The more I think about it and the more experience I get, the more I realise that the key to good time management is how one handles resistance.
I don’t mean resistance by other people to our brilliant ideas. I mean the resistance we have ourselves to what we know we should be doing. Imagine for a second what it would be like if you had no resistance to any of your work. Wouldn’t you just sail through it, getting everything done when it should be done without any reluctance or struggle to get going or keep going. Everything in your life would be beautifully ordered and you’d be able to look back with pride on your ongoing achievements.
Or would you?
Doesn’t resistance have an important role to play? Without it there would be a danger of taking on far too much, taking on tasks which you are not properly qualified to do or which you haven’t properly researched, and in short behaving like an over-revved engine. Resistance in other words is an important tool provided by nature to prevent us from getting into trouble or danger.
So it’s not a question of abolishing resistance, but of learning to handle it properly.
Years ago I wrote about an interesting phenomenon concerning resistance. I realised that in a list of tasks of varying degrees of resistance, every time you scan the list the resistance to the tasks you haven’t selected decreases. This is actually the basis of those of my systems which use intuitive scanning. You can test this yourself by drawing up a short list of tasks, marking each out of 10 for the amount of resistance you feel to it, doing a scan and then re-marking the remaining tasks before you do the next scan.
Why does this effect happen?
I think it’s because every time you scan the list you do a micro-assessment of each task. On each scan of the task the micro-assessment changes because your brain has been working on it subconsciously between scans. The task actually becomes more approachable with each scan. If this doesn’t happen with a particular task, it’s probably a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it at all.
A problem with many time management systems is that they encourage you to action tasks too early in the process. This has two possible results, one good, one bad.
The bad one is that forcing yourself to do tasks in spite of your resistance to them, has the effect of raising your resistance to screaming point, and you take refuge in valueless displacement activities.
The good one is that forcing yourself to act in spite of your resistance will eventually teach your brain how to handle resistance itself much better. But this is at the cost of properly “softening up” the tasks. You will therefore be spending much more mental energy.
In my next post I’m going to suggest a way of making effective use of the reduction in resistance caused by the scanning process.