98. Discipline, Outsourcing Your Brain, Time & Self Management VS. Micromanagement (Part 2)

This is Part two of Time Management 101 Q&A with Michel Shah, lead UpSkiller, president and founder of UpSkill:

🕰 Key Takeaways :
Understanding Discipline: 

• Discipline is not about being iron-fisted or micromanaging
• Address the common misunderstandings about discipline
• Disclipline as a form of self-love and integrity
• Understanding oneself and managing time and activities effectively

Collaborative Time Management: 

• Time Management and Self-Management
• Importance of reflecting about your time
• Fostering independence rather than creating dependency
• Learning to delegate and developing systems that allow for shared responsibility

Parenting and Discipline:

• In parenting, discipline involves putting guardrails and teaching time management as a crucial skill, rather than enforcing strictness or micromanaging. 

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Transcript

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If you have not spent time on your time, this is something to start to do and yesterday I had, um, orientations for new students in college and we spent like one hour just looking at your time and these students were saying this is the first time I've actually spent this much time. Reflecting on how I spent my time, what systems are working well for me, what systems I need to disregard, what system I'm going to use this semester to manage my time more effectively, how am I going to track it? They've never gone through that. What tool am I using to track this? Who is going to hold me accountable for this? We need a system. So I encourage you to go and think, put aside. An hour of your time to begin to think about your time management system. That hour can produce opportunities for you to leverage your time way more significantly and make up more productivity with less time. Welcome to Upskill Talks, I'm your host, Michelle Shaw, lead Upskill at Upskill Community. Upskill Talks is a podcast for leaders, leaders who are actively seeking innovative and creative ways to interact. Lead themselves and others in every episode through real life stories and enlightening conversations, we will explore the challenges and opportunities real leaders face in today's everchanging workplace. We will present you with real strategies. For you to leverage your soft skills and produce transformative results. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Let us begin. What are some tools or systems that you use, to help you manage your time? I have a lot because. I read this book called Atomic Habits. James Clear. He really emphasizes the use of systems over having goals because you can have a goal and not see how to get there. But if you have a system, then you have a consistent way where you kind of, you automate your progress to the goal. Um, so I take this principle and I apply it everywhere in my life, like to do lists. Because I can't rely on my memory all the time calendar events. Everything is in my calendar. So I've kind of like, taken those parts of my brain and put it in my computer and on my phone so that my brain can think of other things, um, think of my work. Eliminating distractions, making it hard for me to scroll on social media or watch Netflix, things like that. Like I, I don't know if I've told you, like if I've ever mentioned this before, but I child lock myself out of apps. This is really bad. I won't. One point. No, it was really bad. Like I was really, really addicted to Instagram for a while. So I had my parents set a password that child locked me out of the app. Once I reached 45 minutes and past a certain time, like past 11 PM, 12 PM, it child locks again. So I'm physically incapable of accessing my, my problem, my vices. So those are things that have helped me. So I believe that both goals and processes are important. The processes, the systems are in place to help us achieve those goals. And you know what? Whatever strategies or tactics work for you, the bottom line is to what James Clear talks about in his book is really developing those habits and automating them, making them automatic and, and aligning things that work well for you so that you can achieve your goals. At the end of the day, that's what our process is in place for is so that we can get to those goals. It's Althea here, if I could chime in, going to the extreme of creating a password to lock you out of an app to prevent distraction. I haven't had to do that quite yet. But, um. I think for me, learning to delegate and I think managing your time, especially when you have a family like myself, I have four kids and I, I work full time learning how to delegate developing systems that will assist. Um, to meet your goals. So that delegation piece is learning to step up with confidence. And finding the support within your networks, whether it's at work or with it within the home. Sometimes it's challenging to get everybody on the team, but learning to do that confidently. I think time management when you're a busy professional and A parent and just a busy human is about leadership. And leading with confidence to be able to know where the strengths lie and utilize them and liaising as well, as you mentioned, Michelle, liaising, getting partnership and getting people to opt into the plan and seeing, see the vision. Yeah, I really, I really agree with you. It's when we're talking about time management, uh, as I said, when we began this. It's not time that we're managing, it's ourselves. So it's really self management. So self management requires that great self awareness and also requires that self regulation. So to Flora's example, where you have to go to the extreme of blocking yourself out, right? It's, and, and so. I agree with this piece around the self awareness, the self management awareness of what processes you need to delegate, what processes can be automated and you know, what tools can support you to make your life easier, what partnerships you need, what accountability systems you have in place and need to have in place. It's really around understanding. What you need to manage yourself effectively around the activities that you have to perform the outcomes that you have to produce the impact that you want to have. And this is important. It's important at the individual level where you're managing your own time, managing your own self around your own activities. You touched on the concept of leadership. It becomes even more complex when you have to manage not only your time, but the time. The team's time, the organizational time against other stakeholders times in order to make things happen when collaboration is required for bigger tasks, and you're not just managing your time. In fact. There are a number of executives that don't even manage their own time. They've delegated this task to someone who manages their time for them and helps them to focus on their, their, their tasks. So that's a lot of people have executive assistants or so on who really help them to manage their time. So you can even delegate someone helping you to manage your time, but it's really important if we are to be effective. We have to be mindful of how many hours are in the day and what's possible for each chunk of time versus what we want to get done. And it comes back down to, are you disciplined enough? Are you automating enough? Are you collaborating enough? And that's understanding yourself, your strengths, your limitations, and what you need in order to be able to deliver what you say you're going to deliver. Whether that's personally, professionally, on an individual level, on an interpersonal level, at the institutional level, whatever that is. It's really about, do you have the discipline to deliver what you say you're going to deliver? And because of that discipline, you'll go deeper to create the systems, the processes, in order to produce the outcomes that you commit yourself to. I have a bit of a counter perspective on discipline, which I think is really important and necessary, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Discipline can't be blind,, I've seen people work every day towards a goal, but it's just, it's not paying off for them, and sometimes it doesn't feel fun, it doesn't feel good, it's really hard to do something, I think in some scenarios, if you're, you have discipline, but it's blind, then it can lead to bad outcomes. What I'm trying to say is sometimes you have to use your intuition to for and question like what is drawing you to social media? What is drawing you to want to watch TV? Maybe you are already mentally drained from your day job that at the end of the day you like don't have the mental capabilities to do what you think you should be doing because I think a lot of the time if you live in shoulds then Like you you have to question your shoulds um, you, you're touching on the point that has been woven through this whole conversation, which is the self awareness piece, knowing what your strengths are, knowing how you learn, knowing what chunks of time you can produce, knowing what. time you have energy and what time you don't have energy when you're most productive and when you're not when you need a break and when you don't how long you can stretch yourself all of those things so discipline has to be based on self awareness when you are aware of how you work You will be able to set the systems to support you based on your unique strengths, based on your unique skills and your unique preferences. That's the key. So if you, your discipline needs not be linked to anybody else's discipline, your discipline is going to be linked to your needs, your goals, your preferences, your style, your systems. So someone can come home and watch TV every single evening. That's how they. unwind. That's how they refresh themselves. That's how they relax. That's their self care. Someone can do that every single evening. And they're absolutely productive. That's part of their routine. Someone else can add a TV in and watch TV every evening, but they also watch episode after episode and they can't stop it. And they stay up later than necessary. So they go to bed late, then they don't get enough rest. So they wake up in the morning later or wake up early, but they're not feeling refreshed, so they don't produce well. And they come back again and fall into that sort of, uh, Uh, almost a snowball effect and you feeling less inclined to do anything and you fall into the couch. So they're patterns, the key pieces, structuring your routines to help you fall out of negative habits and being self aware and monitoring and tracking your own behaviors, practices, and habits to notice. When you're falling off track to notice that I typically watch one hour of TV. How on earth did I get to four hours of TV tonight? I need to change that. That was way too much to hold yourself accountable for your own habits, your behaviors, your routines. That is what that discipline is. Discipline is not about just doing what people think you should do or just being steadfast, doing what you want to do or. Discipline is also not about doing something and knocking, as they say, beating a dead horse. Even if it's a business idea that you're putting time into, it's about reviewing, tracking, monitoring, does this still make sense? So discipline is not blind. As you say, discipline comes from great self awareness and from great goal orientation, I think like discipline. I think my thing with discipline is that in my head, it sounds very like iron fist. Like it doesn't sound very pleasant, but in reality, discipline is self love. Right. Discipline is self love. It is actually very important for interpersonal relationships. Discipline means, for instance, we have upscale live every Thursday evening at seven. Discipline means showing up for that because one person may show up or two people may show up. Discipline means respecting your commitments and taking extreme ownership of what you say you're going to own and being true. It's, it's authenticity, it's being real, it's being honest, it is to me, it's integrity. It's really, that's what it is. It's sitting on top of the value of integrity. If you say you're going to do it, then you go and do it. That's what discipline is. So it doesn't need to feel tough or iron fisted. It could be discipline also means I'm going to take today off and do nothing. And having the courage to do that. That's also discipline. The discipline to know that if I go beyond this point, I'm going to start feeling exhausted. So I'm going to stop, take a break, go for a walk. That's what discipline means. Understanding yourself, paying attention to how your body is responding to the signals and managing and controlling. all the time and making sure that you can produce the best result. Discipline is a medium to produce positive outcomes for you, whether that's tracking your health, whether that's, it's about things like our routines are our wellbeing routines. Um, it's about our work routines. It's about our relationship routines. Discipline affects every single thing. It's how, you know, you're supposed to meet up with your friends. And discipline means I can't make it this evening, I will not be able to make it next week because I have exams right after. Will not be able to make it next week because I have a big case that I'm working on right now. Will not be able to make it next week. As a matter of fact, the best time will be November when things start cooling down for me. Discipline means understanding what you have to deal with. And honoring yourself and your commitments, that means doing the little things in the process as part of your system, those routines, those habits to deliver when you say you're going to deliver something. Lack of discipline means you know what you need to do, you know what the process is, you know what the goal is, and you don't show up for yourself, and sometimes you don't show up for others. And it means that the The outcomes can't be delivered and you don't feel good about yourself and others may not share the respect or admiration for you as well. Does that change your mind about how you view discipline? Yeah, it does. I want to share an anecdote. For me, like I picked this topic for the upscale live personally, because it's something that I struggled a lot with growing up was time management. And I think it came from my parents who discipline, like their whole view was that children don't have self discipline, so adults need to discipline for them. So they would control my time for me and like, um, limit my access to the internet for me. And then. My narrative, the story that I've told in my own head is that that didn't allow me to develop my own discipline over my time. I don't know if that's true. What do you think? Well, parents understand how important Discipline is managing time is how you use your time, you know, they say, show me how you use your time and I'll tell you what you're going to do and who you're going to be. So these are some of the things that parents know, which is why parents are really always on it with, with their children or whomever they have to take care of with time. And that's what your parents were trying to do. Protect you from. Falling off and not hitting some minimums. You know, they always think as a minimum. Let's make sure we put these guardrails in place so that you walk through here. That's what parents typically intend. Sometimes we overshoot that target as parents and we. So we basically do not leave room for this skill to be developed at an early age. And so instead of putting systems in place, little stepping stones for our children to develop the skill on their own, we manage the whole thing. We wake them up. We tell them when to go to bed, and we don't teach them how to, for instance, set a schedule of their own, sit with them and coach them on what the schedule could look like, what time do you think is a reasonable time to go to bed. If you go to bed that time, what time would you want to wake up? How is that going to make you feel? Rather than walking them through that process and helping them to learn. The skill, a lot of parents just know, I'm going to just put these safeguards in place and make sure that they don't fall off what a lot of us did not know when we were growing up was the value of skills. Skills have become sort of really a buzzword now. And when we were growing up, a lot of parents in our generation. We think that these were things you were born with, you were born with the ability to manage your time and so if you weren't born with it, then you're probably not going to get it. And so then a lot of children grow up and they don't necessarily master those baseline skills early enough. The, the world has shifted and is shifting where we are supporting children with developing these skills through curriculum in schools and so these skills are going to be developed more intentionally now so that children understand time management is a skill. It's not something you were born with, but you can develop this and you can develop it at greater and greater extents over time. So to Flora's point, I hear you. I grew up in a very structured and very disciplined household, where the child is seen but not heard, and lit quite literally. Um, I'm a very disciplined person now, in the strictest of sense, in the sense that Michelle means. Not really. I understand your conception of discipline, Flora, which is self love. I'm learning to do that in my 50s, to see it as self love and not the extremist, um, conception of it, which is what I think we usually connote discipline with, but to your, to what you said, Flora, in your anecdote, Um, what happens when the child does not participate in their own skill development is exactly what you're talking about. But you indicated to us that you now, and I'm not saying it's because you lack the skills, but perhaps had you been more engaged, you wouldn't need, I think you said you had your parents. Um, put a lock on your Instagram, even as an adult now. I asked for it. Yeah, you asked for it because you're accustomed to that, um, guardrail, I think is the term Michelle referenced, because that's what you have been taught to rely on. Had you been taught to rely on your own intuitions and provide some kind of, or avail yourself of some sort of agency, um, you might then be more inclined to sort of... Create your own resources or ways to kind of, you know, limit yourself, but interestingly enough, whether it's bad or good, the way we're taught, the things that we're accustomed to is what we rely back on, bounce back on. So a lot to be said about, um, discipline and structure. Children need that, but they need to be taught to rely on themselves. I have four children. I can tell you the first two had a lot of discipline and structure. And I have learned through, I'm getting older, but learned through dealing with them that children have ideas. They need to learn. I have seen them blossom without, you know, your constant piloting. And so, um, it's a fine balance because we want to ensure that they have things in place, but the discipline has to be sort of finesse. And has to be geared towards the child, the circumstances, and the situation, and the needs. So engaging the children, the child, um, in, in your example, is very important. And developing, helping them to develop those skills. Because without the development of the skills, you do go back to the parents. And you do say, Mom, Dad, can you please put that parent control on my Instagram? Because that's what you're accustomed to. You know what I mean? The system has not been disrupted. She's still following the system. What I wanted to add as well... Is that coaching children, coaching your team, coaching anyone on skill development also takes time. And that is a reason why sometimes someone who is already capable, just does it just says, I'll just write the email because I know how to communicate effectively, it's going to take you a while to do it rather than coach that person on how to do it, leave room for them to make mistakes. And then coach them or guide them or leave them room to identify the mistake and self correct. These are skills, the skill to guide someone, to coach someone, to develop the skill. This is the challenge that we're expecting that people who do not have certain skills do certain things. And this is one of the big challenges we have in leadership right now, we may have someone, let's say the person is in retail and is like top sales and really amazing at dealing with customers and so on. And it's really just a standout. And so then we promote that person to be in charge of the team, but we give no guidance, no training on with that person on how to develop people. So the person is really good at doing all of the technical components, but does not understand the skills that are required for leading a team. And before we never really thought about it, as I said, as this person needs to develop these skills, we thought, you know, these are natural born leaders. And so you, this person demonstrates they're a natural born leader because they can make great sales and they are good with the customers. So then put them in charge of people. And then they can't do exactly this. They do what some of the parents do, which is hover over their people, micromanage them, sit on top of them and make them. Almost feel inadequate and insecure because we can't give them the space to make a mistake, learn from the mistake, think through the process, create their own processes, manage their own time, set up their own time management systems. So this is really, though, a skill that a leader needs to have. To help others develop a skill. So it's one skill that helps you to help people to develop all the other skills. And so the example, the story that you shared, Flora, is a great story of how it's just been given to you. Just go do this. And then you come back and say, Hey, do this for me. I have seen this where an overbearing leader, a leader who comes with those skills, puts up these guardrails, puts these structures and tells everybody walk in this lane. And then what happens is if someone reaches the edge, they come back and check, senior leaders go back and check to see, is it okay for me to do this? Can you just make sure this is okay for me? Because they have not been given the freedom to develop the confidence, even if they're competent to go and do it. This is what, this happens, whether the skill is time management, whether the skill is conflict resolution, whether the skill is customer service in any skill at all. If we just hover over people and not leave them space to design their own processes, to understand their own needs, their strengths, and how they're going to build the routines and habits to develop the skill. We'll end up in a situation where we build an organization of dependent people who keep coming back to the one leader creates a bottleneck breaks down our productivity systems and really makes things so ineffective and inefficient that happens, whether it's in our home or in a business, I'm really grateful that you felt comfortable to share that story with us because that's a great story because it doesn't just happen. We use the story about parents and children. Thank you, everyone. It also happens with leaders and the teams that they lead. And these are ways that I think we can help our leaders to understand it's okay. If your people make a mistake, be there to help them to leverage that mistake for learning. It doesn't have to always be perfect. You don't have to be disciplined every day of the week to have massive success. It means you can fall off for a day and learn from it. How did that day impact your outcomes? You can learn. It's that way for time management as a skill. It's that way for every other skill. And so we encourage leaders to inculcate the ability to bring people along on a journey for their own skill development. So let's wrap up some of the tips that we had for time management. What I've learned, I think an important thread and an important piece that I've learned is self awareness. Um, I've also, um, learned, and I think a good tip is be aware of yourself, be aware of your circumstances, be aware of where you are in your professional and personal life because there is no such thing as life. Work balance per se, what works for you is different for me. What works for me in my 20s is different for me in my 50s. So understand that there is some fluidity. Um, I also love Flora's idea about, you know, sort of not this strict concept of discipline, but self love and being sort of, um. In tune, as Michelle indicated, about what you're doing, where you're going, and what your needs are, because it creates less pressure, so you know you can enjoy your time with friends, but when it comes down time for that report to be due, that you're focused on it, so you, you, it's sort of like a pressure valve. So just be aware of where you are in life and I think that takes a bit of pressure off. When you're managing your time, managing yourself, managing other people, you have to account for that extra time for mistakes to happen, for something to go wrong. So, for example, scheduling something maybe two weeks ahead of when the actual deadline is just to make sure that you give yourself some time because those things will happen. They, they almost always happen and especially when you don't want them to. So I think a really good. You know, part of managing your time well is scheduling in that extra sort of cushion. I think my main takeaway that I got from sharing my story and hearing your guys's reactions to it. Something that I learned that I was like, Oh, is to. Like embrace my training wheels. So if I only ever learned to ride a bike with training wheels, I can't, I think for me, it was a lot of lying to myself. And I think that's why when I hear the word discipline, I have a negative connotation in my head because I always tried to force discipline onto myself. Like you can do this, you don't need this control because all I knew was control. And then when I didn't have the control, when I lost my training wheels, I actually couldn't ride the bike. I, you know, I lacked it. So for me, it was almost, it was that self awareness piece of. Being humble, like, oh, wait, no, I don't have the discipline and I can't keep telling myself I can do it. I can do it because I can't. I need the training wheels, but that doesn't mean I'll need it forever. But I was raised with the training wheels, with these guardrails. So yeah, it was really just self awareness and not deluding myself. Yes, that was, that's great reflection. And I think also being generous to yourself, that recognizing that you're not going to come from point A to Z. That there are all these other letters in there and just taking it one step at a time. This is the one area that I'm going to work on. And when I get this, I'll work on the next area and we have time. That's the one beautiful thing. We've had a great conversation here on time. I want to encourage you if you have not used the Eisenhower matrix before to pull it up and just to take a look at the activities that you're doing and think about the ones that actually are urgent, the ones that are important, and especially to think about the activities that are not urgent, but they are important because those are the ones that we always put aside. And those are the activities that produce the best bang for our buck. It's a wrap. Thank you for listening to this episode of Upskill Talks. We bring you new episodes every Monday. Please take a moment to subscribe. Leave a five star rating and a written review at Apple Podcast or follow us on Spotify, Google podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Don't forget to share Upskill talks with other leaders like yourself, so they too may gain the skills and insights to produce amazing results. Please go to upskill community.com to review show notes, and learn how you can join a community of leaders from across the globe. Collaborating to lead in a more meaningful and impactful way. I'm your host, Michelle Shaw, and again, thank you for joining me on this episode of Upscale Talks.