Today I want to ask you one question. Do you find yourself saying “This task took longer than I thought”? If you do, this article is just for you!
Recently I noticed that several of my private clients said exactly this, and I thought if they are experiencing this problem, then there is a chance you might be experiencing a similar challenge as well.
Today I would like to talk about why is it happening and what you can do about it.
When you say: “This task took longer than I thought”, probably what happened is that you’ve set yourself a personal deadline, or maybe you had a deadline to complete a project. You broke the project into several smaller tasks, and when you did one task, it took longer than you thought; then the next task took longer than you thought, and soon you find yourself missing your own deadline or the deadline you were given.
As the result you get frustrated with yourself asking yourself why can’t you manage it, why is it taking so much longer. Then the negative thoughts coming in such as: “I am not good enough, I don’t know enough, I am not as effective with my time as I should be”. And of course these thoughts are not helping you to continue with and complete your project.
Today I want to suggest to you how to look at it differently, and how to help yourself to become more effective with your time.
When you say: “This task took longer than I thought”, it is almost like you give your own power away and say: “This task has the power over my time”. But the thing is – and this is a universal law – that the work takes ALL the time available. If you allow the task to take any amount of your time then the work will expand proportionally to the time available.
What you probably find yourself often doing, consciously or subconsciously – and it is a big challenge for many people – is that you allow other people and circumstances enter your life and take your time away, as if you don’t own your time.
As the first tip for today I would like to suggest to start looking differently at your time, and start realising that you own your time. You can actually decide how much time you give to certain tasks, to certain projects, to certain people, and to certain commitments – it’s YOUR time. No one can come and take it away from you unless you let them.
It was exactly the shift I have experienced when I realised that I own my time and I can decide how much time I spent on things.
As the second tip for you I want to suggest that when you have a certain project and you have broken it into smaller well-defined parts, estimate how much time each task will take and then give a set amount of time to this task. You are no longer saying “I wonder how long this task is going to take”; you say “I am giving this task a set amount of time to be completed”. And if you cannot estimate the amount of time needed for completion of the task, then maybe you need to break it down into more defined tasks, where you know how much time you would need to complete each task.
What happens when you say: “I give this task the set amount of time” is that you become very focused. And it does not mean that you will end up with a bad or incomplete piece of work, quite the opposite. What often happens is that you become much more focused and effective during this set amount of time and work effectively towards the deadline you set for yourself.
To confirm the above, I’ve just heard from one of my private clients with whom we had a VIP session this week, who said she completed a piece of writing of 2500 words from scratch within just 3 hours of focused work.
Your Productivity for Scientists Assignment for this week:
- start looking at your time differently, realising that you own your time. And you can now start saying “I give this set amount of time to this task” instead of wondering how long does this task is going to take from you.
- When you break your project down into smaller tasks, give them very short deadlines and focus on these tasks during these very well defined periods of time.
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