One of the many challenges that comes with a busy schedule is the need to manage your time. This includes a great many things, really. Time for work, time for family, time for yourself, time for judging, time for working on projects (judge or otherwise), time for sleep, and a million other demands that may pull at your time in general. How do you keep sane when all of these things demand your time?
Calendars are your friend. Scheduling your time is a great way to get an overview of how you intend to spend it. Just like with a fiscal budget, where you check how you intend to spend your money, treat your time like the resource it is. Spend it wisely, not frivolously. Sure, sometimes impulse shopping is fun, and you can certainly be spontaneous with your time as well, but your life will have less stress if you can stay on task so things won’t weigh on you last minute.
Plan out when you intend to be judging an event, even if the application isn’t even open yet for it. Plan out those family trips or projects. Schedule in time to work around the house, and get something important done. Make sure to schedule in time for yourself as well–a walk in the woods, a run, whatever works to re-center yourself. When you have it all down in a place where you can see it at a glance, it’s much easier to see where you are overburdening one particular aspect of your life, and it will usually be obvious that it comes at the expense of something else.
Another nice benefit of keeping a judge calendar is that it becomes easy to sit down and compare availability with people. For instance, my wife and I generally sit down once or twice every pPTQ season and map out what events are going on that we each may want to be involved in. Since my wife sings in a band, and we also have many child-related responsibilities, this allows us both to have an idea of when the other may be occupied, so we each know to keep those dates clear. Options such as a shareable google calendar make this even simpler to do if you can’t share in person.
Work fast, but be productive. For instance, when you sit down to write something (a review, a blog post, a tournament report, a seminar outline, whatever) just have as a goal to get all the information out. Don’t edit, don’t second guess how you are saying something, don’t do anything but spew information onto a page. Once it’s there, you have something to work with. Then you have a much simpler task of shaping the piece into what you want it to be. If you have the first time period set to just get the thoughts down, then you can leave it, and set another time for editing/shaping later. Just make sure you actually spend the time to go back and rewrite and shape the piece to your goal. Breaking a task down into smaller pieces allows it to be more manageable, and also gives you more opportunities to feel a sense of accomplishment. There are more “I’m done for now,” or “I met today’s goal” moments if you handle tasks this way.
A great practical judge application of this tenant is to take those review notes from an event, and dump them into a word-processing file. Many programs even have speech to text options so you can get that first pass without even typing if you want! If you do this, do yourself the favor of going through right away and fixing transcription errors, you’ll thank yourself later. If you are anything like me, just the process of getting the notes onto “paper” will jog your memory (especially if you do this quickly after an event), so you can begin fleshing out the review content right then. Even if it’s only the notes, however, you’ve made a great step towards organizing the content and getting it in place to be polished later.
This can apply to way more than just writing as well. Need to contact a TO to figure out some details before an event? Make a quick note of things you want to discuss before you call them. Need to study some policy before an event? OK… This technique doesn’t apply well to studying really. BUT, you can make sure to schedule in time to study, and make sure you are uninterrupted when doing so. You can also break down your study topics into more manageable slices. “Tonight I want to really learn Hidden Card Error,” for instance. That way you have a narrower focus than, say “tonight I want to study policy.”
Being flexible and maintaining the option to say no is important. Sometimes, life is going to happen, and you’ll need to rework your plans. Sometimes, life will simply say “no” and force you to stop all of your plans. Maintaining flexibility here is important, and sometimes keeping flexible means you will need to back out of a commitment, or simply not commit in the first place. It’s important that if you do need to back out of something, do it professionally. Inform the affected parties as soon as you can, and work to help find a replacement.
This past year I had marked a few GPs out of my region that I wanted to try to attend. GP Indianapolis and Louisville were both on my list. As the time drew nearer, an event that my wife needed to attend for work popped up that conflicted with Louisville, and the combination of that time when she was going to be gone (about a week in another state for a conference), on top of the other fairly busy schedule I had both with judging and at work during that time, made the idea of going to Indy also a bit of a stretch. As such, I chose to not apply to Indy and opened up my schedule to another local event instead of commuting to the longer weekend away.
Time off, for any reason, is important. I said it above, and I’ll say it again. Don’t be afraid to say no if you have other things you need to be doing with your time. Keeping yourself from getting burned out from working too much is overall a benefit to your community. Staying fresh and excited is way better than being irritable and tired at events. If that means you need to skip an event or three to do other things, even if that other thing is “nothing,” then make sure you do it. Take care of yourself first, and everything else will follow from there.
A great opportunity to take some time off from judging tends to be the winter holidays in the US. Very few stores tend to hold events during this time (at least large comp REL events) so it’s a great opportunity to unwind and relax with family and friends. Personally, I have a busy November lined up, and, aside from one event at the start of December, am looking forward to taking a few weeks off from events. That time off let’s you relax and think about why you like to judge in the first place, as that perspective can get lost in the grind at times.
Conclusions
As you can tell, keeping yourself to a schedule is a majorly important part of the message of this piece. You don’t have to use a calendar for this. You can use whatever works for you, but I find having some way to objectively see my commitments “from afar” is extremely useful in order to keep balance and sanity. It’s much harder to try and effectively use a resource if you aren’t aware of how much you have, or where it is going. Keeping that sense of where your time is going will be useful in preventing you from overburdening yourself, and therefore can go a long way to keep from burning yourself out. Until next week, stay fresh!
The Elvish Farmer 