Time Management for Athletes and Coaches

168! With the exception of some Condor Performance clients, I suspect this number doesn’t mean much compared with other well known time numbers such as ’60’ or ‘24’ or ‘7’.

Yet it’s something we all have in common and acts as a great leveller in the pursuit of constant improvement. 168 hours is simply, and precisely, the number of hours in a week (24 multiplied by 7). Last week, this week and next week will all have this in common. Your week and my week contain exactly this number of hours each. The most successful athletes and the ones trying to knock them off their perch all are blessed with 168 hours per calendar week.

Let’s take a step back for a second and run through some of the Metuf basics that lead us to declare ‘168 hours’ as arguably one of the most useful improvement platforms available not only in sport but also performance and life in general.

To start with, what you’re probably most interested in – improving your results – is only something you can influence. You can not control (guarantee) your outcomes and achievements. Nor can anyone else.

In order to increase the chances of reaching our goals (be careful not to confuse ‘increase chances’ with ‘make sure’) we’d want to shift as much of our attention towards controllable elements of performance as possible, such as effort and actions.

Both of these concepts are fascinating for similar reasons. First, if we think about past effort and actions (for example, how hard we tried during this morning’s gym session) this has become a result now. It has become an outcome that can’t be changed unless you are the lucky owner of a time machine. Furthermore, future effort and actions (for example, what you plan to do by way of meditation when the season starts next month) are only influenceable. In other words, you can plan, research and practice now but this doesn’t guarantee anything for later.

So this leaves us with the conclusion that only our efforts and actions of the present moment are genuinely controllable. This makes complete sense if you think about it. Whilst you are reading this you could easily decide to do a couple of quick hand stretching exercises for example.

With this in mind, one of the best places to start from a time management point of view is to spend a whole week simply recording your actions. A basic 24 x 7 table is just fine. Ideally, leave judgment words off the page (or file) so that it purely states what you were doing during that time. For example, rather than recording the word ‘nothing’ during the time you were chilling out over the weekend you’d write ‘relaxing’ or ‘reading’ or whatever the observable action was. Also, try and record the start and end times of the actions and do so as you go rather than at the end of each day where your memory will limit you.

This exercise typically has a major benefit right off the bat. It will increase your awareness and therefore start to help you in becoming more purposeful.

Being more aware and purposeful might well be two of the most underrated secrets of performance excellence.

But you can use this data for a lot more than simply increasing the awareness and intentionality of your current time. You can use it to influence your future time too.

The best way to do this is via an analysis of the quantity and quality of your current time – the time you recorded. It is essential that you consider quantity and quality as separate – because they are. Start with quantity as it’s simpler. Using categories such as sleeping, physical preparation, mental preparation, for example, calculate the amount of time you spent on each according to your data collection (not memory).

If you do this properly then the total of this calculation will be exactly 168 hours. If the number comes out to less than 168 hours you have missed something. If it’s more than 168 hours then let me know as you’ve increased the amount of time available in a week and we’ll make a trillion dollars together!

Some of my sporting clients when I have asked them to do this have enjoyed converting these time tallies into percentages by dividing the number of hours by 1.68. For example, if there was a total of 52 hours of sleep across the seven days then this means that 31% of that week was spent asleep.

Next, it’s the turn of quality. The simplest way to question the quality of time is by considering how many things you were trying to do as once with one being the ideal (more than one being the biggest indicator of poor quality time).

Multitasking (or being a multitasker) is seriously overrated. The science is clear now, the best way to do a poor job of a task is to combine it with another task (or tasks). You can also have a think about how present you were during the activities. The more present and engaged the higher the quality is likely to be.

Every parent will know this full and well. Being with your kids whilst also trying to reply to some emails is just never going to have the same quality as really being with them (with the laptop closed and out the way).

Finally, consider if the blocks of time were on purpose or by accident. For example, watching some television intentionally would be regarded as a much higher quality activity compared with doing the same thing by accident – because there was nothing else to do.

The final part is to really ask the hard question – do I want my time moving forward to be the same as it is at the moment in terms of quality and quantity?

And if not, try and adjust accordingly. For example, if you regard becoming mentally stronger as an important part of your goals and yet your mental preparation is only 1% of your time at the moment then you might like to try and see if you can boost this to 5% for future weeks.

If there is no real plan on how to spend an hour training the mind then shoot us an email at info@condorperformance.com and we’ll help out with that. For the subject of the email write “I’d like help improving the quality of my mental preparation”.

For many of my clients and myself included the future plan is enough. I don’t actually tally the time moving forward I just try to stick to the new regime as best I can. This typically prevents the ugly side of time management taking place whereby the plan becomes a major source of guilt and frustration.

I fondly remember many years ago one of my lawn bowls clients shouting at me ‘this feels like the bloody army, mate’. My reply was something like ‘unless one of your bowls explodes what we’re doing is nothing like the military’.

Remember, you can only influence your future effort and actions you can’t control them.

The post Time Management for Athletes and Coaches appeared first on Condor Performance.

This content was originally published here.