The wrong question.

Do you ever get the feeling that there aren’t enough hours in the day? That was me most days, and it was especially bad on this particular day.

I remember grabbing a piece of paper. I wrote Mon – Fri at the top of it, and started adding up the hours. There are 120 total hours for those days. Then, I listed every weekly activity with estimated hours. Sleep, meals, work, and commute were 90 of the hours. And there were household chores, family/kids’ activities, traffic, and the unexpected items to fit into the remaining 30 hours. Every hour (and more) was accounted for.

That’s when I finally realized I’d been asking the wrong question.

I was a program manager, and for years, I treated my own week the way I treated a critical project. Each week was carefully planned, and yet I constantly felt behind both at work and at home.

Optimizing vs. prioritizing

It took me a long time to see I was solving the wrong problem.

The question I kept asking was: How do I do more with the time I have? It’s a reasonable question that sounds responsible. Exactly what a growth-minded person such as myself should be asking. It also assumed that everything on my plate deserved to be there. That the tasks I optimized were the right ones. That doing them faster would lead to better results. That assumption is where I got stuck.

Optimizing says, “I have this hour. How do I do the most with it?” Prioritizing says, “I have this hour. Should I be working on this now?” You can be a great executor of things that aren’t the top priorities at the moment. I spent years deciding what made it into a project plan and what to cut. It took me much longer to do that for myself.

Many of us are often busy with tasks that don’t need to be completed or could be done by others. Work that feels productive without getting us closer to our goals. When I started paying attention to the difference between optimizing and prioritizing, I realized I needed to pause and look at what was already scheduled.

Back to that piece of paper.

For each activity, I then asked: Which goal does this get me closer to? And does it need to be completed this week, by me? If you run a business, the same two questions work for your week. I chose first what to keep, then what to reduce, and finally what to delegate. As I decided each week and worked the changes into my schedule, I slowly ended up with more time for the things I wanted to invest in. Within 3 months, I got 5 hours back each week, and I knew what I traded for them.

A high-value hour is one with clarity. I know what I’m working on and why it matters to me. It’s either work only I can do or that I enjoy. For me, these are the topics I’m currently interested in, the things I want to do because they are important to me (the “shoulds” that I selected), and my hobbies (often gardening and whatever my current side project is).

A low-value hour has a different quality. I’m responding instead of choosing. This often happens when I browse my email instead of triaging it or get sucked down another social media rabbit trail. I’m human and still do these things all the time. Trying to be aware and timeboxing these when it happens has helped me the most so far.

Choose in 5

That paper exercise was a reset. The small, repeatable version takes 5 minutes.

5 minutes before the day chooses for me, I ask myself one question.
What deserves a place in my day right now? Today. This week.

A few times a year, I zoom out. This quarter. This year. I give myself 30 mins for each of these planning exercises, and sometimes extra sessions when I’m considering new goals.

Choose in 5. It helps me focus on what deserves my energy. The things that move me closer to my goals or that make the time fly by.

Last week, I chose to join an AI agent workshop. After the session, I chose to spend time daily to apply what I learned to my work. This one is tied directly to my goal to keep experimenting with AI for both career and personal development. I postponed a work follow up and my kids’ pool time with friends to join the call live.

A quick 5 minutes at the start of each day. Try it this week. Tell me what you chose for the day,  jenny@balancedprocess.com. No task is too small if it brings you a step closer to your business goal.