The blog

The state­ment “ After hav­ing improved my struc­ture and how I work, I now get 20% more things done.” is rarely what I hear peo­ple say after I have worked with them. What they usu­al­ly tes­ti­fy to, how­ev­er, is how much bet­ter they feel when they have refined their struc­ture and work meth­ods. They have more con­trol over their work sit­u­a­tion, they man­age their time bet­ter, and they use email, chat, and oth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools in a way that they are com­fort­able with instead of con­stant­ly feel­ing over­whelmed and ​“behind on everything”.

In line with the research

This obser­va­tion seems accu­rate if you com­pare it with the find­ings of a meta-study in which researchers Aeon, Faber, and Panac­cio ana­lyzed 158 stud­ies in the field of time man­age­ment. They want­ed to find out, quite sim­ply, whether time man­age­ment works and, if so, what dif­fer­ence it makes. They found that time man­age­ment leads to improved effi­cien­cy, but more impor­tant­ly, the pos­i­tive effect of man­ag­ing your time well was even greater when it came to well-being — both at work and in life in gen­er­al, it seems.

Part of the structure

The researchers define ​“time man­age­ment” as ​“a kind of deci­sion-mak­ing indi­vid­u­als use to struc­ture, pro­tect, and adapt their time to chang­ing cir­cum­stances”. It does not entire­ly over­lap with what I mean when I say ​“struc­ture,” but some of it does, which is why I rec­og­nize the study’s con­clu­sions from per­son­al expe­ri­ence and that of my clients.

So what can you and I do with this infor­ma­tion? Well, if one of the strongest effects of struc­tur­ing is improved well-being, we can, for exam­ple, choose what we want to improve next based on that rather than on the fact that we want to save time. At least that is what I intend to do.

Do this

First: Based on the assump­tion that good struc­ture is good for well-being, think about what you would like to fix in the near future that would improve how you feel about your days. What is irri­tat­ing you, hin­der­ing you, or low­er­ing your mood most often right now?

• Could it be reme­died if you orga­nized some­thing or some­where a lit­tle better?
• Would it be eas­i­er if you had more con­trol over your work situation?
• Would it go away if you had less to do with something?
• Would it help if you made more time each week for something?
• Would a new approach to a par­tic­u­lar recur­ring sit­u­a­tion make a difference?

The more spe­cif­ic you are when defin­ing the prob­lem, the eas­i­er it will be to find a solution.

Then: Choose a sin­gle thing, a sin­gle area, to improve struc­tural­ly next (because I am guess­ing your time is short as well and we need to prioritize).

Per­son­al­ly, I will address how I tend to pro­cras­ti­nate doing things that I fear will be hard or bor­ing to do. They are nev­er as com­pli­cat­ed or dif­fi­cult as I feared, so I will be tak­ing the bull by the horns more than I used to in the near future. I am going to act instead of procrastinating.

Final­ly, define what the first step towards a bet­ter struc­ture in your cho­sen field would look like. If you want tips on what action to take, you could do a search in all the com­mu­ni­ca­tion you have received, seen, and heard from me. There is a lot on the Struc­ture Blog as well as on my Youtube chan­nel.

Bet­ter and better

If you choose an area of your work life to improve that has an impact on your well-being, you should, based on the study men­tioned above, be using struc­ture and time man­age­ment as tools to improve an area where the impact will be great­est. You will prob­a­bly become more effi­cient too, as the meta-study also showed, but sure­ly gen­er­al well-being is just as valu­able to improve as efficiency?

What will you choose?

What will you choose to refine in the near future? Please tell me, because I may want to make an effort in that area myself after being remind­ed of it by you. 

(No sure where your time actu­al­ly goes? There are tools for that — here’s how to find out what you spend your time on!)