You Don't Need Time Management Strategies

Hello and welcome to the CalmCast,

A time to feel calm and think clearly.

I'm Clare Downam,

The Queen of Calm,

A Transformational Life Coach.

I was a burnt out head teacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying,

And I want to prevent you from having to do the same.

The CalmCast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state,

Which is calm and clarity.

Just listen like you would listen to music,

With an open mind and curiosity.

There's nothing else to do.

Now let's relax into today's episode.

So saying you don't need time management strategies is probably the opposite of what you've been told you need in order to run a successful business or life for that matter.

And I absolutely not so many years ago would have agreed with you that,

Of course we need time management strategies.

Otherwise we will just wander willy nilly through life,

Not achieving anything we want to achieve,

Not making any progress,

Not getting where we want to go,

Wherever that might be.

And I really did believe that,

Because that is my story.

And if when you're listening to this,

You hear the story that you're in right now,

Then perhaps we should talk.

When I started my first business in,

Well,

Completely by accident,

I mean,

There is just no joke that I started a business by accident.

I didn't even realize that's what I was doing.

I burnt out in 2015,

And I,

When I resigned a year after I'd walked out of work,

I never went back and never even knew I wasn't going to go back.

I was sent an email inviting me to train to be a hypnotherapist.

And when I went on the course,

I did not really understand that I was going to start a business.

I just went along because,

Well,

I didn't really have anything else to do.

I had given up my 20 year career in education.

I'd had some hypnotherapy in the past,

And I think I'd found it helpful.

So I went on this course,

And it was only really towards the back end of the training that they started talking about business,

About being in business,

About running a business,

About how to get clients,

About things we could do to get started with our business.

And I remember,

I don't really remember it very well,

But sort of thinking,

Oh,

Is that what I'm doing now,

Then?

Am I starting a business?

I'm an accidental business person,

100%.

Even the business I do now,

I ended up in this completely by accident,

By a series of fortuitous events,

Shall we call it.

So when I started my business,

I had no real experience,

Even of the world of corporate.

I think perhaps to move from corporate to running a business is slightly easier than from education to running a business,

Because really,

Although as a head teacher,

I was running around two massive businesses,

Huge,

With huge budgets,

And lots of staff and lots of issues,

It was very different to running my own business.

And what's coming to mind in terms of that,

Firstly,

Is marketing,

Marketing.

I never needed to market my schools,

Because in the area where I lived in Leeds,

There was a shortage of school places.

I had at one point in my first headship,

I had two applications for every post,

Every post,

Every place I had in reception.

I had two children wanting that place.

And it wasn't dissimilar when I was maybe at a one and a half children for every place.

In my second headship,

I didn't need to do any marketing.

It was a joke.

I mean,

The idea of trying to get rid of school places was hysterical.

I know some schools are in a different position to that,

But that for me was just never,

Never crossed my mind,

Really.

I didn't need to do that.

So when I came into business,

That was one of the first things that struck me,

Because I think like many business owners,

And particularly in the helping professions,

The places where we just,

I mean,

I used to say,

Just give me a queue of people and I'll sort them out.

Don't make me go find those people though.

That's hell.

I didn't want to do that.

Or when you're a one man band,

You know,

Therapist or coach or something like that,

There's all that stuff around.

It's all caught up with our worthiness,

Isn't it?

And whether we can sell ourselves,

Because it feels like we're selling ourselves.

So I got really like caught up in having to be a certain kind of business owner.

And the kind of business owner I picked up on was somebody who had a business coach who had them set big,

Fat,

Audacious.

I remember actually going to a workshop that I think was called how to achieve your big,

Fat,

Audacious hairy goals or something.

It might not have been called that,

But it definitely had that inclination to it.

So from all these different things,

I went on networking talks and things like that.

I started to pick up this idea of business and what it had to be like.

I started to pick up this idea of business and what it had to be like.

And it was the idea I picked up was very structured.

It was the,

You know,

You've got this five year plan and you've got each plans for each year and you've got a 12 week year and you've got all this stuff to do in order to,

You know,

Grow your business or get your business to where you want it to be.

And I really bought into that and then found that I wasn't doing the things that I thought I should be doing.

And then just the word should watch out for that word.

It's a stinker.

We abuse ourselves with it quite literally a lot of the time.

I picked up these rules about how it should be.

And I thought I should be like that.

And I wasn't,

I was a post adrenal burnout,

Middle aged woman with an underactive thyroid and the menopause slowly,

Slowly rolling towards me like,

Like,

You know,

Like on a cartoon,

Somebody drops a boulder,

It's coming towards me.

And so I wasn't motivated all the time.

I wasn't on it all the time.

So I thought I needed to find a way to make myself do things.

And I think when we talk about managing time,

That's what we mean really,

Don't we mean getting stuff done in the most efficient way,

The most efficient way,

Not efficient way.

That's that too.

But you know,

In the most efficient way we can get in through our jobs list,

Getting our tasks,

Tasks ticked off,

Etc.

Now,

One of the things I did try many different things,

I tried lots of lots of tool task management tools,

Like Asana,

Like Trello,

Like I didn't try monday.

Com,

But I know that's another one.

Other task management tools are available.

I'm not promoting task management tools.

And I also tried things like habit stacking,

Lots of stuff around habits,

Actually,

I was quite obsessed with habits.

I read about habits,

I learned about habits,

I thought they were the answer.

I did things like the five second rule,

You know,

Where you say I'm going to do something and then you count down five,

Four,

Three,

Two,

One,

And then you just do it.

Now,

And there were many more things,

I'm not going to list all the different time management strategies that I tried to try and get myself to do things in an efficient fashion.

And it felt it felt all the time,

Like I was trying to shoehorn myself in quite brutally to a shape that didn't fit me to be this certain kind of person that I wasn't.

And that became a hindrance more than a help,

Really,

It really did.

It really did become a hindrance.

And the irony of it all was this.

The irony was that all the time I was spending or using up trying to sort out me to make me better at managing time or me better at doing things in an efficient fashion was wasting an awful lot of time.

At one point,

All my tools and techniques and poking around the past as to why I didn't manage time well and what was wrong with me and all the different moving my list from one system to another.

There's my list on a list on paper.

Now I'm going to move on to Asana.

Now I'm going to be back onto the list again.

Some of the tasks traveled back and forth.

All of that stuff took a lot of time.

I'm going to say on the therapeutic fixed class side,

We're talking probably about 10 hours a week.

But plus,

On top of that,

All this trying to find watching videos about how to manage time better.

And all this time,

My head was very,

Very busy.

I was full of thoughts about how I wasn't doing it right.

I was full of thoughts about the next thing I could try.

I was full of thoughts about,

You know,

Why I was like this and what was wrong with me and what could I do about it?

And surely there was an answer out there.

So I would spend time researching apps for time management and et cetera,

Et cetera.

In the meantime,

I'm not doing any of the things I could have been doing to move myself and my business forward.

And as well as that,

My mind was so,

So busy that there was no way on this planet I was connected to anything in the real,

In reality,

In the real time,

In the present moment.

Because in actual fact,

What we need to do next will occur to us when we have a quiet mind,

When our mind is not full of noise.

But mine was so full of noise so much of the time that I couldn't really,

I didn't have the headspace to think straight.

What I notice now is now my mind is an awful lot quieter.

Well,

I just get stuff done or I don't.

You know,

Some days I don't,

This morning I went for a five mile walk because that's what I wanted to do.

And that's what I felt was beneficial for me physically and emotionally.

I find now that most of the stuff that needs to get done,

It just gets done.

If something's time sensitive,

It gets done in time.

Sometimes it might be a bit last minute.

Sometimes it's in plenty of time.

And the system,

My time management system is a piece of flipping paper.

I've tried everything else.

It works for me to have a bit of paper with stuff written on it,

But I take great pleasure in crossing off because I'm a human being who likes to cross things off this.

So what I'm saying here,

Like everything else I point to,

Inside you is the capacity to get things done.

That is an that is just,

You spend time with a tiny child.

They never stop doing things,

Building things,

Painting things,

Things they shouldn't be painting,

Going in cupboards,

Getting up to mischief,

Whatever they're doing,

They never stop doing.

If we're not doing,

If we're not active,

If we're not following our intuition,

It's because our head's too noisy.

And all these time management strategies and tools and techniques just make our head even noisier.

And none of us work best with a noisy head.

The quieter your mind is,

The more connected you are to your intuition,

To your wisdom,

To that which is inside you,

Quietly trying to talk to you,

The more you will just naturally get done.

Human beings are doing machines.

If you're not doing things,

Then either it's not the right thing to do or your mind's too busy.

And all you need to help with that is awareness that that's what's going on.

So I hope you find that helpful.

Have a super productive day if that's what you want,

But realise you don't need to be doing a lot of extra things just to get yourself to do things.

Take care,

Lots of love.

Thank you so much for listening.

There's nothing to do now,

But bring some awareness to how this is working out in your life.

Listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm.

This has been the CalmCast with Claire Downum,

Queen of Calm.

Take care and keep listening.