The Shortlist Episode 48: Time Management Tricks

The subject of time comes up in virtually every AEC marketing conversation: Time until the deadline, time needed for internal meetings, finding time for special initiatives and non-proposal marketing priorities, and so on. The effect of not having 'enough' time is a significant contributor to the stress and burn-out many AEC marketers may experience during their careers. But what if there were ways to "make" time within the course of the average day? Not only to accomplish what is on your immediate to-do list, but to build in critical space to dream up and explore new ideas?

Join Wendy Simmons and Allison Tivnon for a conversation that explores the human relationship to time and actionable tactics to maximize your minutes day in and day out.

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to The Shortlist.

We're exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.

I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and each episode, I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.

Today, we're talking with Alison Tivnon to discuss time management tricks.

Hi, Alison.

Hey there, Wendy.

Thank you for teeing up this topic.

You've pretty much written out a dissertation on time management tricks.

So I don't know if we will be able to manage our time on this podcast to get through it all, but I love the thinking that you've put into it.

I went down some rabbit trails myself thinking about this topic, doing a little bit of research.

It was really fun.

So I'm glad we're going to have this conversation.

Thank you.

Yeah, me too.

It sounds very dry on the surface, but we're going to touch on some pretty meaty stuff today.

I'm very, very excited about it.

Awesome.

So before we get started, let's do our little trivia question here.

And that is, for all of our listeners, and Allison, I always make you answer too, what percentage of Americans surveyed by, by the way, the American Institute of Stress?

Did you know that was an institute out there?

What percentage of Americans surveyed said that they have high levels of stress with extreme fatigue, feeling out of control?

100%.

Oh, gosh.

That's my answer, and I'm sticking to it.

That is the right answer.

Well, you're not wrong, but we will get to the actual answer and some more details on that towards the end of the episode.

So there you go.

All right.

Let's get into why you picked this topic.

Why do you think it's important that we address this for AEC marketers or just humans in general?

Well, specifically to AEC marketers, I think all of us know that there is a lot of juggling that just is part and parcel with having this type of a job.

There are so many things to do, and many of them are deadline driven.

Some of them are driven by deadlines that are set by people outside of your company that take priority over your internal deadlines.

We also have personal lives that have to be tended to as well.

And there's just so many hours in the day, and it can be very easy for all of that to get out of control.

So I think a lot of folks, when they see the title for this episode, that's probably what's going through their head first, is my to-do list is out of control, I don't know how to get to the things that we had said were important during our retreat, or the stuff that I've had on my plate for months, and I just can't seem to get off of my to-do list, or how do I not feel like I'm going crazy every single time I put a proposal together, and I can't get anything else done.

Those are like the common things that are on the surface level, but there's a lot going on below the surface that is even more influential to how you manage your time.

Things that you don't even realize are happening, and that's the kind of stuff we're going to be digging into.

We'll address all of that surface level stuff, but you got to go pretty deep to get to the whys behind time itself.

Very philosophical stuff here.

How would you describe symptoms of, I don't want to say poor time management or mismanagement.

That feels a little judgy.

But you know, if you're just like feeling off and it's like things aren't coming together and you're building up, like what, how does that materialize in our lives?

Oh, gosh, it's extremely damaging when you are in a heightened state of I haven't done something.

It's a trigger for that same feeling you get, say, if you have a very, very early morning flight that you have to catch and you're packing your bags, which, of course, you're putting off until the last minute because you had so many other things to do.

And you're trying to count backwards to how many hours you've got to wake up in advance of getting everything ready to go to the airport and trying to figure out, is there traffic at that time of day or where am I going to park?

And it's a state of hypervigilance that you get into that makes it almost impossible for you to fall asleep.

And then when you do kind of start falling asleep, you might wake yourself up because you're like, oh, wait, did I set my alarm?

And you get into these weird little loops.

I might have already made people feel anxious just by describing that because most people get those symptoms when they're in a situation like that, like I cannot miss this plane.

But also that translates over into time mismanagement or just time not being within your control might be a better way of looking at it.

But the other symptoms that are very commonly linked to this include stress and anxiety, uncertainty, worry, feeling overwhelmed.

And then also things like lack of motivation, not knowing where to start.

You almost get this like paralysis mentally that sets in and you just have no motivation even dig into this pile of to-dos that you have because it feels so overwhelming.

It can lead to depression.

It can lead to insomnia.

And so all of a sudden, you have so many things on your mind that you cannot quiet your brain down enough to get that rest you so desperately need.

And those mental symptoms can lead to physical symptoms.

You can start feeling bad.

You can suffer from headaches, tension headaches.

You can be grinding your teeth.

There's clenching your hands or just so many things that can have adverse impacts on you mentally and physically.

So when we talk about this, it's not just about having a tidier to-do list for work.

This truly is about your mental and physical health.

Those are all incredible reasons to talk about this and probably keep talking about this and for people who might find this helpful as an episode to share or just to, hey, bring up the topic at one of your team meetings or put it on the agenda for the retreat or whatever that might be, where you just think this can impact all of us.

Well, I think it is impacting all of us.

And there are definitely tricks that we'll talk about now.

I don't know if that's the right way to say it, but that's what we've titled this episode.

But different strategies, techniques and ways to set your mind and your to-do list so that you can reduce all of those negative symptoms, that insomnia, the constant underlying anxiety and stress that can really make the difference between having a great feeling of productivity in life and feeling underwater, pulled in too many directions.

And maybe like burnout, right, at your job?

Oh, yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What do you, I mean, we're just guessing here.

I was like, wouldn't you say that time management being overloaded and pulled in too many directions is probably that core reason why AEC marketers would experience burnout and then look for other things and possibly leave the industry because they're looking for something else?

It is either internally driven or externally driven.

So I think there's two main reasons for burnout.

One is, and let's just get this one out of the way, extremely difficult people to work with, that wreak havoc on your to-do lists and your day-to-day.

I've seen that burn people out, and I have personally been burned out by that.

But I'd say probably even more common is just the burnout that you're talking about, that people get this.

It is like that first day of work when skies are blue, you have no email in your inbox, you're reading your onboarding packet, you're having meetings to learn about the role, and people say to you, you should probably do this now, because you're going to get busy really fast.

I think all of us have probably heard that in the first few days of a new job in this industry, and it's absolutely true, because before you know it, you're going to have hundreds, if not thousands, of emails.

You're going to have more meetings than you know what to do with.

You're going to have more to do's than you know what to do with.

You're going to have said yes to more things than you probably should have.

The list goes on and on for those types of things.

And so the burnout is a very real thing.

I think it's part of what we're talking about today is learning how to recognize that way in advance so that you can figure out how to stop it from burning you out.

Nobody should live in that kind of a state of constant anxiety.

To your point there, I was doing some research and I saw a few online resources reference that on average, people have about 60 interruptions in their workday, which is like basically every 15 minutes and the average interruption is five minutes long.

Now, I tried to sit back and think about my day and what would you qualify as an interruption?

We're all getting a lot of chats on Slack and Teams and other places.

We get emails.

One day, I don't know what everybody else's email load looks like, but I had like 160 emails and most of them actually needed thoughtful response.

It wasn't just being copied or wasn't just the latest newsletter.

There was a lot there.

That's not normal for me, but I do think some people might have more than that.

Or if you're on a big design build proposal, who knows?

You might get 300 emails in a day because there's a lot going on or the chat.

So there's a lot of interruptions and a lot of information to process.

That's the reality of our job.

So it'll be fun to dig in a little bit more and talk about how do we resolve some of that?

How do we prioritize and focus?

Should we get into the tips?

Well, yeah, I think we should.

Unless there's anything else we want to hit on, we don't have to move that fast.

We could talk about, you know, the, I don't know, like we are focused very much on work, but that's only part of our lives, right?

There's whole life that we have to deal with and juggle, or just even, you know, the fact that, you know, what's our, the current state of how we work now?

Are you working remote?

Are you hybrid?

Are you traveling a lot?

I don't know all of these things that can impact it.

Well, that is a good one to touch on, because a lot of folks are still, if not fully remote, working in a hybrid format.

I know that not all of our listeners are doing that.

Some are back in the office full time, but a lot of people have settled into some sort of a hybrid format, which has a lot of pros and cons to it.

And one of the cons is, and one of the pros, is that your personal life and your work life start blurring around the edges.

You don't quite know where work ends and your personal life begins.

There can be things that happen to you during the day that just were not things that happened to you back before the pandemic.

Like say you go to get your coffee, you notice that your husband maybe didn't clean off the counter and left all of the stuff out from making his sandwich in the morning.

Eric, I'm talking about you right now.

And your amazing son finished his cereal and left the bowl with the chocolate milk in the bottom of it and Cocoa Krispies all over the counter.

And so yeah, you have to get to work right at that moment.

But there's a part of you saying, I just really need my kitchen clean.

I'm saying this as though it were another person.

That's me.

That's what I was talking about.

Professional.

Yes.

But there is that blurred line.

You might want to, can I get that laundry thrown in there?

Or, you know, there's these little things that happen.

And also your home phone ringing, or the gardener coming by while you're on a call, or your dogs losing their minds while you're, the mailman arrives and you're, you're in the middle of a really important kickoff meeting, things like that.

So there's, there's a bunch of stuff like that, that ends up creating little to do's for you, whether they make it onto your list or not, there's just more.

And it's very, very hard to delineate between what is work and what isn't work when you start to do that kind of a hybrid environment.

So that also might be teasing around the edges of why people are feeling more stressed with their to do list.

There are distractions everywhere.

I mean, you name some really obvious ones from when you're working at home.

And I know that some people, I've talked to lots of business owners, like, I can't do it.

I can't work from home.

I need to go into that office environment.

I need that space that feels separate.

So I do love that hybrid option where you could have the best of both worlds.

But I just want to say, like, also in an office, I remember I'm not the type of person that puts on music and starts working and doing design work.

I'm more of a quiet person.

So I find talk in the office really distracting.

I wish I were different, but I'm not.

You know, so working from home works really well for me.

I saw a hilarious little video, I think on like Instagram, where it comes up behind a person at their cubicle.

And he has a note taped to the back of his chair that says, I'm on a deadline.

Do not talk to me.

I have no self-control.

I will derail my project.

And I know it was a joke, but I'm like, yeah, 100 percent.

So there are distractions everywhere.

And it leads to those little moments of time where we're not being productive or having to restart.

It's almost like multitasking.

These kind of all fall in similar categories.

So whether you're at home, hybrid, or in the office, you're going to need time management tricks, no matter what.

Well, and then there's another psychological aspect to this that I think it's really, really important to hit on.

And this is something that is happening, and you don't even realize that it's happening, and it can be maddening.

I call it getting stuck in the loop.

But our brains are like supercomputers.

We are computing all sorts of visual stimuli, auditory stimuli, memories, the communication sender receiver that we've got going on with everything around us.

Our brains are taking all of this and absorbing it, making sense out of it, storing some of it, not storing some of it, logic patterns, decision making, figuring out what you're going to say next.

All of that is happening faster than we can possibly imagine.

But that being said, when there is something that you have to do, it enters into this place within your psyche of, I need to remember to do that.

I got to remember to do that.

And it kind of stays in there until it's resolved.

So, oh, shoot, I got to get the oil change in the car.

And then you forget about it until the next time you get in the car and you realize the light's on.

Oh, shoot, I got to get the oil change in the car.

And you'll forget about it, and then it'll pop back up at the weirdest times, like when you're brushing your teeth at night, or you're getting the milk at the grocery store.

Oh, I got to change the oil in the car.

I forgot to do that again today.

That's like a personal one, but there's also the, oh, I said that I was going to do this thing, and you remembered it right before the meeting, or you're checking in with your supervisor, or a team, and you were supposed to have something done, and it didn't get done.

You remembered it like five different times in the last two weeks, but you had so many other things going on that it just never quite made it out of that looped kind of reminder thing inside of your head, and into a place where you could actually do it.

And part of that could be avoidance behavior.

It could be because you have other things that are just way too pressing for you to make time for it.

But for whatever the reason is, if you don't get that thing into a place where you can truly monitor it, say on a to-do list, and have it with a little checkbox next to it where you can truly check it off, your brain is gonna keep it bouncing around in there.

And that's not good.

It's not good for you because you probably have five, 10, 15 of those things bouncing around in your head at any given time.

And it's a mix of the personal and the professional coming together in this cacophony inside of your head.

And that is exactly the kind of thing that leads to insomnia.

So we have some tips for how to eliminate that from happening.

But that is another important one that we have to touch on and why it's a huge culprit to our ability to truly manage our time.

Right, it's like the invisible distractions.

You can't see them because they are in your head and they're about getting your oil changed in your car, but that's not on your to-do list in your Boston and assign that to you.

It's just a thing that needs to get done.

And it reminds me of the book you recommended to me a few years ago, Getting Things Done by David Allen.

I think he has similar types of stories about so good capturing everything that is in your mind and putting it on sticky notes or on a to-do list so that you can start organizing that.

Because when you put it down on paper or digitally, because actually we're big fans of OneNote and Middle of Six, so if you even put it on that digital to-do list, all of a sudden, your mind has more space to think critically about the actual work that you need to be doing and not be managing those things that are flaying and floating around.

So maybe let's get into that right now.

Let's start talking about tips for managing those things that are flying around and then probably getting into prioritizing and deciding and that sort of thing.

Yeah, well, that book was kind of life-changing for me.

Getting things done.

And it was, I highly recommend it for anyone.

I've never actually read the whole thing.

I've read it four times.

I get to the page like 60, and I'm like, I got this.

I feel like I've figured everything out.

And then like six months later, I'm like, I think I need to reread that book.

It's a good one to get a refresher on on occasion.

Also, there are a few parts that are a little hard for me to get through.

Sorry, sorry, David Allen.

I don't mean to throw you any shade, but it's the reality of it.

If we're going to recommend something, it's definitely worth a read and to have as a reference guide.

There's a few things where I'm like, that feels real exhaustive, but whatever.

It depends on maybe your personality, and you can decide how much to do.

For real.

But there is, you're right, there's that you have to get it all out of your head.

And it's also, the book is really written for C-suite corporate executives who are taking on really heavy hitting jobs where it feels like the work is increasing almost exponentially.

Like, how do you actually continue to get things done when you have a seemingly endless addition to your to-do list happening?

And he argues that you can, that you can exponentially increase your productivity.

And part of that is by getting every single thing that's out of your head onto paper or into OneNote and start starting to make sense out of it.

And so this gets to that breaking the loop, which I'll just go to, this is to me, one of the biggest and most important things that people can do, and they should do.

At any time where you feel those feelings that we talked about at the beginning of the podcast is to find a moment, like make space, make a moment for yourself to sit down with a blank piece of paper or a blank word document or OneNote.

But personally, I keep paper in my nightstand because it's typically that's the moment when I realize, okay, my brain is full, is when I can't fall asleep.

So grab the pen and don't worry about making a nice and neat to do list, just simply write every single thing that is pounding on the door of your brain.

I really need to call my aunt.

I really, really need to get those birthday presents ordered.

Oh my gosh, I have got to do this thing and mix it, mix the work and the personal.

Don't worry about corralling them separately.

Get every single thing, every obligation, responsibility, hope and dream, aspiration, home improvement project, whatever the thing might be.

Your health, that's a huge one that we put off.

Oh, I was supposed to make my dental, but I was supposed to check off my annual physical, and I haven't done it yet, that kind of stuff.

Get it all out there and onto the paper.

And once you have that, then you can start to look at it from a, is this a task or is this a project?

And that, again, not distinguishing between work and personal life yet, will tell you if, can you like in one bite size, boom, get it done?

Or is it a series of tiny little to-dos?

And if it's a series of tiny to-dos that'll get this thing done, then put the very first one on your to-do list and put that running list of projects to the side.

So if you said that you were going to build a new template for the marketing team, maybe it is, maybe it's just the template needs to get done.

But more than likely, there's meetings that have to happen.

There's decision making that has to happen.

There's going back and forth and kind of making sure that the users of it are aligned and ready and bought in.

It could be that you aren't sure what the platform is that you want to create the template on.

There's all those little things.

And if your to-do list item just says make the template, you're never going to get it done.

So once you have that list and everything out of your head that's causing you stress and causing you to lose sleep, you have to truly analyze it to make sure that you're looking at the actual to-dos and not just the end goal.

So corral the projects off to the side and then make your list.

That is truly just the next thing to iteratively make progress on all of that stuff that was previously knocking around inside of your head.

It's a lot easier or it feels like you have a comp, you're making progress when you break things down into tasks that you can start making progress on.

I think most of us are guilty of creating a to-do list and then going back to it to cross something off.

You're like, oh shoot, I did that.

It's not on the list.

I'm adding it because you want credit for it, right?

Yes, it feels so good to cross it off.

And you need to give yourself that moment to celebrate.

And so that's part of breaking down large or challenging projects.

I don't know where to start or whatever it might be, or just feeling like you're getting more momentum.

That's a great tip.

And I don't know that I really do that enough, but I love the idea that you could have one item, but all of the little things under it, it's not more stressful.

It's actually clarifying.

Absolutely.

If you have a destination or get to, you're not going to just teleport to it.

You have to take one foot and put it in front of the other to get there.

And that's kind of the way this works.

There's also, to the point about crossing things off the list, is to corral them by time.

So making it a very time-informed to-do list.

And this isn't saying it's order of priority of the most important thing, because that, unless it is like, oh, I have to submit this proposal like at two today.

Yes, that is the most important thing.

But a lot of times, it's just, how do you make sure that you are making progress on everything that you have in front of you?

One of the most effective way to do that is to look at your to-do list, one, make sure it's exhaustive.

So try and capture everything on it, even the little stuff.

So once you've got that, you can look at them and ask yourself, is this a two-minute thing?

Is this like an email that I can write and get out in two minutes?

Is it a phone call that I could make?

Is it something that I was supposed to do on our social media account?

Was I supposed to take these things from this file over here and simply copy them over and save them into this file over here?

Like those little tiny things that can end up kind of weighing you down because you haven't done them yet?

Or if I send that email, it's just going to mean that that person is going to respond to me, and then I have more to do.

Like, whatever the psychological reasons are for not getting to the little stuff, makes it way harder to focus on the big stuff.

So, marking with either a highlighter or little symbols, like, okay, this is going to...

I use two minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour plus for my stuff.

If you do that, then I know this is taking a lot of paper.

If you're doing it on paper, just rip that one out, start a fresh sheet, and corral all the two-minute tasks at the very top of your list, and then the 15 minutes, and then the 30, and then the hour.

And you'll probably realize that all of that stuff, this overwhelming amount of stuff, you can actually get done within an eight-hour day.

You can probably even get it done in a six-hour day.

It's amazing that if you just plow through those two-minute tasks, you will have gotten half of the stuff on your list done because almost everything that we do is communication-based.

And we only have a handful of things that requires to sit down quietly for an hour or more to work on, whether it's writing or layout.

A lot of it is just moving the ball forward slightly, whether it's that text or that phone call or that email or checking that box or filling in that form.

So, I highly recommend doing that, of getting time-informed, because those little things are going to, they will chase you if you don't get them done.

I've seen you demonstrate this in a presentation.

So I have the visual in my head, and I almost feel like our listers might need that visual too.

But just imagine that long, normal to-do list that might be like two sides of a piece of paper as you're putting it together.

And now they are grouped differently, where you can see all of those two-minute tasks and all the 15-minute tasks and the hour plus, and then you can decide, like, great, I'm just going to spend whatever, one hour right now, and take care of all these two-minute tasks, and then they're done.

And it's like going back to that distractions issue.

Sometimes those little tasks can just feel like a distraction, and you get distracted into that email or whatever.

So I like that idea.

And then another thing I've seen you do all the time, I do it too, is actually that time blocking on your work calendar, on your outlook calendar, and you'll block time to put your head down into some writing or whatever it might be, focus time.

And I'm not sure, do you turn off notifications or do anything like that?

Okay, so you allow that to come through, but you just still block the time, so you know.

I do.

I block off that time because I need it for myself.

But I never turn off my notifications unless it's an actual proposal deadline or there is something that I absolutely need zero distractions for.

The only time that I really try and make sure that that time is protected for that thing and that thing only is if it's a meeting.

So if I do put something on my calendar, I go in and mark myself as free.

So it shows up there.

But on Teams, I'm still going to be a little green dot and unavailable, and people will know they can get ahold of me.

I don't want to make my calendar impenetrable or looking like I don't have time for you.

That's the one thing that you have to articulate to your coworkers if you do this, is that you aren't just filling up your calendar with you time, meaning that they don't get any of you because the way that I block my calendar, if you open it up, I look like I have zero capacity all the time.

And that isn't the case, but you have to be able to understand the nuance of, oh, those are the meetings.

That's when she really isn't available or the travel time to get to something, trying to incorporate those things as well.

But if you are going to use your calendar to simply say, I'm setting aside this hour or this hour and a half to work on this thing, and you can write it there.

One, it's great transparency wise.

People see what you're working on, which is educational and informative.

But once they understand the difference between free and busy on your calendar, those two little markings that are on the side of the calendar hold, then they start to realize, okay, you're just preserving time for this thing.

Maybe I should make sure that this is really important for me to call up or to put this meeting on your calendar.

Or, you know, it's a conversation to have with your coworkers just to make sure that they understand why you're using it the way you are.

I mean, just in general, I would say using a calendar is a great time management strategy.

It helps you visualize where the deadlines are, where those meetings are.

Those are obvious things, right?

Those are probably things you're putting on your calendar.

But, you know, can you put your personal activities to dinners that you need to go to, dentist appointments?

It can be a private appointment in that way.

It doesn't have to be visible for everyone to see, but just to really understand the reality of what your day looks like.

And I know I've read this somewhere.

I can't quote where, but it's like we're all optimistic about what we can accomplish and how quickly we can accomplish anything.

And so maybe as you get into the practice of it and test some of these durations, you know, does it really take you just one hour to do that?

Is it really a two-hour task?

You can kind of learn and be more realistic in the future.

And it might also sort of be a wake up call if you're like, wow, I don't really have any wiggle room to do the work.

I'm only in all the meetings.

When does this happen?

Well, that's why it's happening after the kids go to sleep and you get back on your email.

I mean, these are just helping to visualize what your day looks like can help you make adjustments in the future.

So that's something time management wise.

You brought something up.

If your entire week is held at the mercy of meetings, that could be a conversation because it might be one of two things.

It might be that your company has a culture where it's come one, come all to meetings.

And it could also be that you are seen as so valuable, that people want your opinion on things, they want you in the room, or because they want your buy-off on things.

But do you really need to be in all of them?

Do you really need to be in the whole thing?

These are things you got to kind of, it falls in the same category as delegation.

And both of them are very hard for a lot of reasons.

But if you are kind of living at the mercy of meetings every single week, that needs to be a conversation with somebody at the firm.

Also, is this optional?

Like, ask them, am I optional for this?

Do I have to be in this?

Sometimes you have to kind of negotiate on some of them.

Some of them are obvious no brainers that you're going to be there.

But don't automatically feel like you have to say yes to everything if it doesn't prove out to be the highest and best use of your time.

But that is a very delicate conversation and nuanced.

So pull out all of your communication skills to have it.

But it's also true for delegating as well, and knowing what you can and can't peel off from your to-do list to give to somebody else, which is a whole other podcast episode to talk about how to successfully delegate work.

Well, meetings can be, they can take a hold of your schedule and make it really hard to produce things and depending on your role, you might need more or less time for that.

I guess I will throw out a tip or just a reference point of what we do at Middle of Six, because I was aware that there's a lot of meetings.

We're being creative.

We want to be together.

We're fully remote, so we also need time to see our faces and be together, even if it's virtually.

And a few years ago, I created an Excel spreadsheet and counted up what are our daily huddles, what are our quarterly meetings, what about our goal setting, what about the one-on-ones, all of the standing meetings.

I mean, I wasn't worried too much about client meetings because they should be able to fall normally as long as people aren't feeling overwhelmed.

But like, what about the internal stuff?

So if you're a marketing manager or director of a team, you might look at, take some time, look at standing meetings.

The old adage was, you know, this meeting could have been an email, but then also the world has changed a lot, and sometimes we do need to get together and meet.

Yeah, e-mails are great, but then you're just flooded with 175 e-mails.

You have to answer and, you know, you can't get in the flow of, like, a conversation.

So meetings aren't bad, but look at, which, like, to your point, Allison, look at what you're in, where you're adding value, how you're providing direction, what can you delegate, and let someone else take the leadership role for that.

That's all really good.

And what's the right balance within a year?

And you'll get a sense of that if you calculate it out.

That would probably be pretty helpful for your team and appreciated by the team, you know, that they didn't have to raise the red flag.

Help.

You know, you're being aware of that.

I feel like this also kind of connects well to your point, you have a tip about like readjusting your sense of urgency for tasks.

And that also could be meetings, you know, accepting every single meeting.

Can you dig into that a bit more?

Well, this is that that goes to that sense of hypervigilance, like what needs to get done, what doesn't need to get done, what needs your attention right now versus something that was a great idea that you said yes to, and maybe you need to reevaluate.

Is it really practical to have on your list of to do's in the short term?

I think in order to adjust your sense of urgency, you have to have context.

And when you're stuck in the day to day, you lose sight of that.

And especially if you're part of a larger team, you lose context for each other as well, because their to do's are tied to your to do's.

You can't make progress sometimes on your to do's unless they make progress on theirs.

It's all intrinsically entwined.

So how do you unwind that, and how do you get back to a place where you have the appropriate sense of urgency for each of your tasks?

Well, I think that it goes back to something we've discussed a few different times on The Shortlist, which is creating that annual calendar together.

And I'm a huge fan of getting the butcher paper and rolling it out on the wall and having the long timeline of the 12 months ahead, using different color markers, and putting in the big stuff for your firm.

And then along the way, the big stuff for you too.

If you're going to get married, or you're moving, or when is your birthday?

When are you going on vacation?

The things that are going to have you out of the office or have you distracted should go on the list.

So you all work together, and you start to build out the big timeline.

And that's going to capture things like the parties, retirements, the website launch, some big social media campaign that you've been planning, some other big project that you've been working on internally.

It could also capture the times of the year that you know you're going to be super busy with proposals.

But the most important thing is that you start to get this sense of perspective.

And so that annual calendar that you work on with your coworkers, you can also think about doing that for yourself as well.

And having a personal contextual understanding of your time is, it's a similar exercise.

And you can have it for the entire year.

You can go crazy and have it for your entire life, which is something that I did recently with my family, where we looked at our life expectancies and made this crazy long in-in-design, beautiful calendar of our lives and started to capture the things that we know are givens, like when anniversaries are going to happen.

And when our son is going to graduate from high school or get his driver's license.

And we started to make big moves because of that.

But you can extend that down just by even having this kind of a mindset of, does this really deserve this level of stress and anxiety for me?

And ask yourself that when you're looking at the to-dos on your list.

Some of them, they might.

Like maybe there's a loved one of yours that you have been wanting to talk to and catch up with for a really long time, and you just haven't prioritized it and made time for it.

That might be something that does require urgency versus a phone call that you really need to make.

It's like maybe that one's just more of a, I need to check this off the list in order to move on to the next thing.

So understanding the differences in that can help you right size your stress.

You know, now I'm inspired.

I feel like we absolutely have to make this giant calendar at Middle of Six.

I haven't done it myself.

I've been part of teams where we would look, do like a two month look ahead, you know, have it that for a stand up meeting, done it in different ways.

But man, with Mural, we can do that, we should do that.

So maybe we'll put that together and share a template out there with the world at some point.

But it would be interesting.

And I know from thinking about big marketing initiatives and company initiatives, being able to see on the calendar that you're celebrating a big company anniversary, or what about the company party or picnics?

Like you said, Allison, wanting to launch a website, you know, is that six months of time?

When does that really need to start?

What's the drop dead deadline for some of these things?

Or are they flexible?

And thinking about awards, submittal, season, all of that stuff.

Like, do you do it as an exercise to figure out and be a reminder to ourselves is that there are going to be things that are not, we cannot put on the calendar.

We cannot plan a whole year in advance.

That's not really possible, and things take longer to get approved and to go through the process than we expect.

So maybe this, it's kind of long range or big style time management is just to be realistic about what can be done and be thinking about resources.

What real resources would we need to accomplish that much?

So, I don't know, you inspired me.

We've talked about that big calendar before.

Maybe we do need to do it, because it would be fun.

And we have all these grand dreams that we want to accomplish in the year too.

And that might help put it in perspective of what's possible.

Well, and to bring things on home, there's also something that we have to do at least a couple of times a year, which is like a hard reboot of the way we're approaching getting things done throughout the day.

Stuff piles up on your desk, on your desktop, the unread emails that aren't that important.

Like you looked at them, you marked them unread, but they pile up.

And also just the stuff in life too, but a friend of mine calls it clearing out the cobwebs.

But setting aside some time, the thing we're talking about today, to clean your desk, to dust your computer, to clean off your desktop on your computer, corral all of the little tiny slips of paper, post-it notes, to-do lists, and start to look at how you can consolidate them into one list or even ditch some of them.

If it was like a fanciful idea, that is not a big deal anymore.

Evaluate the work projects that you've taken on.

Ask yourself, are they still the highest and best use of your time?

Comparing them with your marketing and strategic plan is huge.

A lot of times we can veer away from the stuff that we've said is the most important things for our department to work on.

So just aligning it again and making sure that it is still holding true is important.

What's taking you longer than it should?

What could be delegated?

What could be permanently removed?

And also, how could that extend into your personal life?

These are all fantastic tips.

And as we've had this conversation now, it feels like it started off on time management.

And I just want to say to the world out there, you can Google all kinds of time management tricks and tips.

There's methods and ways to organize, and that's all really helpful.

I think, Alison, what you've done here is show us what you're actually doing, how you reset in your mind.

And it's really about task management.

I just heard again and again, what can we not do, not pay attention to, focus and prioritize, all of that sort of thing.

So I don't know, maybe that's just a little bit of an adjustment of what we've talked about.

But I think you're really excellent at getting a lot done.

You've got a lot going on in your personal and professional life.

And so I think it's proven that these are good tips.

And so the takeaway for me is just about getting things out of your head or out of the sky all around you, putting it down on paper, and then reorganizing and getting some momentum by like tackling some groups of things, things that can be done, crossed off the list, and really realizing what also just needs to not be on that list at all.

So an exercise, maybe after listening to this podcast, people can take some time and try this, practice a few times and see if you're making improvement and reducing those distractions and reducing the time where you're feeling like you're focused on things that don't matter.

That's kind of what I think I heard today.

I want to circle back because we're kind of getting to the end of our time here about just the answer to my trivia question in a little bit more detail there.

And the answer was that 65% of Americans surveyed said that they experience stress at a level that is extreme fatigue and feeling out of control.

And even though we were talking about time management and task management today, immediately, so much of what I was reading was going to how this impacts us and the feeling of stress and how it can have a huge impact on our health, our mental well-being.

And probably, it's not a stress to say also just like, you're a professional, you know, your career, what decisions do you make based on that stress that you're feeling?

So I did go down the path of talking about stress because it just seemed like time management and tasks that are just piling up, they lead to these negative consequences.

I don't know how many people are getting positive feelings from feeling overwhelmed, right?

It is detrimental to our health to allow time to control us versus the other way around.

I got to share one little hack.

Yeah.

Maybe this is just on my little flip phone.

I don't know smartphones do this or not.

But I just discovered that I can, when I set an alarm, I can create my own alarm with a recording.

Oh.

So my past self can talk to my future self and say, Allison, you have to get up at 6, or you have to get up at 530 or whatever the time is, because you have to do this thing before this meeting.

And if you don't, you're not going to do it later.

Like the reason why I set the alarm for the time that I did.

But morning Allison is not the same person as evening Allison, and I will snooze, snooze, snooze, snooze, button my way until I have now filched through the time that I said I was going to use for whatever the reason is.

So that's like a case of...

And it's really weird hearing your own voice, waking you up, like admonishing you to get out of bed.

It's really effective.

So you'll have to let me know if that's a hack that you can use on your smartphones.

But even my son, my 14-year-old is using it now to get himself out of bed ready for high school.

I'll have to check it out.

I don't know if that's a feature.

It probably is.

I want to say like you're reading my mind because the other day I had to get up for an early flight.

And I said to myself as I was going to bed, I said, okay, the two o'clock a.m.

alarm is not a joke.

Get up.

You need to feed the dog and walk the dog and drive to the airport.

And so it was like, it's so funny.

We're not the same person at all, but that is so relatable.

And I'm sure other people are out there when they're like, no, I do need to get up at this time because I've got to make those edits before 8 a.m.

Yeah, I mean, that stuff is like, it's a real deadline.

It's a real alarm clock.

There's no wiggle room there.

That is a summary of the life we live.

Thank you, Alison, for being here.

I do want to give you a second if you want.

Do you want to do a quick recap of all of what you said?

I mean, I think it was really valuable.

It's nice to hear.

The stuff we talked about today, a lot of it was like deeply psychological, physiological, philosophical.

You know, time is relative, all of that.

But there are some hard and fast rules to how you can just better handle your time, even if you have busy, busy schedules like marketing coordinators do.

The first one, going back to it, is that idea of just figuring out what is and isn't urgent and making that to-do list that is time-based and knocking through the little things first, snowballing your way to the big stuff.

And if the big stuff feels insurmountable, it's because it's not one big thing to get off the list.

It is a project.

You have to break it down into the iterative steps.

So those are just mechanical things that you can do.

I think it's also really important that we stop siloing our work life and our personal life.

We're past that now.

So blending those to-do lists together, blending your calendar, like you said, putting the personal stuff on there too.

Even if it's like marked private, so people don't exactly know what it is, you will and you do have to plan in it and around it.

The next one is to extend your outlook beyond this week or month and start thinking strategically about the quarter ahead, the year ahead, even your whole life if you want to, which I would love to talk about that more if anyone else is super curious about that life graphic, just hit me up on LinkedIn.

Do that hard reboot occasionally.

Literally cleaning off your desk, dusting your desk, recoiling all of your cords, just make some harmony out of your workspace, because when it starts to reflect what's inside of your head with all the clutter, that's kind of a signal to you that it's time to knock all the pieces off the chessboard, and it's very healthy and reviving and refreshing to do that.

And then lastly, that idea of breaking the loop and getting every single thing out of your head and on paper, it's almost hard to describe that feeling of peace to somebody when you feel like you have everything present and accounted for in a way where you don't feel like you're failing at something or you're forgetting something.

And that's the state that we can feel like we're in when you're lying in bed at night and you're like, please just let me go to sleep.

Just let my mind turn off.

If you find yourself in that state, grab a notepad and sit there.

Yeah, turn the light on.

You're not going to sleep anyway, and get all of that stuff out of your head.

You can start making sense of it the next morning.

Somehow mentally, psychologically, your brain is going to realize when you have emptied it, of all of those things that are looping around in your frontal cortex.

And once you do that, you probably will be able to go to sleep that night.

But report back to us on all of these tips.

And let us know if your stress levels drop.

Alison, I don't know if your time management is going to take a hit here, because this is the second podcast where you told people to hitch up on LinkedIn.

So you're going to have a whole bunch of it in mail and emails for this.

But I love that you're so welcoming of people to connect and to talk and learn more together.

That's really awesome.

And thanks for sharing all of these insights to how you manage your very busy schedule and keep a smile on your face and kindness to your co-workers and clients.

It's all really good stuff.

Thank you for being here today.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I love talking about all of these different topics, but this one is especially near and dear to my heart.

Yeah, I could tell it was good.

Thank you so much and we will see you on the next episode.

All right.

Thanks.

Bye, Wendy.

The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, principal marketing strategist.

Our producer is Kyle Davis, with digital marketing and graphic design by the team at Middle of Six.

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Until next time, keep on hustling.

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The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.