The Curse of Time Blindness
At Mind Coach, I often encounter high-achieving professional clients who feel they are always catching up. They own up to the fact that they can’t get ahead with anything new because they don’t have the time and space to develop strategies and see the big picture. They are constantly falling behind, trying to catch up. Even though they cannot take on more, they seem to always say yes, forcing themselves to work late into the night or on weekends. Yet they don’t let anyone know, because they feel they should be able to do things faster and better than anyone else, able to do it all alone without complaints.
This is due to a form of time blindness. We Turbo Thinkers© really struggle with time estimation, so much so that our magical thinking extends to the point of making us delusional. Our brains are so terrified of being bored that we will do anything to avoid having extra time for nothing. We find ourselves comparing to others and creating our schedules based on how long we think a project should take. But very often, we forget some very basic human needs. The most obvious one is thinking time - the expectation is for us to be productive and executing at all times, when in fact, we need time to think, plan, and revise. That time is just as important, or even more so, than the execution of the plan itself. We also neglect transition times between tasks, time for research, solving technical difficulties, comparing versions and drafting, evaluating our work to refine it.
We forget about communication time - the back-and-forth until everyone fully understands. We fail to account for different energy levels which might mean varying work speeds and intensity. We ignore the time of life’s distractions - new priorities that might alter plans, like a sick child or flat tire. And we often disregard the time involved in transferring knowledge and skills when bringing someone else into a process. As the saying goes - give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Delegating may take extra time upfront, but saves us time long-term.
All these “Extra” times vary project-to-project, person-to-person. By becoming acutely aware of how we actually spend our time, could we better estimate future tasks with an accurate picture? Could that allow us to then align and refine our process for greater efficiency? But to expect ourselves to be robots without human needs like breaks, refueling our bodies, resting our brains, recharging with variety, is unreasonable.
My clients want to work with love and integrity - integrity in the sense that they do what they say. So do we focus solely on grinding through work at high speeds to match our words with actions? Or could we approach it differently - see the reality of our workloads first, then alter the words to match that reality? How can we create a more realistic picture of what’s required for high-quality work, so we can set authentic expectations for ourselves and communicate those clearly?
In the end, it’s easier to be honest with ourselves about how we truly work best. By reflecting on our natural rhythms and needs, we can communicate more accurate timelines from the start, rather than trying to force ourselves to work faster and harder through sheer willpower and discipline. It may take some time to make this mindset shift - but then again, taking time is precisely what we Turbo Thinkers© need to do more of, isn’t it? In slowing down to speed up, we might just find our most productive, fulfilling pace.