When you think about all the things you do in a day, could you break down the values and pieces of your identity that these actions support?
Do you take proactive steps to make time in your days for things that are important and fulfilling to you?
I think these are interesting things to consider because it is easy to be reactionary rather than proactive in the ways we spend our time. We react to our alarm going off in the morning. We react to the email that just popped into our inbox. Our coworker sets a meeting or has a really urgent task they need us to do. The kids or pets whine for dinner…
This is a much longer discussion, but for now I want to focus in on a strategy I’ve been using to set priorities in my day to make time for things that are important to me. This strategy has helped me gain awareness of the benefits of being proactive with my time, and it starts with setting a daily highlight.
What is a Highlight?
In the book, Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky share a process to gain control of our days and make time for the things that are important to us. One of the key components of this time management model is called the Highlight.
The authors describe the Highlight as, “a single activity to prioritize and protect in your calendar.” As they explain it, by choosing a Highlight, we are allowing ourselves to prioritize our time spent on things important to us, rather than going through our day completely reactionary to other people’s needs and priorities.
While the authors go in-depth about what exactly a Highlight entails, how to choose your Highlight each day, and tips and tricks for making this process work for you, I want to deviate from this to share how I’ve implemented this strategy to prioritize both my productivity and wellbeing.
My Experiment: Productivity and Wellbeing Highlights
Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky encourage readers to experiment with the strategies they provide in the book to see what works well for each person. I love this, because it recognizes how different each of us are when it comes to how we are aware of our time and how we manage it.
As I began to devise my experimentations regarding the Highlight strategy, I realized that just one daily highlight wouldn’t cut it for me.
Work/Life balance is a trendy phrase these days, especially as technology brings work into the home and allows nearly endless opportunity for productivity.
What I’ve found is that setting a productivity Highlight still left me wanting more. It was rewarding to set a priority to complete a project, prepare for a workshop facilitation, etc., etc., but it didn’t entirely fulfill the way I wanted to prioritize my day.
Clarity arrived when I had a conversation with an acquaintance who made a different distinguishment of work/life balance. She said she prefers to think about it as work/wellbeing balance.
Yes!
Since work is part of our lives, and becomes a part of our internal and external identities in a variety of ways, looking to create clear distinctions between work and life wasn’t a good model for me.
But, this idea of work and wellbeing opened so many possibilities.
In my experimentation, I began to set both a productivity (work) Highlight as well as a personal (wellbeing) Highlight each day.
This gives priority, and thus validity, not only to the things on my plate that are work-related, but also enforces the activities that help me maintain a physical, mental, emotional, and social that allows me to feel healthy and well.
Without going on a tangent about my time values, I put a lot of value on my identity as a worker and on learning how to take good care of myself (read about my person first value). Since I put this level of value on both of these parts of who I am, it makes sense that creating productivity and wellbeing Highlights is an effective time awareness and management strategy. It helps me make time and space to prioritize actions that uphold these identities and values.
Overview
My productivity and wellbeing Highlights are different everyday. Some days I complete them without a problem, other times I find roadblocks and distractions that make it more difficult to prioritize. Some days I don’t set Highlights at all.
What I like about this strategy of setting Highlights is that it puts time management into our own terms. We get to decide what we want to prioritize – again, this is about being proactive so we aren’t moving through our day only being reactive to other people’s needs and wants. We get to develop Highlights that make sense to us, and then we get to empower ourselves to make time in our days to follow through on these priorities.