clock face for things I do every day. I have other lists as well, including a To-Do list in a notebook for specific tasks and a master list of goals on a dry erase board above my desk.

These are just a few of the boundaries I’ve set to protect my relationships, myself, and my goals. They’re my secret weapons against Time Vampires — the ones who don’t understand the demands on my life, and the ones I bring upon myself through my own bad habits.