The Most Powerful Time Management Question

By on February 4, 2012 · Topics: Time and Tasks

(Time to read: ~1 minute)

In seeking spacious balance, I’m asking myself a new question these days.

It seems incredibly obvious now that I’ve started, but it certainly wasn’t obvious before. Well, maybe it was obvious, but just asking it made me so anxious that I didn’t do it.

The question is “When?”

As in “Okay, you want to this task, or you feel that you need to do it. So WHEN are you going to do it?”

When?

There are a four possible answers to this question:

  1. Right now
    .
  2. During a regularly scheduled “batch” time
    (e.g., the next time I enter receipts in my accounting system; or in my regularly scheduled email processing time; or the next time I work on this particular project)
    .
  3. At a specific time in the future that I immediately find and record in my calendar
    .
  4. When I look at all my existing agreements with myself, I realize this just isn’t important enough to do in the limited time available to me. So the answer to “when?” is “not”.

Then I file any task-related materials accordingly.

Benefits

This helps to ensure that I have spacious enough time to do all the things I’m agreeing to do. So I can do them peacefully and still have time for the rest and “not doing” (being) that are essential to my total well-being.

And that I can retain that spacious peacefulness by easily being able to find the materials I need when I need them.

Would it enhance your life to ask the “When?” question more often? If so, when will you ask it?

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