Why time management books might not help you manage your time better
Why time management books don't help you manage your time better
It’s summer 2022. That means fewer work hours, more adventures, and a lot more reading for me. Personally, I have no goal in terms of the number of books I’ll read. However, I’ve read 16 books so far this year... and I have no plans to stop!
If you struggle with spending your time how you want to, focusing, getting things done, or procrastinating less, I'm guessing you're planning to read a time management book (or maybe, five) this summer.
Before you pick up any books, you need to know why most time management books don't actually help you manage your time better!
My hope is that this blog will either convince you to read romance fiction instead (😂) or help you make the most of any book you have or will read so you can truly start spending your time how you want to.
What’s wrong with time management books?!
I’m going to say this bluntly (with love). Almost every time management book claims it’ll help you...
accomplish more in less time
work less and take off more
find time for relaxation
take better care of yourself
feel less stress and anxiety
Yet the chance of that actually happening is slim to none. Why?
If they did deliver on their promises, 201,000 people a month wouldn’t be searching for time management help still.
Millions of people wouldn’t be working 50-60+ hours a week or unable to take off without feeling guilty.
Of course, another question is…Is it the advice that’s bad or is it the inability to integrate the advice given? I’ll get back to that in a sec.
For many reasons, the very concept of productivity books isn’t working.
The main reason is: You have to make time to read a book… that’s supposed to give you more time?
As you are merely trying to get everything done in your business and life, reading and integrating the tips in any book become yet another thing for you to do.
Blegh.
What if the time you spent reading about time management books, you spent listening to what you needed?
What do you want to do with your time? How might you make that happen? The strategies that you come up with are 10x more likely to work anyways.
This is what I support my clients with as a holistic time coach. Click here to read more about working with me.
Of course, sometimes we do need strategies from outside to experiment with, which is where time management books can help us. Here’s my best advice:
How to best use time management books
(In my “expert” opinion)
1. Take them with a big grain of salt
I used to read time management books that promised I'd become a productive magical unicorn if I followed their advice. I'd get all excited, thinking I'd finally figured out all my problems, try to implement the advice, and then discover it didn't work for me.
Or, it would work for a little bit… until they didn’t. So I’d move on to the next book while internalizing that something is wrong with me.
Does this cycle sound familiar at all?
The productivity industry has convinced us of three things: we need to be better or different, it will fix us, and if it doesn’t, something is wrong with us… not it.
When you approach any struggle in your life with any shame or guilt about who you are, progress is nearly impossible.
So before we go any further… I’d like to tell you that you are amazing. You don’t need to be fixed. Nothing is wrong with you.
Read the time management books that make you feel good about yourself, that align with your values, and laugh at the books or pieces of advice that don’t.
Don’t find any time management books that do that? Consider working with me!
2. Shift your expectations
Most of the folks I coach have really high expectations of themselves and feel like they should already know how to perfectly get things done and manage their time.
On top of that, time management books have an underlying assumption of: “You’ll be able to get everything done one day following my advice, and that’s when you can relax.”
Most productivity books and tips are imbued with toxic productivity and hustle culture. Read more about toxic productivity and how it impacts you here.
Your high expectations, societal pressure, and the underlying tone of toxic productivity only lead to overworking, more stress, and exhaustion. Yep, you read that right. Time management books often share advice that does the literal opposite of what they say they’ll help you get.
Time management isn’t easy.
Choosing what to do with your life and actually doing it is terrifying.
A book won’t make that decision for you.
When you read a time management book with a lot lower expectations, it will be much easier to throw out the things that don’t feel good to you.
3. Make them fit you, not the other way around
The people that write books about productivity, or create apps and programs, are sharing what works best for them.
Speaking of, did you know most productivity tips, apps, and strategies are made for software developers and engineers? Makes sense they don’t work for the majority of people!
That being said, you will most likely never find a time management book out there that has been made by someone in the exact same situation that you are in right here, right now. Unless you’ve written a time management book!
Yes, there will probably be some time management tips, strategies, books, and things out there with people similar to where you are but at the end of the day, there is no one exactly like you.
Which is a beautiful thing. However, it does make it a little bit more difficult to manage your time in a unique-to-you way.
What do you do? You get to create your own rules!
When you read a book, think of it as reading about someone else’s rules. Then ask yourself what rules of theirs make sense or feel good to you?
At the end of the day… the best time management strategy: How can you be more you?
4. Small changes, seriously.
I know so many people preach small changes and progress. But if you’re anything like me… we just want to get it all done as quickly as possible and keep moving.
Again, if you're already struggling with time, you don't have time to read books, and then implement all the information they throw at you.
When anyone attempts to change a ton of things about how they organize and spend their days and weeks, it will be extremely overwhelming and unhelpful. It will end in throwing everything out, and starting over.
It’s important to choose one to three small (I’m looking at you!) shifts that feel good and you’d want to make after reading any time management book.
Now that we’re here, to answer my previous question: “Is it the advice that’s bad or is it the inability to integrate the advice given?”
It’s both/and. Some advice really sucks, but other times, we try to change too much at once when we’re already stretched thin on time.
That said, the jury is still out for me whether time management books help people manage their time better. After reading this, what do you think? Will you read any time management books this summer? Let me know in the comments below.
Ready to feel more confident, in control, and at peace with your time? Click here to get holistic time management resources from me!
Why toxic productivity is actually getting in the way of your success
Why toxic productivity is actually getting in the way of your success
Today's post is a bit vulnerable and scary because as a time management coach I'm sharing with you my biggest time management mistake.
I’m sharing it with you because hopefully, you resonate with me. By the end of this post, you will also know how it is costing you so much time + energy in your life and business.
So when lockdown started I got at least 10 emails from a bunch of different companies offering free art classes, finance classes, knitting classes, and all these different things that I could do.
Now that I “had the time” guess what I did? I signed up for all of them.
Deep down I felt that I needed to make the most of this time now that we were stuck inside of our homes.
If you felt this way too, comment below just to tell me “Yes, I feel you Becca.” Tell me I'm not alone in this!
This is a super small example of a bigger picture issue that we have as humans in our society today. On a normal basis, pre-pandemic pre-COVID, we are bombarded with productivity hacks, tips, tricks, and tools to make every moment productive as possible. If you google productivity, you will get around 500 million results.
When we are students in school, as children, we are rewarded for getting the most done, the quickest possible, the best output. We're impressed by people who can pull all-nighters. In our industry, entrepreneurs boast about working 80 hours a week and never sleeping or having time for themselves.
Rarely do we celebrate people who have a healthy work balance, who get a good night's sleep, who take care of themselves and have tons of time off to rest and to do whatever they want.
So when the pandemic hit globally, in the United States, many of us didn't have our commutes to our nine to fives anymore. We didn't have plans to go out with friends or spend time with family that didn’t live with us. We had “nothing else to do”, so we could finally get to all of the house projects, courses, books, starting the business, and growing exponentially.
—> A statistic that just backs up what I'm saying is Home Depot increase its revenue by 20% from February 2020 to January 2021. They made 132 billion dollars in revenue.
At the same time, companies and many people felt like our focus, energy, and output would be the exact same or somehow even better during a really traumatic, huge shift in everyday life. So many people lost loved ones, got sick, and lost jobs. Yet we continue to expect ourselves to be productive at the expense of our humanness.
Since lockdown began, it became clear to so many people that toxic productivity is our biggest time management mistake as a society. And it was mine too, even being someone who knew how important resting and taking time off is. Even as a time management coach, I was still pressuring myself to be productive at the expense of the things that I thought I valued and cared about.
The mistake of toxic productivity
Why is toxic productivity a mistake?
A business owner I have worked with recently asked me why is it such a mistake or why is it a bad thing that I want to be productive and work. My answer was, “there is nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with wanting to grow the thing that you are passionate about, the business, the life that you are trying to create. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be productive, it's when it becomes toxic.”
When it becomes toxic, you only care about productivity, making every single moment productive and have an output or result you are chasing after something that is not really ever going to happen.
We believe this fallacy of productivity, that we'll finally get everything on our to-do list done one day. So we're always doing more, more, more, and more to try and get to that one day where we can rest, take time off, and make time for ourselves.
Productivity becomes toxic when all you do is try and get to that one day. That's what creates a hamster wheel because it never happens. Your to-do list will never end and when you believe you'll finally get to that one day, the things that you do get done never feel like enough.
All of that creates a lot of self-confidence issues, it causes unhealthy self-care habits, you start to put your worth into your productivity and the output that you create.
That has a lot of detrimental impacts on your business and your life.
In my personal experience, I was in the hospital with an intestine infection, never really having major health issues before. I developed a severe intestine infection and was in the hospital trying to meet a deadline! I had my computer with me in the hospital trying to work on an essay. At the time I was in college as an engineering student. I didn't really care about English at all (sorry to my teacher) and yet, I was unconsciously choosing to be productive over resting and caring about myself.
That's how bad it can get. Obviously, that is a pretty severe "rock bottom” in terms of burnout and productivity. It doesn't have to be severe at all it can just be you unable to sit on the couch and enjoy an evening with your family or even with yourself.
How to know if your productivity is toxic?
You have trouble sitting still and resting.
You continue to work when you know that you're tired, achy, and not in the mood to work.
You feel like being bored is a bad thing.
There's this just constant need for self-improvement, just more, more and more which leads to a lot of impacts on our mental and physical health like depression, anxiety, and strained relationships.
Choosing work over yourself and which leads to a lot of self-mistrust.
That's my experience and that is the experience of many of the clients that I work with.
How to reverse the impacts of toxic productivity
If you relate to any of the things that I just mentioned, I want to share with you two super simple things that I had to do and that I help the folks do in my coaching program. There are so many things that you can do to start reversing the impacts of toxic productivity and hustle culture.
1.The first thing that you can do is reframing what productive means to you.
A lot of times we think that just resting, relaxing, and spending time with family isn't productive and I would love to cut that out, it is 100% productive. Anything that is of value or importance to you is productive. Being alive, being a human, it's not just about work, it is not just creating results and output. Anything that means something to you is productive and I will say this over and over and over and over and over again.
Once you figure out what is of value or what is important to you then just remind yourself every time that you spend time on those things, you're being productive!
2. The second tip that I want to share with you is, the best lifestyle is a healthy lifestyle.
There are so many statistics and studies coming out around how being healthy is the best thing you can do for work, productivity, your business, for yourself, for your family.
When you are falling into the biggest time management mistake, aka toxic productivity, you put work over health, work over self. Putting your health number one is the most basic thing that you can do to step off the hamster wheel.
At the end of the day, we need to rest, we need to train ourselves to put ourselves first.
The next question that you are going to ask me is how, how do I reframe what's productive? How do I put myself first? How do I create a healthier work-life balance?
There is no one solution. I can't give you in this short post what the how is. The how comes from inside of you, it is unique to you.
This is beautiful because that means it's going to work, you just have to figure out what is inside of you and how to make that happen. So if you want to step off of the toxic productivity hamster wheel, if you want to be mentally and physically healthier and happier. If you want to be more compassionate with yourself. And if you want to feel like there is all of the time in the world for everything that you need to get done… the answers are inside of you. And I can support you in unearthing your answers in my 1:1 coaching program.
I know how hard it is to peel yourself away from your laptop, from work, from the business that you're building. I know how hard it is when you know how toxic a productivity mindset can be and yet still fall victim to it and not be able to rest, take time off and put yourself first. So if that's you, you are in good company here. Trust me when I say that I am here to help you break up with toxic productivity and step off that hamster wheel so you can start resting and start living life in the way that you want to.
If you resonated with my biggest time management mistake, let me know in the comments below.