This time component is not a difficult bit of information to come by. You probably know the answer for many tasks if you do them often enough. If you don’t know, ask around. Be observant. As Stephanie Wickouski, managing partner of Drinker, Biddle & Reath LLP’s New York office told me, many people
“don’t know how long the subway takes from downtown to midtown, and they’re riding it every day.”
Wickouski, a bankruptcy lawyer, has this down to a science. She figures out “when I have to start to get done, not just today, but the whole week.” For instance, if a filing is due at 3:00 p.m., and she cannot start until the day it is due, and she knows it will take 4 hours, she will count back and start by 9:00 a.m. Why not 11:00? “I always build a buffer into things,” she says. Another client might call, in which case she can offer 5 minutes right then, or much more time after 3:00. If she gets done before 3:00, she can start returning calls or relax a bit (“I spend way, way, way too much time on the Internet,” she confesses).
This discipline came in handy when Wickouski embarked on a big project back in the late 1990s. She couldn’t find any good books on bankruptcy crimes, so she decided to write one. Her employer at the time said she could write the book if she wished, but she had to do it outside of her usual billable hours. The prospective publisher wanted the manuscript in 6-9 months. She had to figure out how to make this all work.
Wickouski calculated that the book would run about three hundred pages, with thirty chapters. She thought about how long it usually took her to research and write papers and briefs. Using that figure, she decided that writing the manuscript would take her 1,000-1,200 hours. If she planned to do that in the next 9 months—about 38 weeks—that would come out to roughly 30 hours per week. So then she had to look at her weekly calendar and figure out where she could schedule in 30 hours. She decided to do 4 hours most weeknights, and 12 hours or so on weekends. She blocked those times out. It was a grueling schedule, but “it came to pass just like I had visualized,” she says, with the finished book, Bankruptcy Crimes, raising her profile within the space and leading to bigger career opportunities later on.
Now, I’m sure that—passionate as Wickouski is about her work—at least a few Thursday nights during those months, she came home feeling like kicking up her feet rather than cranking out another five hundred words. But here’s the true secret of seizing control of your schedule. It just doesn’t matter.
If you want to use your 168 hours effectively, once you make a commitment to yourself to spend a certain number of hours on a task, keep it. Never miss a deadline. Follow through on anything you say you’ll do as a matter of personal integrity. If you lose 4 hours because of a blackout, make it up somewhere else as soon as possible. If someone else doesn’t turn in their part of a project, proceed without them and find an alternative solution. It doesn’t matter if the party on the other side of the deadline doesn’t care, and it doesn’t matter if you have a good excuse. Many excuses and emergencies are, in the broad sense, foreseeable. Yes, you and your children are going to get sick for a certain number of days per winter, and their schools will be closed for snow, too. There will always be traffic jams on Friday afternoons and when it rains. Build it in. Make backup plans for working at home, for getting to the airport if your first method falls through, and for people you can call on to help.
If you adopt this philosophy, look objectively at your schedule, and are honest about how much time projects will take, I’m betting you can find space for almost anything that matters to you within your 168 hours. That includes big projects like going back to school or starting a business. While 30 hours per week (Wickouski’s time commitment) sounds like a lot, the average American could find it by cutting out all television, cutting down on housework, and holding sleep to 8 hours per night (Saturday and Sunday mornings are often a great time for getting things done). If you can use saved hours during your work time
—like the 10 hours Anner doesn’t have to spend in meetings—even better.
If you don’t have the space for something, then be honest about it and either don’t make the commitment or agree to a more reasonable time frame. I’m always grateful when my research assistants tell me no, I cannot complete that by Monday but I can by Wednesday. It beats when someone tries to garner points for heroism by saying she’ll do a project by Saturday and then blows through that commitment. It’s not that 2
days matters much. But once you start breaking commitments to yourself and the people around you, the whole system of discipline—the trust you build up in yourself to be in control of things—breaks down.
Again, the world is not going to make it easy for you to stick to your priorities. Don’t let your own weakness contribute to the problem.