The post before last introduced you to calendaring, my name* for a system of getting stuff done.
*I’m quite fond of making verbs out of nouns.
Last week I gave a few extra pointers to take your calendaring up a notch.
This week I want to describe the main arguments (read: excuses) your brain will make to you if you’re new to calendaring.
Let’s get to it!
Brain Meet Calendar
Your primitive brain is going to launch a guerrilla warfare campaign against you for taking up calendaring.
Remember the primitive brain is motivated by three things:
- avoiding pain
- seeking pleasure
- expending the least amount of energy
Calendaring will eventually enable you to satisfy all three of these motivators.
But in the meantime the transition will cause untold resistance because learning a new system is more taxing than the status quo, and the primitive brain does not understand delayed gratification.
So what limiting beliefs and thought errors will you have to overcome as you embark on this quest to boost your productivity?
Unlocking Your Busyness Belt
We aren’t necessarily aware of it, but many of us strive to be or appear busy.
My own theory is that feeling busy gives us a sense of importance. By having no time for other things we are trying to create scarcity in others’ minds around and increase demand for our time.
It serves to help us cope with feeling unproductive. We use busyness as the excuse for why we’re not as productive as we’d like to be.
Busyness is an indulgent emotion—it’s something we like to feel because it makes us comfortable even though it doesn’t move us forward.
We also view busyness as a virtue or desirable quality, much like chastity (thus the invoking of the medieval belt analogy for this section’s header).
Much like an actual padlock belt would weigh you down, so does the veil of busyness.
The key to dropping the busyness yoke is first awareness of how it’s (not) serving you coupled with a system to actually be productive (calendaring).
But the Emergencies!
Your brain will offer up a thought that you can’t schedule everything because that doesn’t factor in emergencies.
I’d counter back questioning how often true emergencies are actually happening.
I’m talking about a medical emergency or car accident or the like.
I’m not talking about tickets going on sale to see Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, or Annyong.
Sure, if her dress or hair catches on fire, THEN it’s an emergency!
(Annyong was my band in college & med school—just making sure you’re paying attention.)
We generally consider urgent tasks to be emergencies. Not all urgent tasks are actually important or emergencies.
In my life, urgency usually arises from inadequate planning/scheduling on my part, and I’d venture to guess it’s the same for many.
I know there are things that come up that are urgent or emergencies, but try not to let the urgent usurp what’s truly important.
Furthermore, if emergencies occur with regular frequency, then you need to examine why. Maybe you need to build a schedule with enough buffer or margin to accommodate them.
I'm Too Busy to Get Less Busy
This argument is my favorite one, the gist being “can’t stop or it’ll fall apart.”
That’s just our primitive brain talking. Our default mode is using our primitive brain which is reactive and can’t plan ahead.
This is why we falter with to-do lists in isolation. To-do lists are a half-hearted attempt to plan ahead by at least listing out tasks we need to complete. But as I’ve discussed elsewhere, they tend to cause more overwhelm and stress and actually decrease productivity.
Instead, calendaring forces us to tap into our prefrontal cortex. Doing so allows us to access executive functioning, our brain’s powerhouse of ninja skills that let us plan, focus, remember, and juggle things in our working memory.
However, the transition from primitive brain reactivity to prefrontal planning can be…painful.
We feel like we’re already doggy paddling to keep our heads above water. The paddling takes energy, exhausts us, but moves us forward, albeit slowly.
Stopping to try something new (hopping on the speedboat!) feels like it will hinder whatever progress we are making and perhaps even cause us to sink beneath the waves.
And that’s scary to us.
Our preinstalled default software (i.e., our primitive brain) holds us back in this way. We all need to upgrade to the latest and greatest operating system: prefrontal cortex v2.0!
The real question is: how productive are you in your status quo, truly?
It's Impossible to Get More Done
The last question I posed still stands.
This thought distortion originates from the idea that busyness equals productivity. That busyness is the byproduct of striving for success. That busyness is a hard fought badge of honor to wear.
It’s not.
Wait, where the hell did Steven Seagal come from and why is he glaring at me?!
It is possible to get more done when you use a system designed to make you more intentional. That’s what calendaring does.
I'm a Free-Flowing Spirit
Another excuse I often hear is that scheduling out your tasks feels too restrictive. Like it’s going to limit your freedom in some way. Put a cage around the wonderful bird that you are.
Au contraire! Scheduling out your activities actually creates more freedom. Specifically, it lets you:
- Build in and know when your free time is.
- Shift around your schedule if need be since you know how much time you need to get your work done.
- Enjoy your free time unencumbered by thoughts of what you need to do.
I can’t think of a better type of freedom than #3 above.
Fine, fine, maybe a Braveheart going full-commando and mooning your enemy is a better type of freedom.
I'm Too Far Gone, There's No Hope
This tends to come in three main flavors:
- I’m too much of a perfectionist
- I’m a lost cause procrastinator
- I don’t know how
These are all related so I grouped them into one long section.
I heard Kara Pepper, another physician coach, sum up perfectionism…perfectly: it is an intolerance for one’s own humanity.
Perfectionists believe their worth is tied to their performance. This couldn’t be any further from the truth.
(PS – this is one main reason healthcare systems and administrators can hold so much sway over physicians—they use our perfectionistic tendencies against us.)
One manifestation of perfectionism is procrastination. There are countless reasons people procrastinate, but they all revolve around their inability to manage negative feelings (buffering anyone?).
Like any buffer, the activity we do while procrastinating provides a small reward, or hit of dopamine, that tides us over in the immediate short-term.
But in the longer term, procrastination overall makes us feel terrible because we’re aware that 1) we’re avoiding the task at hand, and 2) doing so is going to lead to negative consequences.
Lack of know-how and fear of failure are common instigators of procrastination.
For those who fear they don’t know how to calendar, that will come in time.
You didn’t know how to take an H&P let alone do any procedures or surgeries at the start of medical school. You learned over time how to do all of these things.
Unless you were Percival Ulysses Cox!
The same is true with anything, and calendaring is no different. Saying you “don’t know” is your brain taking the easy way out rather than coming up with a solution.
Parkinson’s Law comes into play here too. It states that work expands to fill the time allotted, like how a gas will expand to fill the confines of a container.
If you restrict a task to a certain amount of time (like when you procrastinate and only leave yourself an hour to write a paper!), then you’ll get it done in that time. If you don’t restrict the time, then it’ll take up all of the time.
I tell members of my charting program that if they allow charting to spill over after work hours, they’ve now just opened up the rest of their day (and by extension their lives) to be filled with charting.
Master of Your Time
What if you were the master of the universe—no, I meant—
…time. I assume you store your calendar on that sword, He-Man?
(Toxic masculinity aside, was He-Man way ahead of his time putting his preferred pronoun in his superhero name? No? Just completely uncreative character naming? Gotcha.)
What if you were the master of your time? What if you could manage your time like a boss?
You can.
Just start. Remember that even B- work can change the world, so it can certainly move you forward and boost your productivity. And it will get better and so will you.
Schedule in some margin too to give yourself some wiggle room, especially as you get a feel for calendaring. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: this is an iterative process.
Finally, and most importantly, show yourself the compassion and grace necessary so that you can learn. Failing shows you what doesn’t work so you can later succeed. Embrace it, even if you have to ignore your primitive brain kicking and screaming!
These are the main excuses I find people come up to avoid trying calendaring. What resistance comes up for you when you try or even just consider trying calendaring? Let me know in the comments section below.
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