Take Control

If you were asked, would you like complete control of your working day? Your answer would undoubtably be yes. Who wouldn't want control over their working day?!

I am a bit of a control freak and when things are out of my control I don't like it. I tell people this is why I don't like rollercoasters, but the real reason is probably because I am a scaredy-cat when it comes to anything like that!

I am writing this in the context of your working day because that is where most people struggle to be in complete control but would love to be.

I have seen a lot of interviews and read articles of people becoming financially independent and what the driver was for it. One of the consistent things they all say is because they were fed up of the 9-5 and wanted to take back control of their time.

But does everyone have to be financially independent to feel in control of their time? I don't believe so. Yes, it would be amazing to be financially independent for lots of other reasons too but how can you take control back right now? Here are 3 steps to try and help.

Sit down with a pen and paper (or use excel if you do everything on it like me), and write down what your typical working week looks like. It might help if you look back at your calendar for work and use that to jog your memory.

I would do this by having blocks of half hour's. e.g. 0900-0930, 0930-1000. Then putting next to it what you have in that half hour, whether it is a catch up with an individual, a team meeting or just going through emails.

This will be a great exercise to just view how you spend your time and how busy your days truly are or do you have free time that you would probably procrastinate during? It is easy to do this and not realise how much of your day you spend doing it.

You have your time blocks and you have your activity detailed. Now put a tick next to the activity that you control. What I mean by this is that it is activity that you can choose to have or not and you can choose when you do it. e.g. going through emails or a catch up you have organised with a colleague.

Now put a cross on the activity that is out of your control and controlled by others. e.g. Your weekly catch up with your line manager.

Obviously the time that you have no activity planned in to is within your control on how you use so will have a tick.

Now hopefully you will have more ticks than crosses. If you have hardly any ticks then you have justified yourself in doing this activity as it is needed!

Great, you now have your activity mapped out and you now know what is within your control and not. So what do you now do with this?

Well the stuff with ticks is the easiest to deal with. You can decide to:

• Keep it in as it is
• Move it to another time
• Reduce the time spent on it
• Remove it from your day

You will know what is best to do, I would just ask that you really challenge yourself on each activity because it is easy to just accept the status quo.

Now for the crosses. You might think you have to just leave this the way it is but that is the wrong way to think about it. The old saying goes: If you don't ask you don't get.

If you think your weekly catch up with your manager can be reduced to 15 minutes then just ask him/her to reduce it. The chances are that they will be happy to get some time back too. Or another option might be to have it fortnightly instead. Try to be creative with your solution and if you are honest with the person you are asking something of the chances are they will completely understand and would be happy to assist you.

I would love to hear how you get on with this and whether it made a difference to your working life.

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Thanks for reading,

Gav