Showing Up and Leveraging Time By Coach Mom
Elaine Dizon is a Filipinx growth mindset coach, writer, mother of 2, and a recognized AT&T Business Cultural Champion. She supports busy nurturers grappling with time and who would like to leverage their roots to nourish a joyous intentional life.
Time. There are days when there aren’t enough minutes in a day. Then, there are days when the hours don’t move quickly. Time is an interesting energy isn’t it? The mindset we have also plays a role in our perspective towards the clock. Time, is it a friend? Or is it a foe?
As 2021 kicked off, I wanted to make sure I was leveraging time in a kind and gentler way. Parents are consistently pulled in many directions. When I am done slogging through the day of deliverables and must dos, all I want to do is veg out or do something that does not tap out my brain. Streaming platforms are calling out to me and after a few hours binge watching a new show or the next season of a show I am splurging on (hello, Real Housewives of Atlanta and The Handmaid’s Tale), I am astounded with the amount of time that passed by. I tell myself, “Just one episode” and the next thing I know, I am mid-season of whatever I am watching. Before I consumed another ten episodes, I decided to take a beat and calibrate this binge watching with the other areas of my life. Is this how I want to parse out my time? Then the idea about productivity trackers crossed my mind.
I’ve never used a productivity tracker consistently before. I leaned on calendars and to-do lists to get me through the day and believed that I got enough insight from these visual boards, but I wanted to do something different. I wanted to take a leap and try something that required me to really look at where I was devoting my energy and attention. After spending a few hours searching for something useful, I landed on the Boosted Productivity app. The free version had a few features and after a few days, a special offer for the premium version at a reduced cost showed up on the screen. The premium version offered timers, calendars, and reporting. The data head part of me kicked on, and I jumped at the chance to manage what I could measure. My goal was to track six months of data. Did I follow a mantra I carry with me daily, “Energy flows where the attention goes.” Using my 2021 goals, I set up the app to measure time aligned with various professional and personal projects, creativity goals, and self-care. The big question, “Am I seeing the outcomes and results I imagine?”
In the beginning, I forgot to hit start and stop on the app. At the end of the first week, I realized I was spending an inordinate time going back throughout the day tracking what I did. I had to shift my mindset and integrate this app into the daily mix. I will manage what I measure. To entice me to track in real time, I put some thought into the color coding, title categories, and specific activities I wanted to quantify. With these details, I was more inspired to hit start and stop throughout the day. Creating stories was blue and specific activities were associated with collaborators. Understanding the why and the who behind each area of focus was quite helpful in setting this app up for success…and to shift my mindset into hitting start and stop with clarity, focus, ease, and grace. As the days passed, I was pleased to see projects finish, crafts getting done, game nights concluding with smiles and laughter, and finding pockets of time to write, reflect, and practice yoga. After the first month, I was excited with each week’s progression and over the first quarter, I could clearly see that my attention was pointed in the directions I outlined at the beginning of the year. In April, I was able to correlate the decrease in work hours because of a family vacation in April. The app was doing its job, it was telling me where I devote my time.
In May, I started employing the Pomodoro Technique in getting work done. This is a great way to schedule in breaks. After many months of sitting in front of the screen (for some us, it could be a multiple set of screens), diverting your eyes away and taking a stretch break is essential in giving yourself that physical and mental rest. With summer approaching, my desire to test out a method that creates timeframes for deeper focus and a few minutes between tasks sounded great. I described this process to my kids and those five minutes between pomodoros meant time to huggle. (Huggle is a huddle that is done with hugs…huggle). Breaking down big rocks of work into workable nuggets made life easier. Instead of focusing on what I have to do, when I have to do it, and then dealing with the chatter about being in the mood to do it…I shifted my focus on the projects listed in the app, enabled the Pomodoro timer, and the clock started working for me in ways that I didn’t expect. I experienced a gentler way to getting things done. Less stress because I scheduled twenty-five minutes to get something done. The twenty-five minutes went by quickly and within an hour block, 50 minutes of work with a 10-minute break sounded like something attainable, sustainable. By the end of the month, I decided to take on a continuing education course because there was more ease throughout the day.
When it feels like I am not doing “enough”, the Boosted Productivity data gives me the insight and my heart can either affirm or reflect back something I need to relook at. As I enter my final month of this experiment, I am staying mindful to my goals and plan on doing my traditional mid-year reflection before the end of the month. In addition to these numbers, I am going to bring in some Strava detail, sleep info from Garmin, and check out my Audible listening numbers to further understand where I have allocated my time. I’m sure I will remember draining and depleted moments. My sleep schedule could benefit from an extra hour or two from Sunday night through Thursday night. Instead of hanging onto that knowledge. I wiggle to a different perspective. Remember that kinder and gentler way of doing things I mentioned? Here’s where the self-care comes in. Just a little dose of self-compassion to finding a solution:
I give myself a smile and acknowledge where I miscalculated and look forward to a small miracle that is about to happen
I practice some patience because if not this time, next time
I nourish myself with what I just learned as a hopeful moment to do better
Time is a finite resource and the memories we build with it are immeasurable. Fighting with time means squandering precious minutes, and those minutes can add up. Rather than fritter those moments away, let’s continue to find ways to work with time in a way that serves us. For me, that might mean staying up late just for one more episode, sleeping in the next day, and shifting a few things to create more space for meaningful moments and work efforts. I’m excited to learn about how you leverage time. Please share your experience and memories with me in the comments below!
Be well, be safe, and be loved.
Your Coach Mom,
Elaine
Later this month, I’ll be continuing this conversation about time with a creative soul –Sylvia Blalock – Owner at Queendom Network, LLC: author, Uprising-A book of Poetry in my monthly Third Thursday Hangout. Sylvia and I will explore some interesting ideas she has about time and continue to ponder, “Time…friend or foe?”
Follow @yourcoachelaine on Instagram to get more details about this Facebook Live event.
