Hey Sisters,
Bringing back this post in hopes that it inspires you to make even better use of this precious gift of TIME. This post was first published on this blog in March 2021.
Last time on the blog, I spoke about planning your hours ahead and being proactively lazy.
One of the Queens in my stay at home mom mentoring academy had this question, and I thought to answer this on my blog too
“Oh thank you, If I prepare my daily schedule and I don’t follow up accordingly like the way it is written down and exceed time frame but still get everything done at the end of the day does it portray indiscipline ? is it acceptable?”
In answering her, I went here and there.
For some tasks, you will overestimate your speed, and underestimate its weight, then allocate less time to it. For some other tasks, it will be vice-versa. And that’s OK.
If you planned to, for instance, finish 2 chapters of your current read in 30mins, and 45mins later, you still have 10 pages to go, that doesn’t mean you failed at the task.
What it means is that you need to study yourself and capacity even better, then get more proficient at planning and locating time per task.
Now, the bigger deal here is CONSISTENCY.
That every day, you keep turning up to being proactively lazy, keep tweaking and adjusting, keep challenging yourself, keep praying too, and soon you will see yourself get better and better and ‘betterer’ at knocking out your daily tasks.
By God’s grace, I have been a major planner for years, since my early University days. If you check out this post from 9 years ago, “As e dey hot,’ you would see me talk about a concept called ‘begin tomorrow today’ or so.
Now what this means is that I am further down the road than the women I mentor, and I have gained and mastered a lot more skills when it comes to time management.
And one of the skills I have cracked is now being able to get MORE or the same things done in even less time.
For instance, in the past, say 3 or 4 years ago, I could spend 3 hours or 4 writing a post, and another 2 hours publishing it. Really great reads are super hard writings, trust me.
Today, I frankly cannot allocate that much time to one blog, but I also didn’t wanna present a weak and shoddy read to my readers,
so I have TRAINED myself to spend less time on same quality of blogging, which usually comes with repetitive tasks, and then focus, a real brutal one. I would set my timer to maybe 1hr 30mins or 2 hours, and focus and get the job done.
With more practice, today, a blog can take me 45mins to write, and even though 1 hour is ideal, I have had to TRAIN myself to even get it done in 45mins or less, by taking advantage of the PARKINSON’S LAW.
Parkinson’s law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.
This is so spot on for many things.
Your money for example. You earn 100k and it meets your basic needs,
Same for time. You have 2 hours to turn in a report. You submit it in 2 hours exactly. Next time, the same report allows you an extra one hour wiggle room, and you somehow finish it in 3 hours.
What I have learned to do is to INVERT this law by giving myself tighter artificial deadlines or budgets.
I have 50k for shopping, but I first of all, remove 10k and FORCE my mind to creative levels to make 40k work.
AND IT WORKS!!!!
I have 1 hour for a blog, but I set my timer, and put it right before my eyes, to 40mins, and with every countdown, my brain is FORCED to produce the same thing faster.
Looking at that timer blinds me to distractions.
My ringing phone is annoying.
Interruptions to me are frowned upon.
I am just focused on the task and timer, for those 40mins.
I am like a dog with a bone, and will not let go till I am done
In the end, I achieve the same thing in LESS time.
It has happened to ALL of us at different times. Think of your student days. You only knew of the assignment 2 hours before the deadline. It is a compulsory course and you are in final year.
My sister, you WILL get the literal IMPOSSIBLE done, because all that adrenaline will put pressure on your brain, force you to brutally eliminate distractions, in fact your phone will be silent because every beep is like an invitation to extra year, and as a result, you produce sometimes your finest output, definitely better than if you had 3 days.
That’s life for you. We are capable of so much more than we think, but we refuse to stretch, and just embrace laziness, yet we are young.
“It’s a good thing when you’re young to stick it out through the hard times.”Lamentations 3:227 MSG
If we have 2 hours, we use two hours. Meanwhile an artificial deadline would have forced us to use one hour and save another one hour to INVEST in other things.
This productivity wisdom is so key if we want to increase our outputs where 24 hours are fixed.
As God gives us more to do, we would have to get better at squeezing more out of the same, or less time, especially as women who have to handle work, home and more.
In fact, only the home can stretch you, especially as more and more kids get added to the family, and life happens.
Long and short, we can’t escape this, except of course you are comfortable with the basics. Which I know you aren’t.
So, please give yourselves artificial deadlines, master focus, be brutal in eliminating distractions, and let’s keep WINNING. I believe together we can.
With so much love n cheer
Eziaha.