Unschedule: An Upside Down Calendar
Have you ever stopped to think about how little time there actually is for REAL work during a day?
In his book The Now Habit: A strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-free Play, the author Neil Fiore encourages you to turn your calendar around and to create an unschedule.
The unschedule – one of the tools suggested by Neil Fiore for overcoming procrastination and achieving better time management (click on image for bigger picture)
You can create an own one week unschedule right in your calendar. Just pick some week a few weeks ahead. The idea is simply that you first mark down all the activities that are fun, related to free time and leisure, or that you just otherwise happen to enjoy. In real life these are normally exactly the “appointments” that are left out of calendars: sports, eating, friends, hobbies, and heck, even watching TV.
When I made this exercise, I couldn’t stop wondering how I ever manage to achieve anything… Do I really get all my work done during those small chunks? It gives comfort to realize that the time available for efficient work is limited. What would happen if I would work just a little bit harder during those few hours?
Do one for yourself now! It only takes 5 minutes.
When you are ready, study it. Do you get any ah-aaa’s?
After my own unschedule experiment I actually started to get some guilt out of NOT starting efficient working after the obligatory morning coffee. This is however something like a positive guilt feeling.
The idea of the unschedule is to keep all the rewards – pauses, hobbies and friends – ON your mind. This way you might better get the mental power to drive at full throttle at work, which again makes it easier to enjoy more your free time – the “guilt free play” part.
What’s my take, does this improve your time management?
It might be somewhat extreme to constantly update your calendar with both your schedule and unschedule content. It might also look funny in a shared calendar environment (by the way: please use the “private appointment” if you don’t want to brag with your family’s baby swimming sessions or such…).
In my opinion this it is a valuable exercise to do. It really might give you some ideas on how to improve your time management. You might even achieve a small paradigm shift in your relation to work time. I know I did.
Conclusion
When you’re at work, work hard and enjoy. If you live a balanced life, you will soon be doing something fun anyway! You might as well get some extra stuff out of your table, before your next break.
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