should you wake up desperately in need of a Boxing Day, open your diary (planner/calendar/wall chart …) and see if you can swap whatever you had planned for today with your next scheduled Boxing Day.
Believe me, this strategy works well. I’ve been known to postpone Boxing Days several weeks when Life is throwing everything it can in my direction, and similarly I’ve been known to have two Boxing Days within a few days of each other if I’ve deemed it necessary. This rule allows me to respond to the pushes and pulls of daily life whilst still getting an average of 12 Boxing Days a year.
Of course, this rule, and Rule Number 2, are virtually impossible if you don’t have a mechanism to manage your time.
Managing Your Time
Time is quite possibly the most valuable commodity you have. Everything else can be bought with money, and money itself can be created, found, given, even stolen, but not time. You have the same number of hours in the day as everyone else. And whilst you have some influence over the number of those days you might have left, believe me when I tell you that it doesn’t matter how healthy or safety conscious you are, they can still be snatched away from you at any point.
You’ve probably heard it said that ‘Time is Money’. But imagine if it was, and the hours and minutes of your life were somehow controlled by a Universal Bank of Time. What an austere organisation that would be.
Under their strict account usage terms, the UBT would actually mandate a compulsory daily withdrawal of 24 hours. The hours would be automatically transferred to you at the start of each day. However, you could never make a deposit. You could never put back what you didn’t use – and unused hours would be taxed at 100%. Worse still, the Universal Bank of Time would steadfastly refuse to issue statements. There’d be no online banking with the UBT. You couldn’t even get them to give you a balance, so you’d never be sure how much time you had left.
If real bank accounts worked this way you’d make sure you spent every penny of your daily withdrawal limit on something worthwhile. Pretty soon you’d probably start to plan your spending – you might even keep a book of items you wanted to spend your money on.
So why don’t you do this with your time?
You don’t expect to get in your car on Monday morning and have it drive you to work on its own, do you? No. You have to control the darn thing. And it’s the same with your life. ‘Taking control’ comes in many guises, but one of the simplest and most fundamental ways to take control of your life is to manage your time, and to do that:
YOU NEED A DIARY.
When I say ‘diary’ I mean, of course, a calendar in which you write appointments, not a journal in which you ponder the meaning of life. You might call it your ‘planner’, or ‘schedule’, or ‘that boring thing that I can’t see the point of’ – I call it a diary.
Here’s what your diary needs to be able to do:
It needs to be with you (you, not your partner), and preferably within arm’s reach, at all times
You need to be able to see a whole week at a glance
You need to be able to put things in, take things out, and move stuff around, fairly easily
It would also be useful if it could do the following:
Remind you of upcoming events
Warn you about public bank holidays, birthdays, days such as ‘Mother’s Day’, changes to and from British Summer Time5 etc
These days most people’s mobile phones can be set up to do all that and more. But it’s not the lack of diary options that stops people from using them, it’s the fact that most people don’t see the need for one. They’re not very sexy. It’s all a bit too much like hard work. So let me see if I can sell you some of the benefits of having a diary using real examples from my own life, when I was young and stupid.
Have you ever forgotten someone’s birthday? Someone important? How did that feel? Did they give you a hard time about it? Did they get upset? Did they hurl things at you and, in a flurry of tears, accuse you of ‘not caring’? That wasn’t true, was it – it was simply because your ‘current diary system’ (i.e. keeping it all in your head) failed you dismally. Am I right? No? Ok, try this …
Have you ever missed an appointment? There you are, sitting on the couch, squinting at the TV, thanking your lucky stars you have an optician’s appointment on – oh bugger, it was yesterday. You missed it. And why was that again?
Have you ever parked your car and noticed that the road tax expired last month? And when you went to renew your road tax you discovered that you no longer have a valid MOT certificate? Or insurance? Uh huh …
Have you ever arrived at work an hour early – or late – because the clocks changed at the weekend? And you didn’t know? Feeling sheepish yet?
Do people phone you up to find out why you haven’t turned up to that rehearsal / football match / band practice?
Does it ever seem like you spend your free days doing stuff for other people? Do you ever wonder why you agreed to do that in the first place? Do you ever wish you’d made time for yourself? Have you ever agreed to do something for two different people on the same day? How did it feel when you had to let one of them down?
Do you ever wonder where the time goes? Or how busy people fit it all in? Do you ever wish you could do more – for yourself, get a few things done, make things happen, finish decorating that room, take a day off, go to that concert, take a vacation, spend time with the kids, take a Boxing Day, be happier????
Finding the Right Diary for You
There are some superb diary options out there. I used to use Microsoft Outlook – I hated it with a passion, but it’s what my clients used, and it did the job, albeit in an annoying Microsoft kinda way.
I’m now using Google Calendar. Compared to Outlook, Google Calendar is, quite frankly, brilliant. Easy to use, free, and sophisticated enough that I can share various aspects of my calendar with trusted friends or work colleagues, and vice versa. My one and only gripe is that I have to be connected to the internet to amend it, and more than once I’ve wished there was a proper application that I could install on my machine,6 similar to the one I have on my iPod.7
As you’ve probably guessed, I’m a diary nerd. And I like an excuse to play with technology. If you’re a technophobe then an old-fashioned Filofax would work just as well if you used a pencil and an eraser, and got into the habit of looking at it on a daily basis. Many, many years ago I used a Franklin planner and for a while that worked well. Then I moved on – ‘upgraded’, if you like.
In that respect, diaries are similar to computers. They don’t seem like they’re essential, but once you’re using one you’ll not only wonder how you coped before, but you’ll need to upgrade it.
But let’s just start with the basics. Let’s get you using a diary and managing your time. Let’s take action!
Action
