How to Close the Gap Between What You Say You’ll Do, and What You Actually Do
Photo by AXP Photography on Unsplash
TL/DR:
A “priority gap” can cause frustration, burnout, and stagnation.
Time tracking reveals whether your time matched your priorities.
You can realign either by owning your true priorities or changing how you spend your time.
Strategies like advance planning, scripts, and boundary-setting can help close the gap.
The Whole Shebang:
Let me ask you a question:
“What are your priorities?”
Now let me ask you another:
“How well is your time aligned with those priorities?”
If you answered “very well” to the second question, feel free to stop reading now.
But if you answered anything else, you might be in a “priority gap”, so read on!
If how you’re spending your time is not representative of your stated priorities, you’re probably feeling a bit frustrated.
You might be feeling misaligned
You might be wondering why you’re not moving forward on your goals
You might be feeling stuck
You might be feeling down on yourself
And if you’re not sure how well your time is aligned to your priorities, there’s one simple way to find out:
Engage in a little bit of time tracking.
Here’s how:
First, write down your priorities.
Then, for a week or so, track your time (Toggl is a great free app for this purpose)
Try to track honestly, and without judgement, to the best of your ability. (And don’t judge yourself if you forget for a few hours, or a whole day, just start again.)
Sit down with the data, and take a look at where your time is going, and see if it’s in line with your priorities.
And if you find that your time isn’t well aligned, well, you’ve got two options to get into alignment:
Admit that the things you’re spending your time on ARE your true priorities (and that’s OK, you’ll feel better), or
Reallocate your time towards your stated priorities
It would be easy to think “Well, why wouldn’t my time be automatically aligned with my priorities?” But the reality is that we live in a world with so many competing demands on our time.
And so this misalignment tends to show up in little ways, and big, every day.
For instance:
You block time to work on that big project, but you end up doing email instead.
You want to delegate more, but you keep doing tasks yourself because “it’s faster.”
You say you want to spend more time on high level strategy, but you actually spend most of your days in meetings or fighting fires.
What can you do about this?
I’m a big fan of a few strategies:
Separate the planning from the doing, so that you can start moving from reactive-mode to proactive-mode. Decide, in advance, how you’ll spend your time, and make sure to leave enough buffer each day to allow you to absorb the truly urgent/important items as needed, without eating away at your plan.
Define if/then plans for when decision points come up throughout the day, where you might be tempted to take care of something minor (but easy!) at the expense of your true priorities.
Use scripts for pushing back, saying no, and setting boundaries. If you can define language that you feel good about in advance, you’re less likely to give in to stuff that’s not your priority, simply because someone’s asking you.
And look, I’m not saying this from up on a high horse; I can fall prey to misalignment of time too.
Somewhat recently, my husband said to me:
“I think that you prioritize your business, then pottery, then our family.”
My knee-jerk reaction was “No way, it’s family first, then business, then pottery!”.
But, because my husband is a pretty considered person, and doesn’t say things flippantly, I knew I needed to take a deeper look inside to see if there was truth to what he was telling me.
Because even if in my head, and heart, it’s “family first”, clearly, he was experiencing something different, and, when I looked at my time, it told a slightly different story.
Even though I know that, when push comes to shove, I’ll choose my family every time, it’s also true that I have been spending A LOT of time at the pottery studio. And while that brings me a lot of joy, I also know that I need to put my time where my mouth is.
So, I’m embarking on a little time realignment of my own. Will I still be spending time at the pottery studio? Yes. But will I also be much more mindful of spending free time with my family? Also yes.
Where do you need a little time-realignment?
