How to Control Your Schedule
If you want to do something, take the time to do it. This includes everything from a task you have to complete at work to a walk you want to take with your family. The novel you want to write. Weekly play night or date night. The dream you want to prioritize.
Why? Because if you don’t block this time – and yes, that includes time to think, time to plan, and time to do nothing – you may be distracted by something else and end up spending your day in a completely different way. than you planned.
In the latest episode of Ezra Klein’s show, podcast guest Nir Eyal, author of On the Hook: How to Create Habit-Forming Products and the forthcoming I’m Not Distracted: How to Control My Attention and Choose My Life , shared the following idea:
These days, if you don’t plan your day, someone else will. In my research, I found that the vast majority of people do not guard their time. We allow anyone to interrupt us whenever they want, especially when it comes to these technologies. We use them on someone else’s schedule, right? Every time we receive a signal or ringing, we use these technologies, rather than planning our day. Now here’s a very old, very well-established study called setting an implementation intent , which is just a fancy way of saying what you are planning, what you are going to do, and when you are going to do it. I want people to remember the mantra: you can’t call something a distraction if you don’t know what distracted you from.
Eyal explains that while researching his book, he spoke to dozens of people who told them how the world is distracting and how Twitter and Facebook prevent them from focusing on the rest of their lives. But when he asked, “Can I see what you were planning to do today?” they pulled out their calendar app and showed it a day that was mostly unplanned and therefore available to anyone with distractions.
“Transform your values into time,” Eyal advised, and as soon as he said that, I felt a shiver like “ yes” .
We’ve all heard the advice “spend money according to your values,” which often means creating a budget in which we channel our money where we hope it will go .
Eyal wants us to also spend our time in accordance with our values, which often means creating a calendar in which we allocate time to where we hope it is (and then update our calendar to show where our time really went ) …
When I teach writing classes , I often give my students a blank sheet of paper with a grid of hours for the week. Then I ask them to mark all the hours they have already devoted to something: work, children’s football, training in the choir, and so on. Then they need to mark the hours they spend fulfilling basic life requirements: sleep, hygiene, cooking, cleaning. Shopping for groceries. Driving to work, football and choir.
Then I ask them to see how many hours are left and what they want to do with them. How many go to the family? How many friends do they have? How many people go to rest and relax? How many hours should you stay unscheduled in case something unexpected happens? And – since this is a writing class – how many hours can you devote to writing?
It’s an always eye-opening exercise, and it shows my writing students that for this to happen, they need to prioritize writing. Schedule this. Convert their values into time.
I know because I myself often have such a schedule that it is sometimes difficult to stick to such a calendar. For example, if you don’t sleep well, your “time to think” or “time to write” may turn into “time to rest.” If you’re not doing your job on schedule (or getting an assignment you didn’t expect), you may have to quit the gym or postpone your date.
But just as budgeting shows you how your actual spending differs from your ideal spending, this calendar method shows you how you ideally want to spend your time versus what your time is actually spending.
And then you can ask yourself if you are truly spending your time in accordance with your values or if you need to change something.