The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at Dr. Kenner.com and @amazon.com.

Are you going to school? Are you, Annie?

When I grow up?

You ain't either, Annie, you're going to stay here, take care of me.

I'm going to school when I grow up. You said we'd be together forever and ever and ever. I'm going to school when I grow up now, leave me be.

And some of you may recognize that drop from the Miracle Worker, the story of Helen Keller. Now, Annie Sullivan is a woman who is very, very motivated. She knows what she wants. Her top priority is to go to school. But how did she make that happen? And how do you manage your time so that you achieve your personal goals?

So many of us get trapped at the computer. I know I do—answering emails or searching the web. Some others get lured into watching TV or talking on the phone for much longer than we planned, or we take those trips to the refrigerator. There is no end to the ways we waste our time—literally wasting our lives—and we end up feeling like we're perpetually playing catch-up, rather than having a nice, smooth flow and pacing to our lives.

Why is it so difficult to manage our time?

Well, joining me now to shine some light on this is Jean Maroney. She's the president of Thinking Directions, and Jean teaches professionals how to solve problems faster, how to make decisions, and get projects finished by teaching them how to use targeted thinking to make better use of what they already know.

Welcome, Jean. Thank you.

Ellen, thanks for having me on the show.

You're very welcome.

Why is it so difficult to manage time in ways that are personally satisfying?

Well, I think the answer to that question comes in the last part of the question. I think if we knew what would make it personally satisfying, it would be easier to manage the time. But I think, in a lot of cases, people haven't actually thought through what their values are, what is more important. And so at a given time, when they ask themselves, "Well, what should I be doing right now?" there are 10 things that they could be doing right now, and they all feel approximately equal because they haven't really thought about which is most important to them. So they don't get a quick answer when they ask themselves, "What should I be doing right now?" They don't get a quick, obvious, no-brainer answer that is, in fact, something that will really deeply satisfy them and enrich their lives. And that is really because they haven't done enough upfront thinking to zero in on what those top priorities are.

What would you recommend that they do to discover those priorities?

It's a work in progress. It's something that you can't actually sit down and do in five minutes at the moment you need to decide what to do now. It's something that you do over a period of time. And you know, one of the top techniques that I recommend for doing hard thinking like this—and I do think figuring out what's important to you is hard thinking—is to do what I call thinking on paper, which means writing out your thoughts on paper as you're doing them.

One of the things I recommend for people who are trying to figure out how they want to spend their time is to put a little bit of time, maybe 15 minutes a day, into thinking on paper on that topic until it starts to become clear to you what you want to do more of in a day and what you want to do less of in a day.

So if one of your goals is, for example, to spend more time with my husband or wife or partner. And you say, "Oh, yeah, that's my top goal." But how many of us let that slip through the cracks? If you're saying that, if you first identify that as the top goal, or "I don't want to do what my parents did and not spend time with my kids; I want to be the parent that's connected, bonded with my kids," and that's a goal for me.

Now that they've set that goal, you're suggesting that they spend maybe 5, 10, or 15 minutes a day just writing on paper how to achieve that goal, right?

So that would be the second step. So the first step is to figure out what it is that you want to change about how you use your time, and the second step is then to actually do the problem solving to figure out how to make that happen. So what is, in fact, getting in the way of spending the time with your husband or your wife? That's different for every person. You know, there are no cookbook solutions to these problems. You can get ideas from reading a book, but ultimately, you have to make that solution fit your work schedule. And if it's your husband, your husband's work schedule, you need to sit down and figure out, "Well, when could we spend more time? What is it that I'm going to have to stop doing in order to make that time available?"

These are, you know, they're not intractable problems, but they are questions that require thinking in order to answer them. If it didn't require thinking, if the answer was obvious, you would already be doing it, right?

Right.

So with something like that, spending time with a partner, it's how do I create the mood? Because you have to shift gears, too. And so that would be another aspect of the thinking.

And you mentioned something when we first started talking, that what should I be doing? And then go by feelings, if they're guiding their minds with shoulds or "What should I do now? What's off base with that?"

Hey, I got to interrupt this because we've got to pay some bills. 30 seconds, that's it. A very quick ad, and then Alan will be back.

Romance. Oh, I wish guys knew more about what we want from a relationship. Boy, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where's that ad I saw? Here it is: The Selfish Path to Romance, a serious romance guidebook. Download chapter one for free at selfishromance.com and buy it @amazon.com.

Hmm, the Selfish Path to Romance. That is interesting.

If they're guiding their minds with shoulds or "What should I do now? What's off base with that?"

Well, ultimately, what you would like to have is that what you want to do and what you think is best for you to do are completely aligned, so that, in a sense, there's no difference between the shoulds and the wants. That they are basically all wants that are personally satisfying, right?

That the thing that you think is the best use of your time is also something that you enjoy doing and want to do. Now, that's not going to be true 100% of the time, but you and I are egoists, right? So we don't expect to think that we should be doing anything that isn't, in fact, going to be beneficial to us.

A lot of times, what you need to do to be able to get yourself to feel motivated to do the thing that you know is good for you is to think more about those benefits. There are benefits. And again, it's partly an issue of thinking. It's partly an issue of doing the thinking in advance so that you can remind yourself without having to just stop and try to figure it out at the time.

I think a lot of times we get into trouble in following through on priorities because we expect to be able to talk ourselves into doing the thing at the moment. In fact, it's much easier if you've done it in advance, and you've figured out how to put yourself in a place where doing the thing that you want to do is going to be easy.

So they're aligned.

What about keeping a day planner or a calendar? I know people who don't do any, or they don't keep up with it, they don't update it. How important is that?

Well, that's part of what I would call a trusted system to help you make sure your day goes the way that you want it to go. Now, I got that term from David Allen, who you may know. He's got a whole system. His first book was "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity," and he talked about how you need to have a combination of filing system, calendar, and to-do lists that actually capture all the things that you want to be doing, so that at any given time, when you have time, you can easily find that thing and then do it.

If you have what he calls a trusted system, you don't have to keep it in your head worrying about that you're going to forget that you need to do this. It will, in effect, pop up out of your system at the time that you need it. So if you have time to make calls, you can look at your call list, and they're all right there, and you can just make them.

Or if you have some free time, you can look on your list: "What can I do at my desk or in my living room?" And you have things there, and that's part of what I meant about, in effect, setting up a structure that makes it easier to make the good decision at the time. If you have some of that structure in place, the decision becomes a no-brainer. You remember what you want to do, and it’s right.

So it's much more personally satisfying, Jean. I've listened to a lot of your talks, and they're fabulous. How can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more?

I would be delighted to have people check out my website, which is thinkingdirections.com. That's the word "thinking" and the word "directions" with an S, with no space between it. You can email me at jm@thinkingdirections.com, and I have a free monthly newsletter, which you can sign up for on the website. I'd be happy to put you on that. It's excellent. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jean.

Thanks for having me, Ellen.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com and please listen to this.

Here's an excerpt from the Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and co-author Dr. Edwin Locke:

Respect your partner's need for private time. People are individuals first and partners second. No matter how wonderful living with a romantic partner is, it necessarily will take some attention away from yourself. Sometimes people need time to do things alone. Partners need some freedom to do things in their own way, such as how they cook meals, what time they go to bed, how and if they make the bed, when and what they eat, what time they get up and shower, what TV shows they watch, if any, when they go out, and for what purpose, shopping, etc. They need to be free of concerns about always checking what their partner would want. Having some time alone reinforces your sense of being an individual.

You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy the book @amazon.com.