13

Learning How to Tell Time

On the surface, procrastination appears to be a rather straightforward problem of poor time management. If you organized your time better and used it more efficiently, you wouldn't be procrastinating. Right? With this in mind, many procrastinators turn to experts in time management for advice. You may have already read some of the extensive literature that exists in this area and checked the Web sites of authors, experts, and coaches who are part of the enormous time management industry. You can probably see the wisdom in their recommendations about adopting calendar systems, using to-do lists, setting priorities, and making good decisions. Most time management experts include a brief exhortation to stop procrastinating. But if you're reading this book on procrastination, you've probably found it difficult to put these reasonable recommendations into practice. If you could, you would. Why can't you?

As we noted in Chapter 6, time is one of the great challenges for procrastinators. They are preoccupied with time, counting the hours and minutes or pretending that time doesn't matter at all.  A procrastinator plays games with time, trying to outsmart it: "I'll watch a movie tonight and still have my report ready tomorrow morning." "There's always more time; time is no object."

Yet for all their experience at playing with its constraints, procrastinators' views of time are quite unrealistic. They have a relationship more akin to "wishful thinking" when it comes to time; they hope to find more of it than there really is, almost as if time were a quantity that could be extended instead of being one that is limited.

Perhaps it is this aspect of time—that it is fixed, measurable, and finite—that is so difficult for procrastinators to accept. Procrastinators, as we have observed, prefer to remain in the vague realms of potential and possibility and do not like to be concrete, measured, or limited. When they are ultimately caught short of time, they are surprised, disappointed, and even offended. In order to implement the time management techniques in this and other books, you may have to confront your own wishful-thinking approach to time.

TIME TO THINK ABOUT TIME

If you have chosen a behavioral goal for the next week, have you thought about when you are going to work on it? In order to think more realistically about using your time to achieve a goal, it helps to plan ahead. We know that many procrastinators resist this idea. We are not suggesting that you give up your spontaneity and become an on-time machine. Nor are we encouraging you to spend so much time planning that it becomes another means of procrastination, because at some point, you have to shift out of planning and into working on your goal. But we are suggesting that you take some time to think about time.

We know that planning may be particularly difficult for people with ADD or executive function problems. For you, planning should be approached with extra care and attention, taking into account the challenges of your particular brain. For techniques tailored specifically to those with ADD and executive dysfunction, see Chapter 16. The ideas in that chapter may help you implement the suggestions that follow.

When you plan ahead, you have the opportunity to use your brain in relative calm, before the panic of meeting an approaching deadline takes over. Compare how well you plan when you are relaxed to the frantic thinking that gets you into trouble at the last minute. As we have seen, increased stress interferes with the cognitive functions that are essential for planning, so you are more likely to plan effectively if you start before you are stressed out. Conversely, lack of planning increases the chances that you will become more agitated as you run out of time. As Alan Lakein, the original time management expert, said, "Failing to plan is planning to fail."

People may resist planning because it seems to be about the future, and they want to live now, in the present. They can feel trapped by committing themselves to an activity in the future, as if their freedom is being constrained. Planning does not necessarily mean committing to use every hour of every day; you have to expect the unexpected, and you also want to have time for spontaneous fun and rejuvenating relaxation. Procrastinators may feel so guilty for lost time that they pressure themselves to use every minute productively, only to find that they have set up impossible expectations. It's not the plan that's the problem, it's the pressure.

However, a time plan can be your best friend, a link to your future. To quote Alan Lakein once again, "Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now." In order to be your friend, a time plan should be realistic and compassionate. Planning your time hinges on getting real about what you actually do, not just programming what you should do.

As you plan to work toward the behavioral goal you have chosen, let's look at how you're going to make the time to take those incremental steps. When you think about the coming week, do you know how much time is available for you to use? Are you aware of the commitments you have already made? Have you planned for activities you usually spend time on, like watching the news or blogging? Is something unusual happening this week, such as houseguests visiting, a weekend seminar, or a sports tournament?

THE UN-SCHEDULE

Psychologist Neil Fiore was our colleague on the staff of the Counseling Center at UC-Berkeley when we were designing our Procrastination Workshops. He understood that many people set up schedules for themselves that they never fulfill, then become disappointed, and eventually give up. So Dr. Fiore developed a method of keeping track of time that is not based on what people should do. Instead he created the un-schedule." We have found the un-schedule to be very helpful to our clients and to participants in our Procrastination Workshops.

The un-schedule is a weekly calendar of all your committed activities. It can help you accomplish your goal in two ways. First, in looking ahead to see how much of your time is already committed, you will see the maximum amount of time you have left over to work toward your goal. Second, it helps you at the end of your week to look back and see where your time has actually gone, another example of self-monitoring.

"I Don't Know Where My Time Goes." Think about the next seven days, starting with tomorrow. Using the blank un-schedule on pages 198-199 as a model, write down all of the activities you can predict you will do in the coming week, however trivial they may seem. Mark on your un-schedule the hours when you most probably will be doing things you already know will occur in the next week. If you know exactly when you will be doing something, write it down in the appropriate box—for example, a lunch meeting, Tuesday, 12:00-1:30 P.M. If you don't know exactly when you will do something, estimate the amount of time it will take and then mark it down on a day when you might do it. Include any special commitments you have scheduled for this week, like an evening meeting or a social date. In addition, mark off time for routine activities, such as grocery shopping or filling the gas tank of your car, that happen each week.

Consider the whole variety of activities in your life: work hours; scheduled meetings and appointments; classes and social events; time for exercise; time for meals, including preparation and cleanup; time given to household chores such as cleaning, laundry, and shopping; time set aside to spend with your friends, spouse, or children; time that you spend sleeping. If you always watch the evening news, Monday Night Football, or other favorite television programs, put them down as well. Anticipate the extra time you spend reading the newspaper on Sundays. Don't forget to include your commuting and travel time, too. Use a calendar to remind yourself of your commitments, because it's easy to forget something. It's hubris to think you can keep track of everything in your head. On pages 200-201 is the un-schedule for Sonya, a high school history teacher who is behind on grading midterm papers for her students.