We are often reminded that we all have the same 24 hours in each day, but have you ever noticed how some hours are better for certain tasks than others?
Have you ever forced yourself through writing a report or blog post at 3pm when your post-lunch blood sugar crash has hit? Or what about trying to tick off a whole bunch of little tasks last thing in the evening when all you really want to do is crash out on the couch and turn your brain off?
I call these situations “Time Type Mismatches” because you’re aiming for tasks that are not a match for your energy levels at that point in the day. The key to avoiding these challenges begins by learning about the Five Types of Time, as I call them.
The Five Types of Time is a model that I started using with clients about four years ago, and it has brought a lot of illumination to their lives both in terms of planning their days better and highlighting life imbalances so they could be shifted.
Learning about the Five Types of Time can help you leverage your energy more effectively each day, ensure you’re making time for important and neglected activities, and highlight why you might feel like you’re running on fumes.
So, let’s dive in and explore the Five Types of Time together…
1) Restorative Time
The first and most important type of time is Restorative Time. This is your self-care time and for recharging your engines. Restorative Time is what makes all the other types of time possible.
What are Restorative Time activities? – SLEEP, eating, resting, personal grooming, play, fun, anything that you do for pure enjoyment, hobbies, exercise, watching TV, going to the movies, reading a book, playing with your puppy dog.
In addition to the 7-9 hours of sleep you need each night there should be at least 2-4 hours of this time in every day, if only for meals, breaks, and getting some exercise in. So, the lion’s share of your 24 hours should be going to Restorative Time each day. That’s how you build the energy for making everything else happen.
2) Connecting Time
Connecting Time is any time spent with others, building relationships, and making things happen together. Connecting time has both a personal and a professional face.
What are Connecting Time activities? Professionally – meetings, phone calls, chats at the water cooler or via IM or Slack, networking events, company lunches, etc. Personally – Family time, dinner with friends, time with your kids, calls to your parents, FB sticker wars with friends (yep, that was how I started my morning today.)
Since research says that strong relationships increase our overall happiness, you definitely want to make sure there’s a good dose of connecting time in your day and week. However, depending on whether you’re a natural introvert or extrovert this time can either be a boost or a drain on your energy. As an ambivert myself, I definitely enjoy Connecting Time, but in moderation. Sometimes I really just need some quiet, alone Restorative Time to rebuild after a lot of Connecting Time.
Similarly, depending on your job you might discover that whole days are dedicated to running from meeting to meeting. I see this with a lot of my executive clients. Depending on your job responsibilities this is often a warning sign that you’re not getting a good mix of the other types of time when some “real work” can get done. So, keep an eye out for this in your daily life.
3) Get-It-Done (GID) Time (a.k.a Tick-it-off Time)
During these periods you’re just plowing through a bunch of the little tasks that we all have on our plates. It’s not highly mentally straining and is really just about ticking through as many little actions as possible.
GID Time activities include: email, housework, quick calls/voicemails, paying bills, ordering stuff online, opening the mail, reading reports or bank statements, all activities that require some focus but low-levels of brain power.
We all need some amount of GID time in our days just to keep the train on the rails. After all, we all do some level of the activities listed above just to manage a household, right?
However, there’s a danger in Tick-it-off Time activities because sometime we convince ourselves that it would be more productive to just click through a bunch of little tasks rather than working on that one more important task that needs our attention. It’s the siren’s song of the insignificant activities that leads us away from our most important work.
That’s why we need to always remember Stephen Covey’s lesson “Put the big rocks in first.” GID activities are the sand and water of our days… they should be filling in the cracks in between the more important stuff of the other four types of time. They are not meant to be the focus of our energy or attention.
4) Creative Time
Creative Time is your high-brain-power, focused work time. This is what you need whenever you’ve got a big project that requires your complete attention.
Creative time activities include: writing of any significant kind, designing, important research and data evaluation, computer coding, it depends on the focus of your work, but most core business-building work requires some level of creative time.
Now, some jobs don’t require much Creative Time. If you’re a sales person, then your emphasis might be a balance of Connecting and GID time, with only a little Creative Time each week to pull together your sales report information. However, if you’re in marketing, an entrepreneur, a PR professional, an author, speaker, or many, many other jobs I could name… then a good section of your week needs to include Creative Time to make sure that the important and key projects of your world can get done. Everyone needs some Creative Time, but the amount depends on your responsibilities.
Since Creative Time is also high-brain power time, that means that there will be certain times of day when you are energetically most effective at getting these types of tasks done. For many people that might be first thing in the morning. For others the peak might be around 10-noon. If you’re a night owl, then it might be after dinner.
What’s important is to recognize your peak time of day and plan to do these high-intensity activities during that block. Protect that time and ensure that it doesn’t get given away to GID or Connecting Time activities, which can easily happen. If you take this one recommendation to heart and start implementing it, then you might be surprised how much more effective you become at making substantial progress on those “big intense” projects that you were (perhaps) avoiding in the past or never getting to.
5) Reflective Time
Ah, Reflective Time, the least appreciated and understood of them all. This type of time is most often overlooked and yet so powerfully helpful to keeping us focused and on track in life.
Reflective Time activities include: PLANNING!!!! Long-term strategy, weekly reviews, daily reflection and planning for today/tomorrow, thinking time of all kinds.
Reflective Time is when we step back from the bustle and make sense of our world. It’s during Reflective Time that we figure out what’s on our plate and clarify our priorities. Reflective Time is when we draw connections between disparate information that leads to the Ah-ha’s and breakthroughs for the future. It’s when we ask ourselves the big questions that allow for new answers and light to shine into the bustle of life we’ve created.
It’s also the one type of time that most people neglect to dedicate in their daily and weekly rhythms of life. We think of planning as something that happens once a year, maybe. But, I would suggest that if you’re not taking some Reflective Time at least once a week, then your yearly planning is doomed to miss its mark.
I would recommend that you’re taking at least 15 minutes of Reflective Time each day to create a plan for the day, at least 30-60 minutes once a week to develop your plan for the week, and at least a full day once a quarter to evaluate where you are and where you’re going.
I actually spend a whole section of my book Inspired Action exploring the levels of focus on a daily, weekly, seasonal, and yearly basis, and how to plan your Reflective Time to be maximally effective for you. Since this is an area that many people are missing or struggling with, it seemed that having some recommendations could help shift that for the future.
Another under-utilized expression of Reflective Time is what Warren Buffett calls “Thinking Time.” Some of the most successful people on the planet have recognized that one of the best ways to make an impact is to simply step away from the bustle of action to reflect and think about things. In fact, some of the smartest most successful people I know schedule their thinking time right into the their calendar to protect it from getting swallowed up by other activities.
I’ve encouraged many of my clients to start a list for “Thinking Time Questions” that allows them to focus on what’s coming up for them during this dedicated Reflective Time. When you start scheduling and protecting your thinking time you might be surprised at how easily obstacles fall away and issues dissolve because you stepped back to consider them from a different perspective and found new solutions or resources that were right at your finger tips.
Next Actions
Knowing about these Five Types of Time is interesting to be sure, but it’s when you start working with them and considering how they’re showing up in your life that you really get the benefit of them. Therefore, here’s your first step: download your FREE copy of my Life Rhythm Map exercise. Next, grab your calendar and schedule at least an hour of Reflective Time in the next week.
The intention is to help you realize the existing patterns of your day and notice whether you might be missing some Types of Time from your life. If we don’t reflect and question our current patterns, then they will never change.
This exercise by itself has helped many of my clients realize why they are constantly exhausted, or what would need to change to get more Connecting Time with their family. Perhaps it can help you have a few Ah-ha’s in your life too.
If you’d like to take this further, then here’s a FB Live I did in 2019 as an update to this post:
