How Do You Frame Your Time (and what does it mean)

A recent article in Psychology Today reported a counterintuitive finding.

Readers are asked, “Who’s most likely to donate time to charity? A lawyer bllng $400 an hour; an accountant billing $100 an hour; a parking lot attendant earning $10; or a teacher earning $45000 a year?”

The answer may surprise you. It turns out that volunteering is not related to wealth or income but to a style of framing perceptions about the value of time. Once you start working hourly, or billing your time by the hour, you start to be conscious of the value of time. My own suspicion: Those who are paid hourly but in fact work consistent hours are probably less conscious of their hourly rate.

I’ve noticed this response when people shift from free lancing to take a regular job, or “J.O.B.” They’re very conscious of the way employers waste their time. For instance, one friend was putting together an online program. She was told to, “Check the links to be sure they’re okay.”

“Aren’t there computer programs to do that?” she asked. She was shocked as she considered the value of time she was being asked to contribute to this mindless task that a low-cost piece of software could accomplish more accurately.

Going the other way, new entrepreneurs often have trouble making sure they use each hour effectively. “Time is money” takes on more meaning when you aren’t drawing a fixed salary.

On the other hand, the article points out, it’s easy for the hour-minded to start tracking all their activities, including leisure or family time. That’s going a little too far for some.

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Time Management for Mid-Life Career Change

Mid-life career changers often feel totally overwhelmed when they contemplate all the things they have to do. In fact, the reason most career change fizzles is related to lack of time. If you’re working 40 to 50 hours a week, how will you squeeze in your search for a new career? And where do you start?

– Career change time doesn’t work the same as career success time.

When you have a job in a corporation, you often realize you need to focus. Your mission is to “get the job done.” But when you want to find a new career, openness is more important than focus. A distraction may turn out to hold the key to your next life.

Serendipity used to be considered woo-woo and even a little silly. But browse through serious academic journals of career research and you will find a surprising number of people find a new career by accident, not through a step-by-step careful process.

For some reason, though, working through a step-by- step process can trigger a serendipitous experience. You consider a career that combines your love of math and mechanics with your fascination with medical miracles. One day you meet someone who enrolled in a degree program for biomechanical engineering and you have an “aha” moment you could never have achieved by deliberate planning.

– Think of juggling several balls in the air, not pitching one of them at a time.

When you’re just getting started on a search for your next career, you need to explore multiple options simultaneously, not sequentially. For instance, you might be considering a return to school for an advanced degree, a temporary job to pay the bills while you start a business and a new role in your current company.

When you focus on just one option, you may need weeks or even months to sort out the possibilities. Any of these options could turn into a dead end. If you just focus on one thing at a time, you’ve lost weeks and months with little to show for your efforts.

– Make career planning your number one priority.

Recognize that you may have to give up some recreational activities and personal time. Remove nay-saying friends from your life. Get the family on board even if you have to hire a counselor or relationship coach.

Mid-Life Career Strategy can be especially challenging because the rules keep changing as you move in new directions. Now you can download a FREE gift, “3 Secrets of Successful Midlife Career Change,” at Mid-Life Career Choice. For a proven time management system visit Time Management For Careers. From Cathy Goodwin, Ph.D., an author, speaker and career consultant who specializes in helping mid-life mid-career professionals and executives navigate career journeys.

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Work-Life Balance? Not always possible.

David Brooks’s New York Times column drew attention to Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Brooks writes about Sotomayor’s sacrifice of personal life to her career. During her marriage, Sotomayor admits, she sometimes left home at 7 AM and didn’t return till 10 PM. Not a good way to create a home life, she says.

Comments on this article are actually more interesting than the article itself. Some readers pointed out that Brooks would not have written this column about a male judge. For one thing, the male judge who kept those long hours would probably have a wife who maintained his home and arranged a social life for his few available hours. For another, men, well, just don’t talk about these things.

Other readers noted that you no longer need to have a traditional style family to feel complete and satisfied. It’s okay to be single.

My own take is that some jobs just don’t allow for balance and some people don’t really want balance. And in the early 21st century, it’s still easier to be career-intensive if you’re male.

In an interview for her book, Generally Speaking, Retired General Claudia Kennedy acknowledged that her life did not have balance for a long time. She divorced her husband and had not remarried by the time she left the military. She noted that she chose to be extremely discreet about her relationships and personal life.

I’ve also known distinguished college professors who put their personal lives on hold for long periods of time because they wanted to gain the benefits (material as well as intellectual) of a career at the top tier of their profession. They were all male and married to stay-at-home moms. I’ve also known a male Internet marketing multi-millionaire who said, “Balance? What’s that?” I believe he eventually found a girlfriend who was willing to work around his life (and maybe he mellowed a little, using some of his money to pay others to free up his time). Read the rest of this entry »

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Conquering E-mail overload in the corporate environment

Writing for the New York Times, Luis Suarez tells us he conquered email overload by using social marketing tools like wikis and blogs. For example, if he gets the same question over and over, he justs blogs or posts on the corporate equivalent of Facebook.

What the article doesn’t tell us: Suarez seems to have one of the coolest jobs in the world, as “social computing evangelist” for IBM. He’s shown amidst some beautiful mountains in the Canary Islands, a long way from upstate New York.

Check it out:

http://tinyurl.com/53p78c

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Time Management: Pause? Fast forward? Rewind?

For many years I never watched television. Now I justify watching selectively because I really like certain shows — mostly reality TV, C-SPAN, PBS and of course WNBA basketball. But it’s not all virtuous: I got started because I couldn’t miss the last season of the Sopranos, my all-time favorite show.

But these days I rarely watch anything live. Even if I watch live I record the shows because I can go back and listen again, picking up what I missed the first time around.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could manage our time this way?

Fast-forward: Find a way to avoid distractions. Choose experience selectively. I  go through the 2-hour Good Morning America show in as little as 15 minutes (while multitasking) because there may be just one segment that I really want to watch. And these days, I no longer feel obligated to read every word of every book, let alone finish.

Pause: Stop the action. Smell the roses. Go back and revisit a favorite book, movie, or person.

Rewind: Go back to the beginning and start over. This one is tough. But we can do this more than we think. Revise a book or report from scratch. Ask for a do-over. Or we just recognize when we entering a new negotiation, business situation or job…it’s a chance to go back and yes, rewind.

I’m fascinated by time management. Check out my own irreverent time management guide.

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Getting Real About Time Management: Are you lazy…or just random?

An employee “Bill” varied his arrival time at work. When Bill was late, his boss yelled at him. When Bill was on time, the boss offered praise.

Sure enough, Bill responded. The day after the boss yelled, Bill was on time. And the day after the reward, Bill slacked off and arrived late. So, concluded the boss, praise doesn’t work. And punishment does.

There was only one problem. A computer demonstrated that Bill’s arrival times showed a pattern of random variation. In fact, the computer could predict quite accurately how Bill would perform – with or without praise and blame.

The same pattern has been found among students: some days you learn faster while other days you just don’t get it. And some days you’re productive and efficient, while other days you’re sluggish.

If you’ve studied statistics, you probably guessed that we’re talking about regression to the mean.  People usually have an average level of productivity. When they work hard one day, they tend to slow down the next.

So here’s an exercise.  Suppose you have a writing project. You set a goal: write 500 words a day. For other projects, find a daily activity level that’s easy to observe and measure.

For the next 30 days, track how many words you write (or how productive you are in the task you’ve chosen). Some days you’ll write 1000 words, other days none, with lots of variation.  Each day just record your word count, without judging your output.  At the end of 30 days, calculate an average. And calculate again after 60 days.

You may find that your natural average is 300 words a day. You can lower your daily goals – or recognize that you work best with your random pattern.

Obviously, if you have a deadline, you have to increase your output. Professional writers typically write 1000-3000 words a day. Their mean might be 1500.

But if you’re making acceptable progress toward a goal, you can begin to understand, accept and work with your natural rhythm.

For more unorthodox time tips, visit my Time Management Special Report.

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