Striking a balance

Last week I delivered a workshop to a group of sports scholarship students at the University of East London.  The session specifically looked how a student-athlete can set about creating a balance in their lives, an environment which will both help them in their sport and facilitate their development as a human being.  Some interesting discussion followed.  Here is a summary of the key points:

No man is an island

Athletes, like everyone else, live in an ever changing environment, and have to interact with many different people, and balance many different aspects in their lives.  These are just some of the many things that athletes (and particularly student-athletes), need to be good at:

• Managing budgets
• Selling themselves (to funders and potential sponsors)
• Dealing with the media
• Managing their time
• Organising and planning
• Coping with setbacks (bouncebackability)
• Managing relationships (with coaches, teammates, fans, sponsors)
• Coping with pressure (from the press, fans, teammates, self, parents)
• Decision making
• Accepting the uncontrollable
• Negociating
• Striking a balance
• Setting goals

All these skills are required in addition to the physical and mental attributes required for their sport, and more than a good measure of hardwork.  The above factors are just some of the elements which make up the ‘athlete lifestyle’

Getting a balance

The best story that I heard of to demonstrate balance, is the one where the university professor gets two pint glasses, and demonstrates to a group of university students how they can go about getting a balance in their lives.  He takes the first glass and fills it to the brim with water (signifying alcohol or a social life).  Filled to the top, there is no room left in the glass to for anything else; place a stone or pebble in it, and some of the water will flow over the edge.  He takes the second glass, and fills it to the top with stones.  The glass takes 5 or 6 medium sized stones and can take no more.  The glass, it could be said, is full of stones.  With the stones, however, there is still some room of other things.  The professor takes some small stones, and puts as many of them as he can in the glass.  He fits a large handful in.  A handful of pebbles follow, and then a small handful of sand.  Just as the audience think that the glass can hold no more, the professor takes a beaker of water, and manages to fit some into the glass.

The glass can be taken as a metaphor for the student-athlete’s life.  Think of the larger stones as the training sessions, the smaller ones as the lectures and coursework, the pebbles as all the little chores of life like shopping, cooking, and eating, the sand as sleep, and the water as relaxing and social time.  This way around, there is plenty of time to fit everything in.

A good route to striking a balance, can be broken into 5 processes:

1. Set goals

Deciding what you want to achieve, and what you want to get from life will help focus your balance.  Some of the questions that you might want to ask yourself include: what do you want to achieve?  What do you need to do to achieve those goals?  Are  the goals realistic?  Do you have goals in multiple areas of your life (sport, academic, career, other hobbies, life)?  What can be done to ensure that those goals fit together?  Are you following your goals for the right reasons (i.e. are they your goals, or are the goals you think others expect you to achieve).

2. Make a plan

Plans can be set on a daily, weekly, termly, seasonal, or yearly basis.  Some specific forms of planning are included in the timemanagement blog below.  Use the tools and planning process that work best for you.  Constantly consider your goals when planning.  Do your plans work towards your goals?  Review your plans to ensure that you are realistic in what you can achieve on a daily basis.  Identify where you are losing time, or being inefficient (are you spending two hours travelling each day, when the journey would be quicker to cycle? Did you spend time travelling because you failed to pack everything you needed for the day before you left the house in the morning?).

3. Make any important decisions

Student athletes constantly need to make decisions as they attempt to strike a balance in their lives, and often make decisions on a daily basis which they don’t even realise that they are making.  At certain times, however, important decisions which affect one’s goals and plans, need to be made.  Procrastination over making decisions can be an additional source of stress for an athlete, and delaying making the decision can result in missed opportunities.  Athletes should develop sound decision-making skills.  The following task, helps to highlight some of the processes involved in making decisions:

• Pick an important decision that you need to make now, or in the near future
• Consider what happens if you don’t make a decision, or delay making the decision
• List all your available options (include at least one ‘dream’ option i.e. in an ideal world what would you do?)
• List where you can find further information to help you make your decision
• List all the people that you can seek advice from (don’t just include people who will tell you what you want to hear)
• List any factors that you will use to help you make your decision (e.g. your goals, values, abilities, time, financial or family situation, location, things that you will/won’t compromise on)
• Consider what sort of things stop you from making decisions
• After seeking further information and advice, and considering any factors that your decision will be influenced by, choose 2 or 3 viable options from your initial list
• List the positive and negatives for each option
• It will be a lot easier to make a decision once you know what exactly your options are.  Imagine yourself in different situations.

In many cases, there are no right or wrong decisions, just decisions that cause stress because they haven’t been make.

4. Build in relaxation or recover time

Planned recovery time can be far more rewarding and beneficial than ad hoc down time.  Consider how you are going to relax and recover each day, week or season and use recover to refresh and revitalise the mind as well as the body.  Use down-time at the end of the season to cross things off your bucket list that you don’t get to do during the season.

5. See everything as a choice, not a sacrifice

Sport for most is a hobby, and the choices you make to achieve your goals should never be seen as sacrifices.  Choose to be successful.

Preparation for Life at University, Part 2 (Time Management)

In part 2 of our series of advice for adjusting to Life at University we look at some simple time-management tools and how to use them.

Time Wheel

The one that I like to begin with is the time wheel.  This is a simple 24-part pie-chart divided to represent the 24 hours of the day. 

Step 1: Choose a colour to represent each of the main tasks that you do during a typical day (e.g. sleeping, eating, travelling, training, working, lectures, studying, socialising, reading, on internet, other leisure activities, quality relaxation activities).

Step 2: Now think about how you would spend an ideal day and colour complete the circle accordingly.  If you normally need ten hours sleep then fill in ten of the segments with the sleep colour.  If you have five hours of lectures a day then fill in five of the segments in lecture colour.  If training should take up three hours, then fill in three of the segments in that colour…and so on.

Step 3: Now think about how you spent yesterday.  Fill in another wheel based on what you actually did yesterday.  If you spent two hours on the playstation, then fill two segments in the appropriate colour.  This step can be repeated over a number of days.

Step 4: Compare and contrast your idea wheel (Step 2) and your actual wheels (Step 3).  This is a good way to work out where all your time is going.  Is your ideal wheel unrealistic and does that need to be adjusted, or are you spending time doing things that you don’t need to do.  Make a list of the things that you are wasting time on.  Some of the following tools and exercises will help you come up with ways of overcoming procrastination and time wasting.

The Time Wheel

The Traditional Diary

It sounds obvious, but don’t expect your brain to remember everything. Carry a diary around with you and write down important date including competition dates, meetings, exams, holidays.  This way you can make sure that you don’t miss important appointments or double-book yourself.  It also highlights busy weeks, and when you may need to do a bit of forward-planning and preparation.  Of course your diary doesn’t have to be a traditional paper one.  Electronic diaries work just as good.  Just be sure that everything is in the one place.

The Weekly Planner

This is my favourite tool of all, and each Sunday evening I take 20 minutes to fill in a new one for the week ahead.  If you week is reasonably structured (set lecture and training times), then you don’t need to do a complete new one each week.  Weekly planners both help you to get into a routine (set a plan, see if it works, adjust if appropriate, until you find a schedule that works for you), and organise your week.

When putting together a weekly plan, follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Put in all the immovable appointments (lectures, meetings, group training times).  Step 2: Add the things that you need to do at certain times, but which don’t have to be set (e.g. S&C sessions that you can’t do straight after a heavy training session and which have to be done when the gym is free; optional tutorials).  Don’t forget to add travel time if required.

Step 3: Add the rest of your training sessions at the most appropriate times.

Step 4: Add all other tasks that must be done in the week (e.g. weekly shopping).

Step 5: Add some recovery and relaxation time, and social activities if appropriate.

Step 6: Assign tasks to other blocks of appropriate time (e.g. course work may be assigned to a larger block of time while doing the ironing may be assigned to a smaller block of time.

Step 7: Work out the logistics and make a list of anything you need to pack the night before (e.g. if you are going straight from lectures to training on a day that you won’t have time to have lunch the you will need to pack books, lunch and training kit).

The Weekly Planner

Prioritised to-do Lists

We’ve all done to-do lists at one stage or another and are great for keeping you motivated.  Usually these are simply a list of things that we need or want to get done as a particular stage.  Prioritised to-do lists are a slight adaptation of the traditional list.  They split tasks into urgent and non-urgent tasks, and low and high importance tasks.  This way unimportant tasks don’t get in the way of more crucial ones and everything is done on time.  Similarly lists of tasks can be subdivided into big and small ones.  Big tasks can be done during larger blocks of time, and smaller ones can be done during shorter time periods, or to get a break from larger tasks.

Prioritised to-do Lists

Others

Monthly, termly, or three-month planners are a good way of identifying busy time periods, and making appropriate adjustments.  They differ from diaries in that they only contain half or full day events or tasks, and not every meeting and appointment.

Year planners wall charts work in a similar way, and can be used to plan your training year as well as your academic/work schedule.

September to December 2011 Planner

In Summary
There are no quick or easy fixes to time management.  The main components are to set goals (what do you want to achieve with your time), and be organised (plan in advance, make lists of what is to be achieved).  Good time management takes practice, and different tools are appropriate for different people.  Pick what suits you best, and adjust as appropriate.  Each tool will take some practice before it is utilised to best effect.  If you are starting a new job, or going to University for the first time, it’s a good idea to get practicing straight away.  Don’t leave it 4 or 5 weeks until you get ‘settled-in’.  Being organised will actually help you get settled in to begin with.

Finally, things don’t always go according to plan.  In fact, they rarely do.  However it’s easier to adjust a plan than to make one up as you go along.  If one of your lectures is cancelled, you can do a task that you had scheduled later that day, or one that you were struggling to fit in later in the week.  Make the most of your time.