Some people live their lives in such a way that they feel victimized by time. How about you? Do you ever feel victimized by time? Have you ever suffered from time victimization? I’m amazed at how many people are, and how many feel, victimized by time. And how would you know if you have experienced this? Some of the signs of time victimization are statements such as the following: “I don’t have enough time.” “There’s never enough time.” “Time just gets away from me and I’m left running from one project to the next, doing things in a way that means that they are incomplete or far below the quality with which I want to do them.”
“I need to balance my work and life. It is all out of balance.”
“Time stresses me out and by the end of the day (or week) I feel drained of my vitality.”
I’m especially amazed by it when people frame their choice in terms of “work-life balance.” The very phrase work-life balance seems to fragment time into either work or life. And in doing so, it seems to generate the classic zero-sum game so that it puts a person on the horns of a dilemma as if a person has to choose one or the other. What if there are other choices about this?
Now, at one level, all of this is an expression of unsanity. After all, there is no such thing as “time” as an external force, let alone a force seeking to victimize you. Minutes are not vicious. Hours are not horrendous horrors that lurk around in the dark seeking to do harm. If no one else will speak up for minutes, hours, or even days, then I will. They have done nothing wrong. They have been blamed and scapegoated when all along they have been minding their own business and not trespassing on your responsibilities at all. So leave them alone!
The problem here is actually two-fold: first, your frame about time and second, your ineffective use of scheduling events.
While these, and many other statements, indicate a sense of being a victim of time (as if time was a thing and consciously chose to do things to people), they also indicate an either-or thinking that there’s a dichotomy between work and home life or relationship, and that the choice was one of either-or. The zero-sum game presupposed by these statements position work and life-outside-of-work as a see-saw— as one goes up the other goes down. More for one means less for the other.
One frame by implication here is that less of one is better for the other. No wonder this way of framing things inevitably sets up an internal conflict—personal life or work. One or the other. Which will it be?
There’s a solution to this. Using Self-Actualization Psychology, the solution is to create a holistic synergy of the two. Instead of dichotomizing work and home (work and play) as opposites, we seek instead to create a synergy from both. In this case, we seek to think about work as an enjoyable part of a well-rounded life, and a well-rounded life including a way to express one’s talents and competencies in one’s work and source of wealth creation. Instead of viewing “time” as a scarce resource, you can create an integrated view that focuses on using your energies effectively for the people and the work you care about. And when you frame things in that way, you can now ask a whole new series of questions.
How can I make my personal life more effective and satisfying?
How can I improve the quality of both my relationships and work at the same time?
How can I tear down the artificial boundaries between work and family?
Peter Drucker (1967/ 2006) in his classic The Effective Executive, says, “Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.” (p. 100). About this kind of concentration he says we first need to focus on doing well one thing at a time. Drucker also comments that a busy person is an ineffective person.
“It is concentration in which all faculties are focused on one achievement. Few people can perform with excellence three major tasks simultaneously. Concentration is necessary precisely because the executive faces so many tasks clamoring to be done. This is the ‘secret’ of those people who ‘do so many things’ and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time.” (p. 103)
In September of this year (2009) I was back in Colorado for a few days and I heard a report on National Radio Broadcast of an interview with a researcher on multi-tasking. His primary discovery was that multi-tasking impairs cognitive functions. His research had shown that it actually lowers a person’s IQ by 11 points. When you multi-task and make it a habitual way of operating, you become a sucker for irrelevant information and over time, it results in you become slower and slower in changing tasks.
Time— are you the master of it or does it master you? Is it your construct or do you just represent and frame it in a way that leads you to giving all of your power away to that idea? Time, as a human construct, is just that—something we invent and then forget that we invented it. If that describes you, then the first step to mastery over your sense of time is to realize that it is your invention. Do that and you can begin to change your orientation to it as if it is a real thing out there. Do that and you can begin to learn how to manage your concept, your representations, and your belief frames about “time.” And you can do so with energy, playfulness, and vitality.
To your highest and best experiences in and with time!
Michael Hall
http://www.neurosemantics.com/
Unleashing Leadership Workshop
The latest book in the Self-Actualization Series and in the Meta-Coach series is Unleashing Leadership: Self-Actualizing Leaders and Companies (2009). As a leadership development workshop, discover how to identify your leadership potentials and unleash them --- whether for self-leadership or leadership in an opportunity that awaits you.
Dec. 11-13, Imola, Italy
Sponsored by BlessYou! --- Nicola Riva and Lucia Giovannini
