In the previous chapter you committed to at least one major goal and discovered how to avoid the typical pitfalls of goal setting. By putting your focus on goals that have a major potential to change your life for the better, you will be directing all your efforts to what matters most. However, it may be that you have old habits of how you use your time that are not ideal for speeding you towards success.

In this chapter you’ll learn how to recognise patterns that may be holding you back, and how to establish new, more productive patterns. First, a few basic points that will give you the context for these techniques.

The surprising facts about time patterns

• Everybody has patterns of behaviour. Not surprisingly, doing the same thing again and again results in the same outcomes again and again. For example, someone may keep having different relationships but always with the same kind of person, or someone may repeatedly get into money problems by misusing credit cards. Of course there are also positive patterns. You may know people who always land a good job or always drive safely. People have certain patterns for how they use their time, too. For instance, some people will always tackle first the task they think will be easiest, while others always start with the one they think will be most difficult.
• More surprisingly, people tend to repeat their old patterns even when the outcomes aren’t positive. In other words, people don’t necessarily learn from their bad experiences that maybe it would be a good idea to do something different (a little later we’ll look at why this is). Therefore, it’s not unusual for people to use inefficient or unproductive time patterns for years.
• People tend to be aware of other people’s patterns, but not their own. It’s unlikely that we will change until we are aware of our patterns. Once we do know what they are, it becomes easier to change them, and therefore to change the outcomes.
• Patterns can include feelings, thoughts and images, as well as actions. For example, if you request a pay rise and don’t get it, the next step may be to remember all the other rejections you’ve had. Then you might remember the voice of some negative adult from your childhood telling you that you’ll never amount to anything. Then you might picture getting rejections in the future for a project you’re currently working on, and then it might seem that the best way to blot out all these negative thoughts and feelings is to go to the pub. That’s a disempowering pattern. An empowering one might be to hear the rejection, remember other times when something that was initially rejected went on to be accepted, ask for feedback on what to do differently in order to get a salary increase next time, and then do that (or consider looking for a different job if there is no chance of advancement in your present one).

How to discover your own patterns

Here are the most common general dysfunctional patterns:

• get-in-shape déjà vu (sign up for gym, go for a week, quit)
• serial job dissatisfaction
• continuous financial discontent
• repetitive toxic relationships.

And here are some of the most common dysfunctional patterns relating to time use:

• doing the least important work first
• procrastination
• “fire fighting” (doing what is urgent rather than what is important)
• letting the inner critic dominate thoughts.

It’s pretty easy to see that people who have these patterns will be easily distracted from reaching their goals.

How can we open our eyes to our own patterns? First, let’s be clear why we’re doing this: then we can work out what we can do differently in order to get better results. With that in mind, here are six different approaches to discovering your own patterns:

1. Ask other people. We can see their faults, so guess what? They can see ours. But you have to convince them that you want them to be honest, and you have to be sure that you can hear this kind of blunt honesty without endangering your relationship. It may be uncomfortable, but you’re doing it so you can move forward. If several people recognise the same pattern in your life, they’re probably right. Good questions to ask include: “What do you notice about how I use time? What are the ways you may have noticed me wasting time? When do you think I’m best at it?” If there’s nobody you feel comfortable asking this kind of question, ask them of yourself and jot down the answers.
2. Consider what negative patterns your parents had and assess whether you may be duplicating them. It could also be that as part of your rebellion against your parents, you took on a pattern that is the opposite of theirs but that is also negative (for example, “Trust no one”/“Trust everyone”). In terms of time use, your parents may have had the pattern of putting things off until they turned into emergencies, or they may have been such perfectionists that they never had time to do all they wanted to do. If so, how do you think this has affected your ideas about using time?
3. Use dissociation. Think about a situation in which you’d like to understand your behaviour better. Imagine seeing yourself in that situation as though it’s playing on a movie screen with you as one of the actors who can be observed. This is the “dissociated state”, as opposed to the “associated state” of seeing things through your own eyes. If you are truly dissociated, you won’t have any particular feelings about what you’re observing – no guilt, embarrassment, or anything else. You’re just watching to find out what you can about this pattern. For example, if you have started and then abandoned learning a new skill in the past, review exactly what happened.
4. Use the “teach your problem” technique. In this, you pretend you have to teach someone how to behave the way you do. You have to give them exact, detailed instructions. For example, let’s say the situation you’re looking at is why you never seem to catch up paying the bills on the weekends, even though that’s always your intention. To teach someone how to do this, you might instruct them to make promises to their spouse, partner or children that involve activities that take up most of the weekend. You might teach them to let minor tasks go during the week, so by the weekend they absolutely need to be done. You might instruct them to stay up late on Friday and Saturday nights, so they don’t actually get up until noon on Saturday and Sunday. You can write down this detailed curriculum, or you can dictate it into a voice recorder, or if you’re brave you can do it with another person being the “student” and let them take notes for you. You will have a list of behaviours that you can change one by one.
5. The next time you go through a pattern, map it as you go. For example, let’s say you are working at home on Friday and intend to use that time to write a report. Friday comes around but by the end of the day you still didn’t get the report done. As it happens, make notes about the process that causes you to change your mind. For example, maybe you get up and notice that the laundry has really piled up. You decide to put it into the washing machine and then write the report. But as the washing is being done, you think that you might as well quickly give your home office a quick once-over to tidy it up so that you’ll really be able to concentrate on your writing. Just as you finish and are ready to sit down at your desk, a friend phones. She’s upset and needs a shoulder to cry on, so you sit there and listen to her latest romantic misadventure for an hour. Now you’re hungry so you make yourself a late lunch – after all, you can’t write well if you are hungry . . . and so it goes. (Note: writing down a pattern as it happens often is enough of a pattern-interruption that it will cause you to go ahead with what you originally intended – so this can be a curative exercise as well as a diagnostic one.)
6. Use the “letter from your higher self” technique. For something that you’d like to change, sit quietly and ask your higher self for some insights into your current main time patterns. By “higher self” I don’t mean anything too mystical, just the part of you that is detached from the stresses of the moment and seems to know what is best. Write down anything that occurs to you, without worrying about whether or not it’s really coming from your higher self. Some people find that they get better insights if they write things down with the “wrong” hand (that is, the one they normally don’t write with). You may find that in this process your higher self not only diagnoses the problems but also jumps ahead to possible solutions.

Start now by jotting down below at least three patterns that you have that are not supporting your most valuable and focused use of your time. When you’ve done a bit more digging, you can add more.

Time patterns that do not serve you well:

Understand what your current pattern gives you

One of the assumptions of a very useful psychological approach called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is that every behaviour has a positive intention. It’s trying to give you some benefit.

When you’ve identified a negative pattern, clarify what it’s giving you. Usually it will be some kind of protection, often a protection from needing to face change, which is uncomfortable initially and sometimes very scary indeed. Even though this protection has negative side effects, it’s the devil you know. It allows you to keep on doing the things you’ve learned to do in the past, rather than having to change.

Let’s look at a few more examples:

• The person who keeps putting off clearing out their “junk room” may be afraid of having to throw away items that have sentimental value and give them comfort. By avoiding the task, they get the pay-off of continuing to draw the solace they get from just knowing the items are there.
• The person who creates something, such as a painting, a manuscript, or an idea for a new business, but never shows it to anyone may fear the same kind of ridicule they got when they were the overweight kid in the PE class. By never letting anyone judge their work they get the pay-off of avoiding ridicule. Naturally this kind of reaction is unlikely even if the idea or product is bad, but we’re not talking about logic here, rather about emotions.
• The person who wants to make a career change but never moves towards it gets the pay-off of not having to risk rejection.

There are some simple patterns that may not have a deep pay-off, they may just be bad habits that you’ve fallen into. These should be easy to change. However, when you confront a set of behaviours that are not easy to change, it’s worth investigating the pay-off. Again, please note that the point of this is not to criticise yourself for your behaviour, but rather to use it as a starting point for change. Write down the top three time patterns that work against your success and then, below each, what pay-off you think it gives you:

Before you can change your negative patterns into more productive ones, you will have to work out how to get these pay-offs in other ways.

Find better ways to get a similar pay-off

Let’s relate this to the 80/20 patterns. Suppose someone has an idea for an online business he thinks could be very profitable. If he spent 80% of his available time actually implementing his idea, that would probably give him a great deal of value. Instead, he spends 80% or more of his time researching, reading and learning about online marketing, but never actually gets a website, never develops the product or service and never attracts potential customers.

He can rationalise that he needs to get all the latest information available before he takes action, but what do you think might be the real pay-off?

For as long as he is only planning, he can’t fail. But we learn by trial and error, and a beautiful plan that is not implemented will never bring in any money. However, simply telling him (or yourself) to get on with it is not likely to work. We have to come up with a way that provides much of the safety of the current pattern while doing something different.

When you have identified what the pay-off is, you can generate alternatives for getting the same benefits in more benign ways. If our budding entrepreneur’s biggest fear is ridicule from other people (maybe because he’s tried and failed at a business scheme before), he doesn’t have to tell anyone about his plans. He can test some of his concepts first, and see how it goes. Once he feels a bit more positive, he can share the information with the most supportive person in his life. If he makes some mistakes, which is almost inevitable, he can learn from them and move forward.

Here’s the key point: it’s not enough to just change your pattern, you must change it in a way that also gives you the pay-off that was provided by the old pattern. If that element is missing, the new pattern is unlikely to last very long.

The person who avoids clearing out a junk room could consciously choose several items to keep for sentimental or comfort value and get rid of the rest. Or they could put the surplus items into boxes and put them in the attic instead of throwing them away. That way they’d still be there if needed. If they’re not needed for a year or two, they may then feel secure enough to throw them out.

The person who fears ridicule for a creative effort can test it first with a supportive friend or colleague.

The person who wants to start a new career but is fearful of failure can break the process down into safer chunks. They may be able to try out their new skills in the context of volunteer work, where there is less pressure. For instance, someone considering becoming an events organiser could initially set up a small function for a charity organisation.

The key is finding what works for you, and it’s a trial and error process. Please don’t expect that the first thing you try will be the perfect solution. Approach the whole thing in the spirit of play and experimentation. We are social scientists seeking what works – or, if you prefer, we are heroes on our own journeys of learning. You can move another step forward by looking back at your three most negative patterns and their pay-offs, and brainstorming some ways to get the same pay-offs in a way that doesn’t require you to keep repeating the negative behaviours. Below, jot down at least one idea for how to do this for each of your three patterns:

Let’s follow this process through for one of the most common negative time patterns.

How to avoid overcommitting

A typical negative time pattern is overcommitting your time. If you do this, you end up stressed because you have more to do than you can accomplish, so you cut corners and end up delivering a disappointing product or service, or you miss your deadlines and disappoint the people waiting for what you’ve promised, or you drop one or more projects entirely, which upsets people even more and could result in losing your job or losing clients. By trying to do too much, you fail to focus fully on anything.

If we map this process in order to understand exactly what happens, we discover that when someone asks you to do something, you tend to say yes immediately, or you mentally say yes when you think of a new project yourself – you get to work on it right away, and maybe tell others all about it. Unfortunately, what you don’t do is consider how this is going to fit in with everything else you’re already committed to achieving.

What’s the pay-off of doing this repeatedly, even if you’ve realised in the past that it generally ends badly? There are two:

• If it’s someone else asking you to do something, you may not want to upset or disappoint them, so you just say yes.
• If the project is really appealing, you get so excited by it that you think about it in isolation, rather than in the context of all the things you need to do, and you don’t want to miss out on something that could be great.

In each of these cases, the culprit is your imagination. You imagine that the person will be upset. You imagine that the project will be really exciting, and you imagine how disappointing it would be to miss out on something.

Insert a pause

To buy yourself some time to overcome your usual emotional response, take at least a few minutes (or a day, if necessary) to consider whether the new project could fit into your schedule.

If it’s your own idea, by all means record it. Jot down all the aspects that come to mind, and make a new folder for it. But do not commit to actually taking action on it for at least a week (unless you have nothing else to do). When you come to decide whether you really want to do this new thing, draw a mind map of all the projects you are already doing, and consider how much of your time each of these will take. If you have a history of being too optimistic about how quickly you can get something done, add another 25% or 50% to your first estimate.

If you are approached by someone else and you find their idea wonderfully exciting, by all means express your feelings, but tell them that you can’t commit this instant. I say, “This sounds really fantastic, but before I can commit to it I need to decide whether I could give it the time it would require to do a good job. Can I get back to you tomorrow and let you know?” That buys you 24 hours in which to take a look at all the other things you’re doing, instead of getting carried away in the excitement of the moment.

If you realise that taking on the new work would be overcommitting yourself, work out alternative ways to get the pay-offs you used to, but now in a way that allows you to say no.

• Pay-off 1: Not upsetting or disappointing the person asking you to take on more work.
• Alternative: Use your imagination to consider how much more upset they are likely to be if you say yes now and later don’t deliver or have to back out. Explain to the other person why you can’t take on the project and that doing so would only result in disappointment for both of you. This kind of clear explanation should keep them from having an emotional reaction. If appropriate, suggest someone else for the task.
• Pay-off 2: The excitement of thinking how great a new project could be and the desire not to miss out.
• Alternative: A new project always seems more exciting because it’s fresh and has not yet revealed the obstacles it will entail. Remind yourself that every new project has such stumbling blocks, and imagine what some of them might be for this one. Imagine how upsetting it would be having to leave something half-way because you don’t have the time to do it properly. That is probably something you want to miss. Also imagine missing out on completing your current work successfully because you are trying to do one more thing. Then imagine how great it will be to accomplish the work to which you are already committed.

As you can see, in each case you’re using the same thing – your imagination – but in the alternative scenarios you’re using it to recommit to what you’re already doing and to avoid adding more than you can handle.

What’s next

Now that you have worked out some goals and found out how to shift patterns that may have stopped you in the past, it’s time to look at two big obstacles that hold back most people, and how you can be among the few who know how to handle them. That’s coming up in Chapter 4.

Website chapter bonus

At www.focusquick.com you’ll find a video interview with personal effectiveness coach Carol Thompson on gaining positive patterns that can result in dramatic changes in your life.