[b]Why do you write like you're running out of time?[/b]
As a student, then as a teacher (briefly), and now as a publishing professional, time management has always been essential to me, juggling personal, academic, and then professional commitments. Managing the tension between my MPhil studies and the part-time job that paid for them was my first real dilemma, and then teaching is a constant time management struggle. In many ways, getting a 9-5 office job was liberating: I'd learned a huge amount about time management from teaching, and selling advertising kind of dictated my priorities - you made sales calls while people tended to be at their desks, and then did the admin when they were likely to be away from their desk. I thought I was sorted.
But then I started taking my writing more seriously, and I started acting in community theatre groups, and things began to get a lot more complex. I began to feel that I never quite had enough time in the day to do the things I wanted, and my life now feels like a constant struggle to balance work, "paying hobbies", my personal life and social commitments, all while avoiding burnout. It's led to insane periods in my life where I'm rehearsing three plays at once all while working a 40 hour week, and trying to meet a short story competition deadline, and then friends get offended when I try and duck out of a party invitation. Because I don't like offending people, I am very bad at saying no to things. When I started self-publishing, where I do my own formatting, often design my own covers AND record my own audiobooks, not to mention the marketing side, I crossed an event horizon of constant stress and panic. I don't even know what to do with free time when I have it these days.
Gosh that's a lengthy intro. Suffice it to say that The Ultimate Time Management Toolkit could have been designed for me. Written to help people with ADHD, anxiety disorders and CHRONICALLY BUSY PEOPLE - which was the term where I recognised myself most clearly. Risa Williams has put together 25 tools to help people think about their relationship to time and the tasks they feel they have to achieve.
This 200 page book is a pleasure to read, text nicely spaced out, with fun illustrations, lively terminology like the "task-intensity metre" and "the frustration surfboard", and worksheets that include colouring exercises, etc, but the fun is clearly underpinned by the author's expertise as a therapist, and backed up by copious citations and a substantial bibliography.
If you can carve out the time to read this book, and spend some time with the tools, exercises, and worksheets contained therein, then I can't promise that all your piles of busyness will suddenly melt away, but there are some great techniques for changing how we think about our tasks and to-do lists. It's certainly helped me think seriously about how I approach my day, whether I'm working from home or going into the office. I used to think I was good at time management, but then the world changed, and this book feels like a tool that will help me to get on top of things again.