Do you feel guilty when you carve out a bit of time just for you? Do you find it hard to prioritise your own thinking space and development at work, even though you’re championing it for your colleagues? If so, you’re not alone.
The biggest challenge most of my coaching clients face is making time for themselves – Professional Me Time – identifying it, justifying it and then using it effectively. And if you don’t use it effectively – that’s E for effectiveness, not E for efficiency – you’ll find it even harder to justify it. Working closely with my clients has given me insight into what effectiveness looks like in a coaching context and that’s what I share in this article.
Are you time poor? If so, you may be inclined to abandon this post now and go back to your calendar as though the answers to your Professional Me Time dilemma lie there (spoiler alert, they don’t!). Instead, read on – I start with three articles which will help you with the basics of managing your time. An understanding of efficiency has its place in this discussion, and will certainly help you to identify your Professional Me Time needs, though it’s not the full picture.
Use your time efficiently (but don’t stop there)
The first read I’m sharing is for you if you enjoy analysis. Authors Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen take you through their findings about why you aren’t efficient with your work time. Their article includes an easy self-assessment tool to throw light on your particular brand of inefficiency. Basically, they’ve put in the legwork so that you don’t need to!
In article #2 Marketing Manager Neha Kirpalani shares her top productivity tool, time boxing. This might be more applicable if you who work solo – as a consultant, freelancer, sole trader or guru! The key take away from this, for me, is “the paradox of choice” – the observation that making choices can be a time stealer and a form of procrastination.
Third off the blocks, and my top read of the three, is Dane Jensen’s contribution, Time Management Won’t Save You. Don’t be put off by the title of the article. The points he makes about applying principles rather than decisions resonated with me and I hope will with you too.
Understand the effectiveness of your Me Time
With that done, let’s think about effective use of time, and specifically about your Professional Me Time. Everyone’s definition of effectiveness is slightly different but most of us want to get the most out of our time. What’s more, we’d like to do that without spending excessive time, money or energy in the pursuit of an outcome. My guess is that you’re used to thinking about how much time or money you spend achieving something, but less accustomed to valuing your energy in the same way? Your time, your Professional Me Time, needs to be effective otherwise you’ll never justify having any!
There are so many ways we can spend our Professional Me Time. Maybe you’re a dedicated reader; your closest friends and colleauges probably know this and your book shelves are full. If you’re embracing technology you’ll have webinars and podcasts bookmarked, and regular subscriptions which bring high quality content directly to your screen. You may also be contemplating working with a coach, adding some in-person conversations to your development?
How we measure effectiveness will partly reflect how we spend our Professional Me Time. Executive Coaching clients not only prioritise their Professional Me Time, they also have the opportunity to discuss progress and effectiveness with their coach. Three outcomes tend to indicate to clients that they’ve invested their time effectively. I think they’re a good guide to how to plan and use your Professional Me Time, however you spend it.
Numero uno: clients feel different about the issue at hand after exploring it together with their coach. These people find that often their feelings block them from being able to move forwards. The main culprit? You’ve guessed it – overwhelm. The feeling of being overwhelmed and the chemicals released by the brain literally paralyse your mind, making it almost impossible to think through an issue. The good news is that the initial step of naming and describing this particular feeling immediately decreases its impact. Yup: acknowledgement diffuses the intensity of the overwhelm!
In a coaching conversation I often help clients to make their Professional Me Time effective by drawing edges around the overwhelm. Where does it begin and end? In what circumstances do they feel less overwhelmed? What language do they use to describe the opposite of overwhelm? And where is the tipping point?
Second up: clients know their coaching time has been well spent if they have clarity about the issue they’re tackling and know what they need to do next. Without the mind-numbing effect of overwhelm, it’s easier to describe the challenges you face, and understand their nature. Some issues impact mostly on us as individuals, others affect our colleagues more. Until you’ve looked at a situation from more than one perspective, you have little chance of successfully addressing it. Exploring issues and impacts together in a safe space adds granularity to your perception of what’s going on.
You may know a hundred things about the problem you’re trying to solve, yet not have spent time organising these hundred thoughts. In a coaching conversation I’ll help you decide which ones matter more and why? Which ones are the cause and which the consequence? Their Professional Me Time helps coaching clients understand themselves, their issues and their actions better.
And thirdly: clients feel energised by their next steps. How often have you written a plan of action, only for it to remain in a file, untouched, unenacted? Writing plans is an intellectual, cognitive exercise. It draws on logic and is outcome oriented. But what if it doesn’t take into account who, and how, you are? Here, coaching clients steal a march on their colleagues who choose to face their battles alone. They use their coach to test the feasibility of a plan and make sure their Professional Me Time is really being leveraged. I learned the value of this early doors, from my first coach.
Having set out my plan, I waited expectantly for her endorsement. None came. Instead, she observed, “I’m curious: that’s not a very Shirley-like way of doing things, is it?” Slightly flawed I paused, and then realised what she’d spotted: my text book approach was a poor match for my habitual, instinctive way of managing.
It’s hard to own something which doesn’t sit well with you. It’s as though the idea belongs to someone else. You can see someone else behaving in this way, saying these things, but not you. Professional life is very challenging. We need to believe strongly in, and be energised by, our work day by day, in order to be constantly motivated to do our best. In a coaching conversation therefore I frequently ask clients to visualise themselves in action. Solutions which only sap our energy are unlikely to work, and frequently never get started. We talk about the energy they’re likely to need and how easy it will be to access it, in that situation. Cue, light bulbs!
To conclude…
Summarising what I’ve learnt from my clients, here are the key questions you can use to see whether you’re making the most of your precious Professional Me Time –
- Do I feel differently as a result of spending my time in this way?
- Is it helping me understand my world better? Do I have a clear idea of my next steps?
- Do I have the energy I need to succeed?
If you remain unconvinced about the arguments for Effectiveness and your Professional Me Time, I leave you with Abbie J Shipp’s poignant article which brought me up short the first time I read it. To avoid the pain of burnout, we all need to take responsibility for our Me Time, both personal and professional. If you’d like my support as your thinking partner, please get in touch, I’d love to hear how I could help you. This short guide will explain what you can expect during our call.