Melissa Walker of Heyday Coaching pens a monthly blog with tips for helping you achieve your own peak success, happiness, and vigor.
Time scarcity is real. We repeatedly ask ourselves or are asked by others to do more than is humanly possible in any given timeframe. Most of us can learn to use our time more effectively by reducing distractions and improving our focus. But no matter how good we get at reducing demands and managing our time, it seems that over and over, we end up feeling the pressures of time scarcity. We must also learn to manage energy as well as time.
If you’re like me, one of your biggest challenges is finding the time to work on our long-term goals even as we juggle the tasks that come our way on any given day. A few months ago, I listened to a podcast interview with Mark Goulston, M.D., a psychiatrist and author of the book Get Out of Your Own Way. He offered a simple method to develop and organize your action steps toward the long-term goal. He called it the ICU method.
At mid-life, Brigid Schulte found herself drowning in “overwhelm.” “Overwhelm” is her term for the sense that was never had enough time to do all the things on her to-do list and certainly never time for anything resembling leisure. That’s a complaint I hear constantly from the clients I see in my personal and career coaching practice.
