One of the hallmark symptoms for most people who struggle with executive functions is a lack of awareness of the passing of time. This is often described as being “time blind.”
I refer to it as having a “floating time brain.” A weakness in this aspect of executive functioning sets people up for time management problems that can snowball into despair by the end of the day. You look at your incomplete to-do list and beat yourself up for your incompetency.
The problem is rooted in time itself. Time is an invisible abstract concept!
It amazes me that many folks can actually track the passage of time in their heads. Lucky them! Alas, I am NOT one of those people. I have learned that I am terrible at estimating how long a task will take.
In our Seeing My Time® course, we teach people to understand that their emotional brain interferes with using good judgment for effective time management. The first part of that educational process emphasizes that a “floating time brain” will NEVER get better at time management unless you start being a “Time Scientist” and collect/record the data for just how long specific repeated tasks take you to complete.
To help collect this important data, I give clients a PDF form on which to begin collecting data. It is one of their homework assignments for the course.
“It Will Only Take a Minute”
I have been teaching The Seeing My Time for what seems like eons, around 30 years. One of the things I like about teaching it is that I often glean new insights from my clients. Such was the case recently with a bright professional woman.
When she was checking in on her assignment results she said, “I learned that there is almost nothing that can be completed in a minute. The only thing I found was doing four squats.”
Ahh! A lightbulb went off in my head when she said that. There it is, I thought, the lie we tell ourselves that messes up our day. Think of the times you have told yourself, or someone else, “I can do it. It will just take a minute.” All of those “just a minute” choices can stretch to fill a lot of the space in our day, space we had intended for other tasks.
Intrigued with that realization, I thought I’d see what I could do in a minute. I figured I could go downstairs and fold a very tiny load of laundry, just five pieces and maybe get part ways back up the stairs. Wrong! I managed to fold two pairs of pants into fourths. That was it. Humm…so much for that lie!
If you are one who says “It will just take a minute,” I suggest you start being a time scientist yourself. Set an alarm for one minute. What can you do?
I figured that this blog would be really short and fast because it was such a simple concept. I told myself it wouldn’t take but a few minutes. Forty-six minutes later… 🙂
Little by little…
