SCHEDULE YOUR TIME
The 3 Habits of Calm – affirmations, reframing and gratitude – will help you significantly reduce your stress levels and put you in the right frame of mind for tackling the big questions of meaning and purpose. But you will need something else: time.
My wife Vidh used to be a successful criminal barrister. At the age of 30, she decided she wanted to devote her time to being a mother so she made the decision to give up her career temporarily. We were both shocked when it became apparent that raising children left her feeling more stressed than the high-powered legal work she’d been doing for years. One thing that made her particularly anxious was the feeling that there wasn’t enough time in the day. “I just don’t get any time to myself,” she’d keep saying. “I don’t get anything done.”
Vidh and I began hunting around for something that would stop her feeling this way. I’d love to tell you that it was me who found the solution, but it was my brilliant wife. She started making a detailed daily schedule that accounted for every single minute of the day. She wrote down: ‘Wake up: 6.30, Get ready: 6.45–7.05, Breakfast: 7.05–7.25,’ and so on, like this, all the way through until bedtime. This seemed pretty intense to me. Surely this would build anxiety rather than lessen it? But Vidh found that it worked. She felt more in control of her life. She was able to get more things done and at the same time felt fully able to enjoy the time she had scheduled for herself, to practise her yoga, and even to spend time surfing the internet, without feeling any guilt.
But Vidh’s practice of scheduling had an even bigger impact than that. She started to beat her own schedule.
She began to enjoy doing so, almost as if it were a game she was playing against herself. She quickly found gaps opening up in her daily diary that hadn’t been there before.
I’ve since learned that many top CEOs around the world use scheduling for this reason. It helps them be more productive, while ensuring they have ample time to pursue hobbies as well as spend time with their families.
Of course, you may also find that you really do have too many jobs to try and fit in within a short timeframe. Scheduling will also address this: it will help you prioritise the most important things that you need to do, improve your efficiency and help you find time to do more of the things you love.
So I am going to ask you a series of questions and suggest a whole array of strategies to enable you to free up more of your time.
These strategies will ensure that you can do more of the things you love, feel less stressed and find precious time to be alone and think. I will also share an extremely effective technique that will enable you to start off each day a million miles away from your personal stress threshold and primed for meaning and purpose.
THREE QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU SCHEDULE
Which activity would you love to spend more time doing, something you feel you can’t find time for in your daily life?
What are the three most important things you want to get done on any given day that would make you feel as if you have ‘won’ the day?
Which person (or persons) would you like to spend more time with than you currently do? The best way to achieve these things is to schedule them in. You don’t need to strive for perfection – just thinking about these things and starting to schedule a few of them in will make a big difference.
THREE THINGS TO SCHEDULE TO REDUCE YOUR STRESS
Something that brings you joy. It could be anything that gives you a daily dose of pleasure, such as five minutes of dancing when you get home, or listening to music. Chronic stress makes it harder for the brain to experience pleasure, so bulletproof yourself against this with a daily pleasure hit.
Something that trains your ability to delay gratification, such as taking up a new sport or hobby, or learning a new language or to play a musical instrument.
Something that involves movement or exercise. This can be a five-minute bodyweight workout or an hour-long class in the gym. There are no rules, but scheduling it in as an unmoveable part of your day will ensure that it happens.
STARE AT A TREE
One of the big problems with modern culture is that it associates ‘busy’ with ‘successful’. We like to feel our schedules are full to bursting because it makes us feel that we are in demand and important. There’s also a pernicious idea out there that to really excel in life we need to give all day, every day, over to our ambitions. Well, tell that to Armando Iannucci, a man who’s not only had a long career as one of Britain’s greatest living satirists but has broken America with his hit sitcom Veep and films such as In The Loop and The Death of Stalin. “I refuse to work evenings or weekends,” he told one newspaper. “If a script sees my character meeting for dinner, I put a line through the words and make them meet for lunch. After 6pm I turn my phone off. I told the Americans I don’t do calls after then.”
And what does he do with that time? “I really like to indulge in the doing-f **k-all thing. You know, just stare at a tree or something.”
I know you’re busy and under pressure, as we all are. What I’ve found is that, when I protect my own time by having a strict schedule, I’m infinitely more productive for the rest of the week. I’m happier. I feel calmer. We delude ourselves that we can continue working and keep going every single day, without consequence. We can’t.