For 16 years, I was out of the job market, a stay-at-home mom, no employment, no time-cards, no pay. Now I have a part-time job, no immediate supervisor, no time-card, modest pay. I'm finding it difficult to adjust to being employed. At first it was just a few hours a week and I was paid for what I worked. However, a couple of years ago, I moved to a salary and have been trying to raise my total hours per week since then. I'm only aiming for 23 hours a week. It shouldn't be that hard. But it is.
I think I have zeroed in on at least part of the problem: my internal timekeeper. It was developed during all of those busy years of being a full-time mother plus juggling multiple volunteer jobs plus trying to carve out time for personal interests. It operates somewhere below my conscious cognitive processes and has this capability of figuring out exactly how long any particular task will take under pressure.
The "under pressure" part is a key to this. Suppose that I need to prepare for a monthly library board meeting. I could spend hours doing so. I could review past board minutes for outstanding issues. I could work up a fancy agenda. I could send out reminders of the meeting to all of the members. I could write up a detailed report of my activities since the last meeting. I could analyze the statistics to report trends in the library. I could study the financial picture for the library and create charts and graphs. However, my internal timekeeper considers what must absolutely be done in preparation for the meeting and decides that it will take me no longer than an hour of working at maximum efficiency to prepare at some minimum level of adequacy. It then suggests to some subconscious part of my decision-making process that there's no need to start my preparations more than an hour before the meeting.
While all this is going on, the conscious part of my daily planner has decided to start early on my board meeting preparations and get them out of the way. However, other options for investing my time, some important, some not, some urgent, some not, step in and vie for my time. And my internal timekeeper says, "Sure, go ahead and do that. You really only need an hour to get ready for the meeting."
This creates some serious problems for me. That internal timekeeper is concerned only with checking off the most pressing tasks on my to-do list. It has no regard for investing time today in tasks that could be put off until tomorrow or next week or forever. It doesn't care about the whole 23 hours per week goal. It releases me to do actual work "on the clock" only if it determines the tasks I will be doing will be either interesting, important, or urgent. It likes to work under pressure. After all, I'm a much more efficient worker when I have only one hour to do what can be done in an hour but could be stretched to three. If I have three hours before the deadline for that project, I can either take three hours to do it or ignore the approaching deadline until only one hour is left. I find it impossible to do the one hour of work needed three hours ahead of the deadline and then fill those other two hours efficiently.
Something has to change. Now that I have become aware of how my internal timekeeper is undermining my conscious planning efforts, I need to find a way to control it.
Meanwhile, however, I find it fascinating that this ability exists below my conscious level to make a quite accurate assessment of exactly how long a task will take to accomplish at maximum efficiency. Packing for a trip? Three hours without pressure, 20 minutes with. Preparing a Sunday School lesson? Three hours to do dynamically, one hour to do adequately. And at some level, I have determined that the difference between adequate and dynamic is not worth the extra two hours.
Right now I need to be using my one day off this week to accomplish multiple goals. And right now my internal timekeeper is sorting through the deadlines for and importance of those goals and discarding most of them as less interesting, important, or urgent than making this post. It's reducing my to-do list to the bare minimum that must be done today and calculating how much time it will take to do only the bare essentials. While I was counting on accomplishing much in this day at one level, it was looking at my true interests and condensing everything else down to make room for the things that give me the most pleasure right now.
Self-control. I need to take responsibility for my schedule, for my priorities, for how I invest my time. Because what gives me the most pleasure right now is seldom the same thing that will make me feel good about a day at its close. Which means I need to reach down into the realm of my internal timekeeper and break it to my conscious will. I need to get a harness on it and use its surprising skills consciously rather than allowing it to derail my schedule by authorizing procrastination.
I wonder how that is done.
2 comments:
You sound like a college student. And you seem to have the exact same problem that I do. I've had three papers due in the coming weeks for a while now, and have had most other homework out of the way for the past couple of weeks. I should have been working ahead, thinking up ideas, doing some outlines to test the viability of those ideas, writing drafts, et cetera. But no, not so much. I've done a little, but I really need to do more.
And I am actually very excited to write two of the papers, and even then, I can't easily motivate myself. I've done some work, but I should do more than I've done, to also allow time to try to write other papers, such as those for miscellaneous scholarships, submissions to undergraduate journals, and so forth. But I'll probably end up having just enough time to get the bare minimum done to get reasonable grades in my current classes and nothing else.
A year from now, my checkbook is really going to be wishing I had focused more on getting those scholarships. Unfortunately, how I'll feel a year from now isn't helping motivate me any, just like you described. If either of us solve this problem, I think we should let the other know our secret.
Hey, someone who didn't completely give up on this place during the slow months! Good to see your comments, Andrew.
I think you make a good point about sounding like a college student. Actually, it may have been in high school that I first started developing this subconscious ability to estimate the minimum time required to do a project adequately.
Research papers, eh? I'm glad you're excited about them. I'm just as happy to not have anything like that going right now.
Enjoy!
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