If you read Gray Keller’s The One Thing, you’ll learn a different way of thinking about balance. Instead of trying to do all the things at the same time, you focus on one at a time. To do this, he advocates time blocking. In his book, he describes time blocking as setting aside blocks of time in the day, usually measured in hours, to work on a specific subject. For example I will work on my business for 2 hours and then spend an hour with my family, then another 3 hours on my business and so on. During those time blocks you work on “the one thing that [you] can do such that by doing it everything else becomes easier or unnecessary.”
But what if you don’t have hours? Right now my normal day leaves me only a couple of hours at best outside of work. At the same time I am trying to run a real estate business, learn woodworking, something something TinyHatchet, and now a back burner project is bubbling up as a strong potential for good. How do I time block that?
Well, taking half an hour for 5 different things each day is not enough and falls strongly into the false balance Keller talks about. I’m concerned that even taking one day per thing is not enough focus to make real progress on any of them. The thought I’ve been having is maybe to time block by the week. So this week I’ll work on real estate, the next week TinyHatchet, the next woodworking, and so on.
That sounds like a great idea at first, but then I thought about the long-term implications. If I have 4 things I’m rotating through, then I would only be doing woodworking once a month. There’s no way I would be able to develop the hand skills I want if I only practice so irregularly. If I have stuff that needs to happen on TinyHatchet (marketing, development, bug fixes, etc) then it will potentially have to wait a month. I don’t think that’s a reasonable way to run a business. That can maybe be mitigated some by moving to a managerial role, but then I just have to plan a month ahead and it leaves no room for flexing, and I don’t need a whole week if I’m just managing like that.
The other idea that occurs to me is something altogether different.
I already maintain to do lists. I have lists for each project (except woodworking) where I put new tasks as soon as I think of them. Right now I schedule tasks either for the day they need to be done or the end of the week I want them if they are non-time-critical project/business tasks. When I do my nightly planning, I can look at all the tasks to be done for each of those and decide what the next day’s time block will be spent on. Will I go plane some wood or will I organize real estate? Once I decide which needs the focus I can worry about going over tasks and making sure the one thing is on top so I can get right into it.
Maybe that’s not groundbreaking to anyone else, but it seems like a pretty big potential breakthrough to me. I’m at least going to try it over the next few weeks and report back.