I would say that my time management skills are
amazing on paper and terrible in practice.
I am a person who loves the idea of organization but has poor follow through. Whetten and Cameron (2011) talk about the
most prescribed solutions for time stress are calendar or planners, to do lists
and saying no. I have a planner and a
family calendar, I write to do lists and say “no” when I truly don’t have the
time. My problem is distractions. I have a difficult time not veering off my
projected path to follow tangents that have no value to my day what so
ever. When I fill out my daily plan
sheet the night before I wake up feeling prepared for the day, but usually by
8am things have become derailed. When
this happens I feel my locus of control shifts from internal to external, which
leads to my frustration and a downward spiral at times.
As a stay at home mom I have been trying for
the past few years to set a more structured schedule to the day. I want to fit more into the day with my kids
but can never seem to find a way to do it.
Once I read the five questions Whetten and Cameron (2011) described I
started to see where my errors were occurring.
1. What do I stand
for? What am I willing to live/die for?
2. What do I care passionately
about?
3. What do I want to
be remembered for?
4. What do I want to
have accomplished 20 years from now?
5. If I could persuade
everyone in the world to follow a few basic principals, what would they be?
After answering these questions I see that I
have been spending too much time trying to find the time to be with my kids and
not enough time just doing it. They are
the most important part of my life. I am
not currently working so they are my job, and I should give them the same
attention I would give to an employer, but I don’t. I find myself saying things like: “Just a
minute”, “I will be right there” or “Hold on”.
Most of the times the things the kids need are quick and reasonable, but
I am too wrapped up in something less important that I cannot even respond. I want my kids to remember all the fun things
we did together not that I was always too busy to respond to them.
I know I need to be better at organizing my
tasks and only working on them during the allotted time, which is a lot like
the Urgent vs. Important that Whetten and Cameron (2011) talk about in Figure
2.4. I need to be better at realizing
that the soccer club I volunteer for is not as urgent a priority as I sometimes
make it. I would say the high importance/high
urgency thing in my life is my family; the soccer club, friends, running and
school are high importance but low urgency.
Housework for me would fall under low importance/high urgency, there are
five kids living here and sometimes clean up is urgent. All the other things in my life are on the
low end of both urgency and importance.
My new action plan is to incorporate the use of
Whetten and Cameron’s (2011) Importance vs. Urgency chart into my planning of
everyday. While I currently make a
detailed to do list I am not sure the priorities I give each task are in line
with the way I want to live my life. I
will also take into consideration the 20 Rules of Efficient Time Management
(Whetten and Cameron, 2011), when planning not only each day but each week and
month. Some things that I once thought
were a priority in my life may not be after this assignment and the readings
associated with it. I have a new outlook
on my life and my kids; hopefully it will be what I need to be the mom and person
I want to be.
Whetten, D.A., & Cameron, K.S. (2011).
Developing management skills (8th ed.).
Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall.
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