What You Need to Know Before Using a Time Management App as a Humanitarian and Development Leader

Wouldn't it be nice if a time management tool could solve all our problems as humanitarian and development leaders?

Unfortuntely, it doesn't work that way.

While time management tools can be helpful, there is something else you need to address before you can use them effectively.

Something that will have a much greater impact on your time management.

It has to do with the way you THINK about your time.

After coaching hundreds of humanitarian and development supervisors, I have found there are common ways of thinking which prevent them from taking control of their time and making the impact they want.

Listen to this episode to find out more.

Previous Episode Mentioned:

How Respecting Your Own Time Leads You to Having More of It

 

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Episode 285: What You Need to Know Before Using a Time Management App

TRANSCRIPT

 Hello, my aid worker friend, I hope you're having a wonderful week. And this week, I am back in my normal recording place. So I should be sounding back to normal.

Have you ever ridden in a unimog?

Many of you as humanitarian and development workers, maybe you at least know what a unimog is, but if you don't, it's basically a German vehicle that is made to work in extreme conditions. It reminds me actually of a big tractor. And kind of like the vehicle that I don't know if any of you have seen Star Wars, but there's a scene where there's this group of beings which are going around and collecting trash. And I think at one point they collect the two robots, R2-D2 and C-3PO. And, they're in this huge vehicle that's going through the desert. And that actually kind of reminds me of. a unimog.

So you're probably wondering why am I talking about a Unimog? Well, It's one of the only vehicles that we could use at certain times of the year in South Sudan. And in particular, I remember on a visit to the Eastern part of South Sudan, where I was visiting the Holy Trinity peace Village Kuron. And this particular community was set up by Emeritus, Bishop Taban. And he was just an amazing man. He was in his seventies when I was there and every morning he would wake up around 4:00 or 5:00 AM and do a hundred pushups and jump around. And he had this whole routine that he told me about. I didn't actually participate in. But he also was working on creating a community that was free from war and violence within the Toposa region. And , the reason we had to use these Unimogs is because there were no paved roads. We were working with the Toposa people who had been living as they had been for thousands of years, they still had the same huts the same, jewelry, similar agricultural practices.

And so we were introducing seeds and ways of planting that we hoped would help prevent famine in the future. But as many of you know, working in these types of environments can be very challenging. And so you really had to be good at managing your time. And this, of course not only applies to working at the community level, but also working in the office or working with our teams or even just in our everyday life outside of work.. Managing our time and understanding how to best use it can be very helpful and important. And I wanted to talk today about what to consider before choosing a time management tool or app based on my own journey and based on having coached now, hundreds of humanitarian and development leaders. Of course in South Sudan, you have to really use your time wisely and you have to be on top of everything because not only are you working in a place where you have limited time to serve certain areas because of the rainy season, which creates a lot of clay and mud. But also because of just the environment in general and the unpredictability of, potential conflicts or the lack of infrastructure, which led to late procurements and all kinds of things such as that.

Uh, so managing time becomes very essential. And I remember becoming very interested in time management as a concept and coming down to the question of how do I really effectively manage my time to create what I want? And I've come a long way since those times in South Sudan and there's things that I wish I could have told myself if I was to go back in time and give myself advice. But I thought that it might be helpful for you to know some of these things.

First of all, when I first started learning about time management, I started on the somewhat traditional route that a lot of people take, which is consuming books like David Allen's "Getting Things Done" or Tim Ferriss "Four Hour Work Week" or so many other resources which are on time management and different ways of thinking about time management. And I started to come up with my own best practices in terms of putting things in place and managing my time. Some being very obvious, such as turning off notifications and others, maybe not quite as obvious, such as respecting the meetings that I put in my calendar when they were with myself. If that makes any sense. So respecting the time that I had scheduled with myself. I think I've done a podcast episode on that in the past, but perhaps I can do another one because I just think it is, such an interesting concept that a lot of us overlook is how many times we schedule something to do on our own and then we schedule over it because for whatever reason, we don't value our time to ourselves.

In terms of selecting time management tools and apps I went through this whole phase of trying out different things, everything from Microsoft outlook to Todoist and all the other ones that are modeled after getting things done. And what I found was number one, every time I switched a tool, there was a huge learning curve involved and that in itself took a lot of time. But number two, the time management tool that you select is only going to be as good as what you make out of it. It's only going to be as good or as useful as what you actually invest into it. From my experience, some of them are a little bit clunky or they take some time to really set up and understand. And so to be honest, at this point, right now, I'm using a word document and that, between that and my outlook calendar, is the majority of how I manage my time.

It's not to say that these time management apps and tools aren't helpful, but like I said, you really need to use them in order for them to be helpful. And be on to yourself if you are always thinking about the next best thing, because this is the other thing, there is no magic fix, right?

There is no magic fix when it comes to time management. When it comes to time management, I think an even more foundational and more important thing to address before even getting into a time management app or tool is looking at the way you manage your mind, or your mindset around time management. This.will be the key to whether your time management is successful or not. So it's really interesting after having coached many leaders and also from my own experience, from what I remember as a country manager, as a head of office and so on,

I realized that there are these recurring beliefs that humanitarian and development workers have that they may not be aware of having number one, but also number two that are so common that I've actually given them a name and my name for them is high performance syndrome. And basically the way I look at this high performance syndrome is a well-intentioned busy-ness with limited productivity in which a leader spends time on activities that do not create impact and instead, cause overwhelm and burnout. So, let me repeat that again. High performance syndrome is a well intentioned busy-ness with limited productivity in which a leader spends time on activities that to not create impact and instead, cause overwhelm and burnout. A lot of humanitarian and development leaders they're very ambitious. I know you want to make an impact. You want to help as much as you can. And you want to get it all done.

So there's this drive or this, attraction to the humanitarian development sector of high performers. However, there's a certain mindset which I'm calling the High Performance Snydrome mindset which leads to busy-ness without the productivity. And it's sounds all good and well, for example, this needs to be perfect. That is one of the mindsets that will lead to you not being able to get anywhere with time management, because it will perpetually lead to you focusing on activities that do not create impact and yet will burn you out because guess what? Perfect is not possible. There are a few other mindsets as well. One is needing to be available all the time. This one, I especially see common amongst the admin finance teams of the humanitarian and development sectors, where leaders feel that if they're not available, they're not being helpful. This also will impact the amount of work you have and will lead to burnout.

And then another type of thought, which I see a lot, which also fuels the High Performance Syndrome is around needing to be a team player or needing to say yes if somebody asks you to do something.

So, what does this have to do with time management tools? Well, we can use all the time management tools and the apps in the world. But they're not going to be effective if number one you don't use them to their full benefit but number two If we don't address these certain mindsets that are fueling our burnout and overwhelm.

I myself believe when it comes to wellbeing, when it comes to burnout that we do need to take a certain type of responsibility over our own wellbeing. To be honest, I would rather take responsibility over my own wellbeing than have someone else like the organization do it. Of course, there is a duty of care and responsibility for supervisors and organizations to help their teams and their staff. I've seen so many times humanitarian and development leaders are not very good at taking their own responsibility for the cause of their burnout. And part of this, once again comes from some of these High Performance Syndrome thoughts which lead to taking on more work than we should, focusing on things that are not productive and just keep us busy, and therefore lead to burnout. What I'm saying is being aware of these mindsets and which one might be plaguing you because it's very likely that at least one of these ways of thinking are something that you experience, which are keeping you stuck in the same routines and focusing on the things that will not make an impact in your work.

If you're interested in identifying which of these things is keeping you stuck and how to overcome them this is also one of the things that we discuss in the "Coach Approach Leadership Style" course. And that is because what I see more and more is that if leaders believe that they don't have the time and they're too busy to work with their teams, then they're not going to do it. And so in order to use a coach approach, we need to believe that we have control over our time and that we have the ability to operate in a way which creates impact and is actually productive. And part of the way to accomplish that is by overcoming these High Performance Syndrome thoughts. And so if you're interested in identifying which thoughts are plaguing you and how to overcome those and move forward and free yourself up to really make an impact in your work then please join us in the next "Coach Approach Leadership Style" course. You can find out more on the website www.aidforaidworkers.com,

click on "Coach Approach course" and there is information on how to take next steps. Time management apps and tools are useful and can be very important. But they won't be as effective if we haven't addressed the underlying thinking, which is causing our behavior in the first place. The behavior of busy-ness of productivity that doesn't create the impact that we want.

We need to be clear on what is the impact we want, what is our productivity? How do we define it? And then what is the mindset we need to have an order to achieve it? All right, my friends until next week, keep broadening your impact. Bye for now!