Do you constantly feel like you should be working when you’re trying to relax?
Do you worry about how you’re spending your time, all the time? When you’re trying to work, your brain tells you that you don’t relax enough. When you’re trying to watch a movie – your brain won’t shut up about how you need to be doing something else.
As you lurch from one activity to the next, you have no sense of whether you’ve spent too much time or not enough. You have no sense of whether everything’s going to work out all right, and your frustration builds.
I used to feel this way. For years I worked at home as a freelance programmer and set my own hours. I’m the primary caretaker for my chronically ill girlfriend. I struggled to get work done, take care of daily chores and responsibilities, and take care of my girlfriend.
Over the years I felt more and more like I had no time for myself. I felt like I was barely succeeding at everything else. It’s a horrible feeling. I know this is something that people who work from home often experience. It’s also something people experience when they’re trying to make lifestyle changes or work on a personal project – there’s just no time.
How can you deal with the constant feeling that there’s always something else more important for you to be doing? To figure that out, we first need to look at how you got to this point in the first place.
Why does your brain get in your face about how urgent some other task is?
You have no clue about how you’re spending your time. The same thing happens when you don’t have a financial budget.
With every purchase, you have to ask yourself, “Can I afford this? Should I be using my money for something else?” When you’re trying to spend time, you have no idea of whether you can afford it. You wonder, “If I watch a movie now, will I still have enough time to finish ‘Project Flimflam’ for work?” Who knows!?
If you watch the movie, the whole time you’ll be feeling like you should be working on Project Flimflam. Or if you get to work, the whole time you’ll be thinking, “I wish I were watching Backyard Wrestling: Unscarred right now. I should just give myself a break!”
How you can calmly and happily focus on what you’re doing without feeling anxious about what you’re not doing
Clearly and proactively define how you will spend your time
Rather than solely reacting to the perceived demands of the outside world, you need to figure out what works for you. This might be an obvious statement, but I’ve found that people with Nagging Brains are trying too hard to meet others’ demands. Doing so is madness! If you’re not spending any of your days the way you want then, well, what’s the point? I mean, what else is there?
In order to effectively take control of your time and silence your Nagging Brain, you need to know two things:
- How much time you’re spending on activities relative to each other
- Whether you’re accounting for everything – your responsibilities and your desires
Again, this works just like it would with a financial budget. To be certain that you can afford the way you’re spending your time, you need to know that you’re spending it according to your values and that you’re not going to come up short.
Finding the Right Tool for Gaining Control of Your Time
I’ve created an iPhone app, Control Time, whose purpose is to help you set a daily routine for every day of the week. It allows you to easily see how much time you’re spending on activities relative to each other every week and it shows you what activities you’ve accommodated, so you can figure out if you’ve accounted for everything.
One of the best parts of using the app, though, is that the process of creating a weekly routine is useful in itself. Now that I’ve figured out how I will spend my time from day to day, I feel clearer and more confident. I feel excited because I can see objectively that I have enough time to pursue the activities I enjoy – like taking aikido lessons and working on this site. I feel like I’m in control again, and I can stay in control.
Control Time isn’t for everyone. To use it, you have to be willing to follow the same routines week after week. That might sound like an excellent recipe for becoming the most boring person on the planet, but the most successful people follow routines. Dedicating yourself to long-term stability gives you peace of mind. You’ll know that you have a steady base which can handle daily surprises. That’s been my experience.
But I’ve tried this before
If you’re like me, you’ve tried many times to manage your time better. Nothing seems to work quite right. I’ve tried using paper and electronic calendars to manage my time. Both had the following shortcomings:
- They’re too tedious to manage.
- They don’t calculate how much total time you spend on an activity.
- They don’t show you how much time you spend on activities relative to each other.
Control Time addresses all of these issues. It has a tab specifically for showing you how much time you’ve set aside for each activity (shown above). This also lets you compare activities.
It’s also easy to set up a daily routine. Control Time makes it easy to change the duration of each activity and the activities’ order. Making these changes on paper would require a lot of erasing and re-writing. Likewise, with calendar software you’d have to drag around every “event” for a day just to accommodate one change. Control Time’s smart enough to make updates to your routine easy, not tedious. If you change the order of your activities, or there duration, all other activities’ start and end times are updated automatically.
If you think your life could use more order and stability, give it a try. It’s only $3.99, about the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee. The app will especially help you if any of the following describe you:
- You freelance
- You work from home
- You’re trying to create new habits
- You’re working on a side project
This app is my baby, and I think it can help you. If you have any problems, questions, or concerns with the app you can always email me: support@learngrowdo.zendesk.com . You can be assured that I’ll be looking at your email personally and will do my best to help you.
Control Time has already helped me tremendously. Using it lifted a great burden as I was finally able to be confident about how I was spending my time. I am going to continue improving the app as I use it, and I hope you send me suggestions on how to make it better as you use it. You can purchase it on iTunes now.
Thanks,
Daniel Higginbotham
support@learngrowdo.zendesk.com
978-430-8724
