I woke up early today. I got a freelance gig I do and needed to pick up payment as cash is a lovely thing. The best time to link up was 6:30 AM.
I got on my cycle and headed out. It’s cold but the streets are proper now and I don’t have to worry about ice. The cold is a lot easier to deal with in March than it is in December.
I saw a video on this fat we develop over winter to deal with heat. Young people seem to have more of it, which explains young ladies with bare legs. As the ladies age, the bare legs become less frequent. I certainly hate the cold more as I get old.
Time management is hard
I have a decent handle on the theory of time management. While I rarely have a day go by that goes according to plan, because I took the time to plan, I can get most things done.
Albeit with a lot of procrastination.
The easiest way to look at managing your time is via that sociological lens where our day is made up of assumed roles. Each circumstance of our life forces us to adopt some new version of ourself that best blends into that environment.
Before you come at me with that keep it real talk, no one behaves in churches and hospitals the way they do in the club. There are rules and codes of conduct we all follow based on who we are with and where we are.
Time management is balancing all the roles in your life, so you focus on the things that matter the most. It takes this understanding of both how long it will take you to do things and assessing your actual willpower to do those things when the time comes.
Everyone can wake up with a list of tasks, here are some of mine:
Exercise
Read
Write a blog
Practice music
Work on projects (Podcasts, websites, etc)
Look for a job (Holla if you got something)
Socialize
Relax
That well thought out list often forgets the me element. Maybe I drank too much, stayed out too late and woke up feeling like death. Fuck a list on those days.
Know your roles
What an overused expression. We spit that know your role game, but I don’t think people could list all the roles. How can you know what you cannot list?
To be fair, everyone can inevitably come up with their list of roles. A lot of self-help stuff is basically a quest for self-awareness. Once you understand who you are, you can then actually know your roles.
I used the plural version on purpose. We don’t play one role in life. Around my parents I’m a son. Around the fans I’m an artist. When I do a job, I’m an employee. Around Adam, I’m an older brother.
I remember when everyone worked so hard to alleviate labels from our Western world. I get the goal was to combat discrimination, but sometimes labels help us define our lives. To manage your time, you need to know all the labels for your roles.
Once you figure out all the stuff you want to get done you will need to prioritize. When you are trying to figure out what is important to you, you need to decide the roles that matter the most to you. In a sense, good time management has you picking favourites with your life.
My main priority is my creative hustle. If I believe something will move that forward, the other aspects of my life are moved to the side to pursue that.
You can’t ignore the other things, but prioritization helps you make decisions fast.
Plan time to plan
I have practiced the art of planning my life for years. I think sometimes people are thrown off by the depth I can go into every project in my life. I’m not in the beginner phases of most of this.
I’ve already spent years doing exciting “let’s try it for the sake of it” stuff. During my adventures in corporate Canada, project management became a focus for my work. You get good at doing the work, then you get trusted to use that knowledge to guide the ship for others.
Project management forces you to consider what will happen years down the line. This matters because if you can’t scope a timeline, you have no idea the cost of your project. Some projects take 3 months, some take 5 years.
I see each of the roles in my life like a project. Yes, that includes love interests and friendships. I am awful at living in the moment and appreciating what I have, but I can look 10 years into the future and manifest some reality.
The reason I can do that is because I spend a good 1-2 hours a week planning. This is a mix of meditative speculation and list after list of ideas. I’ve taken the time to establish goals, objectives, metrics that measure success and I learned how to write it down.
Since 2016 I’ve been doing this kind of exercise, so I actually know what I’m looking for.
Move the goalpost, ignore the haters
The main thing I learned about time management is most of us are terrible at picking realistic deadlines. When we are young with a few roles it’s easy. When you are mid 30s on your come up, it’s harder.
Man plans God laughs. An opportunity can throw a bag in your face and then it’s pivot time. Your friends will support you and your haters will judge you.
As you level up in your chosen domain you will learn a lot. You’ll start to see new roles you never considered for yourself. You may realize that the real path to your dreams comes from playing positions that are left field to your plan.
Be willing to adapt in this world. A lot of people talk that stay humble game but don’t understand how small we all really are. A lot of people think they are 2 or 3 steps away from their goals, yet there are so many layers that people never see.
Think about how everyone wants a manager but most of those people could not tell you how they can make money off their art. They want the manager to do all the work for them.
I started to learn more about how the music game works and holy moley, there is a lot. When I talk to a manager type now, I can at least say words like merch, sync licensing and we throw our own shows already.
Someone has to be the decision maker
When you take all this and bring it to a team level, with shared goals, it gets messier. We’re all motivated by different things and each of our paths are unique. Some people hustle the streets, I slang words on blog sheets.
If you want to win in a team setting, there needs to be someone who makes decisions. It can be a breakdown where each person… knows their role… so they can actually be the expert in a domain. It can be someone is the leader and guides the ship, no questions asked. There is a time for both.
End of the day there needs to be someone who can decide. That person decides because they did all the planning stuff to back up that choice.
You may not know this about me but when someone knows more than me on a subject I tend to listen. Drunk me doesn’t count if you met drunk me. Pre coffee me is also bad at life.
A lot of times people argue and don’t really know what they are talking about.
Either their expertise doesn’t apply to my circumstances, or they know some “I just took a course online” version of it all. Those courses NEVER tell you how to market a brand no one cares about.
Expertise on a team needs to be established and then trusted.
Time management is boring
Once you add your team to the picture your time management life gets harder. Now you have your romance people, your social people, your team, your economics situation and yourself to consider.
Each of these is like a plant that needs nurturing. Some of them are easy like a bamboo plant that requires very little effort. Some are plants that if they get 2 drops of extra water they die (metaphor death, sheesh).
The problem with time management is that it’s boring. It’s a process that is super repetitive and it takes you away from YouTube and TikTok. Maybe you know some cool way to make it fun, I haven’t found it.
I even tried Habitica, which aims to make your life an RPG. The problem is no one wanted to take it as seriously as I did so I got demoralized. We were fighting a raid boss and only half the team participated, discouraging.
The real thing about time management is you are forced to see how wrong you are. You promise yourself you will do a bunch of things and then you must face yourself. Admit that you did in fact, fail to accomplish all these things.
This is a very tough pill to swallow over time. The endless cycle of accepting a 40% win rate on a day is a big win. Some days you do 0% of the things. A small chunk a day over time is a lot over a year.
Yes, I procrastinated my other tasks with a blog
I have to go prepare my income tax stuff and I am so not into the idea of opening envelopes and taking pics of papers for my accountant. One of my sneaky moves is to tell myself that if
I go do this other productive thing, I can put off the really boring one till later. This ADHD approach to life has me wildly getting things done, just never according to plan.
In my defense I have a very busy day and if I did not write this now, I would not write a blog today. Maybe my subconscious has a better understanding of things. Sometimes what appears to be winging life is just a deep down version of you remembering the hundreds of hours of planning you did.
I have kept up the pace of this blog quite nicely and I’m proud of that. Given I’m going to Toronto tomorrow, good to get something out today. Plus, I can only be a writer if I’m writing.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
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