Grace Over Grind: While Seeking Greater Work-Life Balance, Do You Believe You Need More Time Management?

[00:00:00] Hello, this is Sharon McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness. Welcome to Grace Overgrind. Today, we're going to end up talking about some case studies in regard to how people have actually made changes to be able to improve their work-life harmony. So, I meet a lot of people that think that they have a time management problem that is causing them to end up needing a better work-life balance.

[00:00:27] They're booking hours every day for work and barely have any time at home. They think that with a better time management strategy and tools, they'll be able to end up getting their work brought down into a shorter timeframe. I hold a little bit of a different perspective. For you to end up being so successful in your career you've had to adapt and learn how to manage your time.

[00:00:51] You've got a way of prioritizing, planning, organizing, scheduling, ensuring that you get things done. So, you have a strategy, you are able to end up delivering on time, which means you have an effective time management strategy. What I believe, though, is that you have a productivity opportunity. That as you take a look at how you are working, there are plenty of opportunities to be able to make changes in your approach, to lean it out so that you can end up freeing up more time for your life and spend less time at work.

[00:01:27] Overall, this allows you to continue to be successful at work, getting the same amount of work done, but you're going to start seeing that 12 to 14 hour a day start shrinking as you're able to get your work done in less time. So not time management, but a productivity opportunity. This is all based upon continuous improvement.

[00:01:49] My career is in manufacturing. And then around lean and all the focus on how do you make today better than yesterday? It lives on continuous improvement and that same spirit you can take to your work habits. So, one of the things that we covered is we were always introducing lean to new hourly workers or new shifts and new teams as we were going through rollouts.

[00:02:14] There was an exercise, how do you lean out your morning routine? Everybody's pretty much the same: you get up, you get your coffee, you get ready for work, and you get out the door. But very different variants on what it is. And it was always great, though, to hear the different stories from people of what they took away from that exercise, and then what they did in their own life.

[00:02:34] So they could be more efficient, to spend a little bit extra time with the kids before they went off to school, they got a little bit of extra sleep, because they put in an additional buffer on their traffic commute, they felt less stressed by the time they got to work, or they're able to get a moment of quiet for themselves, but for the chaos of the family getting up for the day.

[00:02:56] And this was with hourly employees, professionals. So these are simple skills and approaches to continuous improvement that anyone can be able to use no matter what your area of professionalism. I had a friend as she was going through her black belt study. She took lean strategies through her whole kitchen.

[00:03:15] She reorganized it, cleaned it up, and was able to set it up. So it was easier and more welcoming for her to be able to cook healthy meals. For most people, their morning routine is a long-standing habit that has been put together for many years. Some things are habits that have been going on forever. They may have a brand new automatic coffee pot that they haven't used the timer feature because it just wasn't something that they're accustomed to using on a regular routine.

[00:03:43] Regularly reviewing Any of your long established habits and identifying what you can let go of and where you can improve is another strategy to identifying how to free up time. For example, there's this one young lady that I worked with early in my career. She ended up having her organization and administrative habits stemming from college.

[00:04:06] When she was at school, she recorded, transcribed, and summarized every class that she attended so that she could end up maximizing what she learned. When she went into project management, she used the exact same techniques. It was great as she was learning the job, but now that she was proficient at it, it was just consuming her time.

[00:04:26] She needed to find a better and more efficient way to be able to generate her minutes from her meetings. So, as we had talked about it, she realized that this transcription was just what was really consuming all of her time, and it really wasn't needed anymore. There was no value to that. She decided to retire that particular habit, made sure that it was sort of her key.

[00:04:49] Project team members didn't need that transcription from herself, and she was able to dedicate all of those hours in the evening to this blooming relationship she had with the man that she eventually married. See, some of these small changes can have a significant impact as you continue to layer them on.

[00:05:08] Another area to look at is reporting. Reporting seems just always to add on. With the next crisis or the next leader, somebody adds something new to report. But nobody really goes back and figures out what can you take out of the report. What can you do to make it easier?

[00:05:25] So, as the leader receiving the report, a couple of key things to keep asking yourself and the team generating the report is, “Are you getting what you need? Are you getting it as efficiently as someone can provide it when you need it? What is no longer needed in that report? What are you skipping over? What's redundant that you're getting somewhere else? What is causing you overwhelm? Maybe somebody only needs it as a CYA if there's an investigation or something goes wrong that they have to look at. Maybe it's not needed truly in a daily report. Is it really clear about why this information is important?”

[00:05:59] These are great conversations to have with the people who are on these lists and who are receiving the reports. Maybe you can be able to find some things that work to free up your time but also make it easier for the recipients of that report. And we've all seen it. Some of these reports go out to hundreds of people slowly.

[00:06:18] They just add up, and they just overwhelm people's email boxes because the recipient list isn't cleaned up on a regular basis. So this is another great area to be able to look to see where you can get small increments of time regularly to be able to reduce the duration of your work day. As you can see from some of these simple strategies and really looking at how you focus on the work that you do, how you do it, and what is your daily process, you can work fewer hours, you can deliver at the same level of excellence and success and being the expert that's involved in all the things that you do.

[00:06:57] by changing the way that you work. You don't need more time. You need to use the time that you have differently so that you can be able to make those positive changes, you can spend more time at home with your loved ones, invest in your personal interests, and being able to get a little bit more sleep at night.

[00:07:18] I hope this is useful. There are so many people that have been able to improve their work-life balance over the years that I know personally because they changed their work habits and the way that they approach their day-to-day work. I hope and pray that you can find something that inspires you. I look forward to seeing you next time.

[00:07:41] Bye bye!