Time management tips for busy dads
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Boy 7 loves to play Power Rangers, and he’s always begging me to join him. I can’t stand it, to tell you the truth, but I can’t always bring myself to say “No” when he asks (I’m usually the blue ranger until the game morphs into something only vaguely Power Ranger-ish). He’s all boy—the action sounds, the jumping and flying around the room. He enjoys it so much when I join him (even though I don’t) so I try to swallow my distaste and play with him.
Isn’t there something I should be doing?
But here’s the thing, very often when I do, I have this nagging sense that I should be doing something else. There’s a deadline approaching, usually, or client-care activities I should be engaged in. And it’s not just when I’m playing Power Rangers with Boy 7. Very often, when I’m not working, I feel like I should be. And it’s true that my family gets the short end of the stick when it comes to my time. The sense that I should be working often beats out the important fact that I need to devote time to them as well.
I wonder how many dads are like me: the struggle to balance work and family time is all consuming, and because my family won’t send a collector if I don’t “pay up,” I too often give them 2nd (or 3rd) dibs on my time. It’s all about time and it’s a continuing struggle. An article at Fathers.com on work and life balance takes on the same topic:
No matter how important something may be, it’s difficult to invest yourself in it when you aren’t likely to see a “pay off” for months, or years, or not at all—especially when there are pressing deadlines today at work. Several recent studies have concluded that success at home and at work is far from an “either-or” situation. John Snarey of Emory University found that, in the long run, involved fathers “went just as far in their work as comparable men did who were less involved with their kids.”
Balance is possible
That’s why I’m calling this book indispensable: First Things First, by Stephen Covey and Roger and Rebecca Merrill. It’s an oldie to be sure (1999), but I think the principles in it are timeless (ha! “timeless” and it’s about time!) The most important takeaway from the book for me was the time management grid. It’s a theory of time management that divides activities into the four quadrants shown in the table below. In my frenetic life, a lot of my time is spent in quadrants 1 and 3: I’m putting out others’ fires, responding to demands of creditors and clients by working 12 hours per day, and spending a lot of time and energy doing things that, had I invested properly in quadrant 2, I might not have to do.
The goal, according to this theory, is to spend more time in quadrant 2; energy spent there pays bigger dividends because you are doing the important things—things that really matter on a deep level, and preventing the fire drills that force you to spend time in quadrant 1 later. The book gives great practical suggestions to help you spend more time in quadrant 2, doing the things that really matter. You can see that the image was adapted from Covey’s enormous best seller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If you just want a quick run-down on the time management matrix and how it works, you can find it in that book. First Things First goes into greater detail—the kind of thing analytical types like me thrive on. Read one or both of them. It just might inspire you to invest time where it pays big dividends for your family, even if that’s playing Power Rangers.
September 13th, 2007 at 9:21 am
[…] makes cleaning the room a breeze, even without The Force. Time management is kind of like that. A good time management book can help you create those little scraps of paper so that you control time instead if living at its […]