#26 I suck at time management.

This is post #26 of my #365 day series.

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I distinctly remember taking the bar exam and thinking “I really screwed up on this one.” Why you ask? Whelp, I didn’t actually do what most other people did, which is follow the Barbi studying routine. I’m not exactly the best rule follower (I know, weird combination for a lawyer), so within a few days of trying to stick to the issued Barbri study schedule I realized that it wasn’t going to work for me, so I went AWOL and studied the way that felt best for me. It worked out well for me, except for one major issue — I never did any practice essays. The essay portion of the bar exam consisted of 3 prompts and you have 3 hours to complete them. Where did I mess up? I never practiced writing the essays within an hour, so I had no experience trying to complete the essays in a timed manner. I thought I was completely screwed. (Don’t stress, apparently I didn’t screw up enough to fail).

By all accounts, I should probably be really good at time management. I was an attorney at law firm, ran major multi billion dollar deals, and now I run a tech company. For all of that to work, I would need to be really good managing my day right? Wrong. It’s all just managed chaos. Do I plan out my day? Absolutely, I block out my day so that have chunks of time to work very specific tasks. That said, many different things happen during the day which require my attention. Whether it’s fielding calls with clients or dealing with a random engineering task, I am in a constant state of focus shifting.

Is it bad that I’m constantly focus shifting? Yes, I’d say so. But it’s the reality, so you have to learn to adapt to it. It’s a lot like white water rafting, you can plan all day and understand the routes, but the water is completely unpredictable so you need to have the skills to adapt to the water in real time. The people that react to the water by saying “that wasn’t supposed to happen” or “that rock wasn’t supposed to be there” are the ones that end up having a bad time. The ability to manage through the chaos is a skill that I didn’t appreciate until I saw it through the eyes of colleagues that became overwhelmed when things didn’t go according to plan. When your system requires perfect execution and everything to go exactly the way you planned it, then that’s a system that is more prone to fail. So instead of focusing on being perfect at time management, I plan out my day and expect almost none of it to go according to how I planned it.

A robust system is a system that expects surprises and errors, but encourages a path to success.