You’re Managing Your Time. But Are You Designing Your Life?
I’ve spent years trying to get better at time management.
Time blocking.
Priorities.
OPA — Outcome, Purpose, Action.
Lists.
Apps.
And, occasionally, rearranging my pencils instead of doing the bloody thing I was supposed to be doing.
And some of those tools work.
But something still felt wrong.
Because you can become incredibly efficient at spending your time while still spending it on the wrong things.
That was the thought that landed in my puzzle book:
Maybe time management is solving the wrong problem.
Maybe the question isn’t:
“How can I manage my time better?”
Maybe it’s:
“What do I actually want my life to be about?”
That’s a much bigger question.
And it’s one I’ve been exploring as part of my own North Star adventure — trying to work out not just what I should do with my time, but what kind of life I actually want to create.
In this FMQ, I sow the seed.
The deeper dive is where we’ll explore the difference between managing your time and designing your life, why being busy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re moving forward, and how to start putting the important things back where they belong.
So before you rush off to organise tomorrow’s diary…
Maybe stop and ask yourself what you’re actually organising it for.
In this FMQ, we explore:
- Why better time management doesn’t necessarily create a better life
- The difference between urgent and important
- Why being busy can become a very clever form of distraction
- How productivity tools can sometimes help us organise the wrong things
- Why time blocking and planning aren’t enough on their own
- The question: “What am I actually trying to create with my time?”
- And the bigger shift from managing time to designing a life
The deeper dive is coming.
And knowing me, there’ll probably be a puzzle book, a few uncomfortable questions and at least one process involved.
🎧 Listen to the deeper dive
What if managing your time isn’t the answer?
What if the real work is deciding what deserves your time in the first place?
That’s the conversation we’re having next.
A little question for you
Before the longer episode arrives, grab a bit of paper — or your own puzzle book — and ask yourself:
If I stopped trying to manage my time better, what would I actually want to do with my life?
Don’t solve it.
Just let the question have a rummage around.
If this got you thinking…
Subscribe or follow Personal Development Unplugged so the deeper dive lands in your feed.
And if you know someone who’s forever saying “I’m so bloody busy”, send this their way.
It might give them something else to think about.
If there’s something you’d like me to explore, or you’ve got a question, a challenge or even a celebration you’d like to share, email me:
feedback@personaldevelopmentunplugged.com
You never know.
Your question might become the seed of the next episode.
Have more fun than you can stand and share what you hear:
It’s time to fly.
Shine Brightly 🌟
Paul
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Music Credits
Music by Wataboi from Pixabay,
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Music by will |Marshall from will marshall.
And the transcript WARNING if you’re a lover of the written word this may make you frustrated, or angry – you have been warned – is it an ‘ism
Welcome back, welcome back to another Seed, the FMQ. I thought about this because it seemed to me, and it was me, everyone seems to want to manage their time better. And for me, I’d see if this goes inside you too, and feel sounds right.
Can you maybe just grasp it for a bit? I wanted to spend my time on the right thing. I had this real burning, it wasn’t a desire, but it was a burning thing that I didn’t want to waste time. Time was so valuable.
Time’s the only bloody thing that you can only spend, you can’t save. Well, you can save it a bit, but you can’t save it for another day, can you? You can’t put it in a deposit account and go, Oh, I think I’ll spend a bit of time that I put aside. I was, I used to get anxious about what’s happening to my time.
Did I spend it right? Did I do the right thing? Did I waste it? Oh, no, I just sat there. Maybe I was scrolling and deep diving in bloody TikTok and all that stuff. Sometimes it’s about maybe distractions, which is that part of the deep dive, but there’s other distractions in our time.
Distractions of other people. Sometimes we get distracted. Deliberately, don’t we? We distract ourselves.
Oh, I better clean my desk up before I start work, because it’s important that I put the pens in the right way up before I do this. So, you know, we’re self-sabotaging ourselves, trying in some way to manage time better. I used to think that if I managed my time better, I’d be more motivated.
I’d be on the money. I’d be really there. I’d be making it happen.
But I then look back and go, shit Cloughie, you didn’t do an awful lot today. And I was always looking for the right time management tool. And I know there’s loads of them about now on, you can get the apps everywhere.
And I did a lot way, way, way, way, way back. I used to do Tony Robbins, OPA. OPA, Outcome, Purpose, Action.
And it works. It did work. But I did get distracted.
I did sometimes not do it completely right. Maybe I was picking the wrong things. And at the end of the day, I thought at the beginning of the day, I was doing the right things.
But at the end of the day, I’d look back and thought, I’m not so happy with all of that. Maybe that was just me. Maybe that wasn’t.
It worked well. It worked well. I even then put it into time blocking.
We all know what time blocking is, yeah? Well, you get your diary and you put in a big block of time saying, this is what I’m going to do. This is going to make a difference to me now. It’s going to make it so different because I want to know exactly when I’m going to do something.
But sometimes distractions came along because I had to clear those pencils up again, because maybe the pen wanted just a cap on and the pencils wanted sharpening and the rubber wanted to be put in the corner and clean that, dust the desk, it’s a bit dirty. And I used to religiously sit down in the mornings and time block everything. But then I got confused.
Because I had, say, like the OPA, outcome, purpose, action in my mind, because I knew that’s important to know what you’re doing, it’s the intention, the purpose, and then take action. But I had a real difficulty in understanding what was urgent and what was important. You see, there’s a lot of people who do a lot of urgent stuff.
You see them, they’re busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, doing all the urgent stuff. And what happens? They leave all the fucking important stuff behind. Because they’re like feeling busy.
And you look back at the end of the day and say, oh, I’ve been so busy, but you’ve achieved absolutely nothing. You know, I did find out and I know now, if I do the important things first, things get done. And I can use in a bit of time blocking, I can do a little bit of OPA and all that stuff.
But it still wasn’t satisfying me. Something was out of kilter. I even used to go, okay, I’m just going to follow my intuition without question.
You know, everyone says follow your gut, just go ahead and do it. And I did sometimes and I did the urgent things or I intuitively followed something which just distracted me because it was easy. Yeah.
And that’s where I started to think, something’s wrong. I know time management is a useful tool. But I was trying to live my life, design my life by allocating my time, my lifetime.
And this question came up in my head. Maybe, maybe, maybe time management may be solving the wrong problem. But I’m going to repeat that.
Maybe time management is solving the wrong problem. That’s when the puzzle book comes out, isn’t it? That’s when the puzzle book comes out. You start thinking, you see, I spent years trying to organise my time.
But what I really needed to do is this. And this is where the puzzle book came in. I needed to organise my life.
Wow, that was a big distinction, wasn’t it? I’m going to repeat that as well. I spent years trying to organise my time, time management. But what I really needed was to organise my life.
And it’s like the thread that we’ve been going through over the last few episodes. But this one goes even deeper, really meaningful. So that’s where we’re going to go on the deeper dive, the longer podcast.
We’ll find out, you know, what’s stopping us. Well, I tell you what, I’m not even going to tell you what we’re going to find out, what we’re going to achieve, because there’s loads of stuff in there. I’ve got things I want to share with you.
So just let that ruminate, ruminate, juggle around in those, in that little thing at the top of your head. Baby, you’ve spent time, years of time trying to organise your time. But what would happen if all you needed to was to organise your life? Catch me on the longer, deeper dive with that one.
Please press subscribe, follow to make sure you don’t miss. I want, and that’s the wrong thing to say, don’t miss, it means the wrong thing. Make sure that you get the next episode.
Set your intention to learn something. I want to find out what’s happening. Let’s see if nothing else, find out what’s going on in that weird Cloughies brain of his.
And I’ll see you there. Share this with everyone you can think of, because it might be nice to do so. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? Pay it forward.
Have fun, have more fun than you can stand, thinking about what you might learn and change next time. Because it’s good to sit down for a change. See you next time, my friend.
Bye-bye now.
Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited