How to make time work for you
#122 - cricket, calls and cooking
Hi there,
I’d usualIy say I was swept away by the busyness of the week” when I miss one…but I’m on holiday! That surely can’t be a valid reason (although Mum thinks I’m keeping myself too busy)
Anyways…I’m sorry for missing last week. My Sunday night was booked up with a certain England football final, which feels an age ago now. I kept myself entertained during the 90+ minutes with colouring in this page1, tilting my head up whenever I heard a rise in the fans’ animosity. It’s a shame for England, we now wait for the next big trophy. The post from last week will be released next Sunday (28/07) when I’m out in the Peak District.
Otherwise, the week has contained lots of meeting people, both on walks and on video calls, as well as the…
Highlight of the week: watching a match at Edgbaston. In what is becoming a summer tradition, I went to a T20 game with 5 friends…and the Birmingham Bears won! The marquee player scored a century and the Bears bowled and fielded well - we’d chosen a good day 🏏
One of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite books goes like this
“Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan” Morgan Housel in The Psychology of Money
It was also the opening to a previous blog post of mine on the key part of a plan.
This Friday showed me a couple of instances where doing this came to fruition.
Ahead of the T20 match mentioned above, I wanted to also go the gym, get a haircut (had to look sharp for the evening out, of course) and also needed to pick my sister up from her afternoon shopping.
When deciding when to leave the house, to time it all right, I gave the haircut a full hour: 2 pm to 3 pm. I was expecting to be done by 2:30 and have half an hour to myself, looking around and sitting in some shade - it’s the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, surely the hairdressers won’t be packed?
Oh, how I was proven wrong? A 6-strong queue and I was there till 3:15 (with a decent trim at the end) so I’m thankful I budgeted for a longer time there.2
When leaving where the 6 of us met up to go to the train station, we left a little earlier to make sure we didn’t miss the 17:32.
Why? If we had, we’d run the risk of not getting good seats - and so accounted for that by giving us some wiggle room.
There’s also an argument that catching the earlier of the two means if anything goes wrong, we have another train we can catch.
And for the sake of balance, here’s an example of when I didn’t get the timings right - which will feature again in a future blog post I’m cooking up 🥘
My final Further Maths paper. Decision Maths is known to be thankfully less complex than other elements of the course, but time-consuming, which makes it paramount to get things right first time around.
When we had this as our final A Level paper a month ago (to the day, in fact), I took my time through the paper, to do things methodically and calmly. In the end, I finished the paper but didn’t have enough time to check my answers thoroughly.
What’s more? When I made a mistake on the final question and had to restart it, I had to use 3 minutes of my precious 90 in redrawing tables and circling numbers. I’m glad I had that time but maybe should’ve been quicker at the start.
So the core message is that we should budget for time to allow for the unexpected. There will be many times when we don’t need it - that’s fine. Yes, you could have eked out a couple more email readings or Instagram reels but you’ll be grateful when you do need that time - and you allowed future you to have it, to breathe easier and to stay cool.
Here are three practical use cases of this I’ve come across
‘You have to get there’ - I found this in a recent newsletter post by time management expert Laura Vanderkam.
I know, from studying time logs, that it’s a pretty common tendency to forget (or underestimate) transition time between places or activities. Travel, in general, is a multi-step process. E.g. Waze may say it takes 29 minutes to get somewhere, but you have to get in the car and park somewhere at the end, and that parking spot is often not 10 seconds from where you hope to end up.
Even virtual work has transition times - finding the link in your calendar, going to the bathroom
There’s no need to get lost in transition. Sometimes people overestimate the time and energy cost of moving from one thing to the next and decide that they can’t do two fun things in a day. That’s often not the case! However, leaning too far in the other direction introduces issues too, such as being chronically late and flustered.
A little space between meetings - whilst the above applies to in-person meetings too3, for virtual meetings, you’ll want a couple of minutes between meetings to breathe, stretch, take your eyes off the screen (you might like the 20-20-20 rule) and refresh, as well note down any action items.
The airport - it’s why adults (dads especially) fluster us to the airport ahead of time, to account for anything going wrong before getting there (roadworks, accidents, taxi breakdowns, you name it) and once you’re in the cauldron of pressure, screens and people.
Whilst it would be wonderful if the world worked perfectly to time like clockwork and everything was ‘tickety-boo’, it isn’t - let’s deal with reality. Make your life easier by embracing the unexpected and planning for it in your time schedules.
Book of the week 📖
Still going on The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Looking forward to finishing Volume 1 of 5 soon this week.
Podcast of the week🎙️
The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett - Walter Isaacson, the Man who Followed Elon Musk Everywhere
Incredibly fascinating to hear how his daily life is and the life events that shape him into the pretty crazy man he is. He also wrote a book in a similar fashion on Steve Jobs.
What I’m grateful for this week 🙏
This video for providing me with 2 fantastic breakfast recipes
Quote of the week 💬
Allow yourself to be a beginner. No one starts off being excellent - Wendy Flynn
That was nice to write a blog post, hope you enjoyed it. Keep making the most of your summer!
Adi
From a book I bought in 2021, thinking I was going to be more mindful
Ended up spending close to 10 minutes trying to distinguish between 6 different QR codes for our 6 tickets, amongst 8 pdfs - good fun!
As I learnt the hard way with being late to quite a few lessons through Year 13…