Establishing safe spaces for your goals

Modern day can be so hectic that it is rare to keep a clear mind 🧠 during the day to day.

Remaining in touch with what we wanted to achieve during the day is a true achievement! This is why TimeRichMe provides you with a Challenge Dashboard and other tools: to make it easy to track what the big vision you had for your life was, turn it into actionable steps, and offer you a clear picture to see how you are doing.

However they are some things TimeRichMe cannot do for you, because they happen in your environment. Here is one of the top things you can do for yourself to dramatically increase your chances of success. It is simple, yet not necessarily easy to master.

You might have all these activities you wanted to do for the day, and you might have even set dedicated time spaces for them in your calendar 📆.

But when it comes to actually getting these activities done, even pleasurable ones, sometimes your “activities boundaries” are hard to guard. It is all too easy for that dedicated space in time to pass without doing that activity.

This can have various causes:

• an activity might overlap over another one (as in you might do your previous activity for too long),
• you might feel it is hard in the moment to find the energy to start the next activity,
• sometimes we were supposed to do something - mosquito tasks, write to a friend, write a blogpost; and though we have started on the path of getting ourselves there, we realize we got lost.

How do we get lost?

Most of the time we get lost on our own laptop or desktop, checking up other emails, solving other things, responding to other things. We get lost digitally, so to speak. Given that our digital environments are infinite, it is very easy to get lost digitally.

Sometimes we get lost in our physical environment - doing household tasks if we work from home, being interrupted or meeting with colleagues if we work in the office.

And sometimes, just sometimes, we get lost in our own head :) They are various things occupying our minds, and our minds are just so busy thinking about these, trying to solve some pieces of them, clear up some social situation by rehearsing it or planning things, that there is no real attention energy left for us to focus on the task at hand.

The dilemma: when half an hour or more of our dedicated time slot has elapsed, we have a dilemma on our hands (and remember decisions require lots of executive mental energy): Now we don’t even know if it makes sense to start that activity, because we might not have time to finish it anyway! We will just use our “activation energy” to get it started, but then we will have to rush through it, or leave it in the middle, in an unsatisfactory way.

Example of Time Boundaries Crossing

Let’s say you dedicated an hour or 1h and a half to writing a nice blogpost. And for you, this is kinda enough time, but also a little bit of a challenge to get it done. You know, in other words, that you will be working in an intense, engaged manner to get this done, but you are convinced the likelihood of achieving this is about 95%.

But then, if half an hour has already elapsed, what is the best course of action? The fact that we have to ask ourselves this means that we will need to rethink what we are doing in that timeslot (even if we are deciding to do the same thing). This decision will take more time and mental energy away from the blogpost.

Variant 1 - Rushing it: Assuming we decide to do the same thing, we will have to rush to finish our blogpost, which was likely to be written in the previous time allocated (95%), but now is less likely to be written (65%). Sure, some people thrive in on-de-edge situations, and search for that excitement in their day to day when they don’t have it in other spaces in their life.

But rushing could ruin your flow - remember that flow requires a bit of a challenge, but not so much that you don’t know anymore if you can achieve the thing. And it is hard to have a peaceful and flowing life when you are constantly fighting to keep the lights on to get your activities done.

Getting your activities done shouldn’t be firefighting, but the peaceful and pleasurable enjoyment of your own creativity.

Variant 2 - Doing part of it: If you only get done part of it done (which might be your result even if you rush - talk about double dissatisfaction), you will then need to find a new moment to reactivate yourself to finish it. To motivate yourself, to get yourself in the same mind space (by reading what you have done before) - and this simply is not a good use of attention and time resources if you could have contained the job in one hour.

Yes, some projects do require a long persistent process of coming back, taking stock of where you were at, and adding the next brick to your construction. But you don’t need to take two or three different timeslots just to add one brick. Containing tasks in such a way that you see they have had a good result at the end of your allocated time can be very satisfactory while having to come back to do part 2 and part 3 of a task you know you could have contained is not. It makes you feel defeated, or at least not effective.

Variant 3 - Postponing it: Assuming you are deciding to do something else with your time, some part of you might very well be disappointed that you haven’t gotten to make that blogpost happen. You could, of course, move things around in your day’s schedule 📅. You could do something else you have planned to do that day in the remaining time, something that can be compressed with more ease. And you could try again to do the blogpost in that tasks’ timeslot. Or you could just give up another activity that day to make more time for the blogpost writing.

Such trade-offs do happen during the day, and making them happen shows that you are flexible.

However, while we like to know that we can move the furniture in our house, and we would possibly detest it if someone else took it upon themselves to rigidly force us to put it in specific places, nobody likes living in a house in which all the furniture moves around, all of the time. Even if it is them doing the moving.

Think of furniture 🪑(in your space) as the pieces of activity you are putting into your time. To give yourself security, you need to know that some of these things will be there, in place, all or most of the time.

Establishing Safe spaces

This is why, one of the best things you can do for yourself in terms of setting yourself up for time management success is making sure you are starting right.

What does that mean?

Starting right means being there, at the right time, when the task you scheduled is starting. It means being ready and having everything you need in place within the first 2-5 minutes if it is a one hour task. This is what will set you up for success.

This means:

1. Other sources of distraction have been closed or exist in hidden windows that don’t bother you (out of sight, not in the tab next to what you are working).
2. Your resources have been gathered and open. This is half of the battle, because sometime it takes us so long to track our digital resources, the right information and open the various tools we will be using, that this increases the danger of getting lost along the way. It is when trying to start that you lose your way and see someone from your team has written something to you on slack, you discover an email you forgot to answer, or an interesting update in notion, or (with working from home) find that there is something to organize and arrange physically and poof, half an hour of your dedicated time is gone.
3. You are set up:
   • you have your tea or smoothie or coffee (or whatever makes you feel good);
   • you are fresh (or almost) - make room for a nap, 10 minutes of stretching or of meditation if you are working from home and your energy is down;
   • you are not hungry - you have a sandwich or nuts or whatever healthy food by your side if you are getting hungry, or you have planned your meals and meal times in your calendar in such a way that there is something to eat if you get hungry earlier.

Imagine yourself starting up your work in a clean space, that only has the resources that you need. How easy would it be? This is the vision you need to hold onto to make this thing happen!

If you find that you are getting lost cognitively a lot, this might mean you need to take a step back, perhaps cancel or move some of the tasks of the day and allow for some time to deal with the things your mind is constantly attracted to. You might just need to set up some Thinking time. Or you might want to write a list 📝 about what your mind keeps reminding you of, and put some dedicated time on dealing with items from this list. Your mind will thank you.

Results

Getting started right, having all the resources you need at your fingertips, a clear mind, a fed stomach, a hydrated brain, having no notifications that will bother you, no tabs that might lure you away, will dramatically increase your productivity and your sense of peace.

Being at the right time with the right tools and the right mindset, and knowing there will be no interruptions will allow you to problem-solve with amazing skill, will help you be creative, and also make for an enjoyable time experience. This will improve the way you feel about your time.

You will also feel like you respect yourself or even love yourself if you do this enough. It is a form of self-nurturing to start yourself off in a peaceful, kind way, giving yourself all the chances for a successful session.

If you are lucky enough, when you were a kid you might have had someone that did this for you. Helped you organize your resources and your environment, blocked time and helped you focus on an activity, in a kind way. As an adult, you can create the same experience for yourself.

It is interesting to note that this will feel like treating yourself well, and this is also one of the “buttons” that many ads try to press in you: you see a person doing something in a clean and clear environment. What is being sold is the sensation that, by being in this environment, owning that computer, having access to that workspace, buying that car or those clothes will give you this self-nurturing, clean feeling.

But ultimately, to preserve such a feeling you don’t need new objects, you need clean, organized experiences, in which you are free to focus.

And nobody can do this for yourself, but you!