Written by Sasha Uy Lim Mariposa

Dar Ty-Nilo is the kind of woman you want to be when you grow up. She is a mom, an entrepreneur, a community builder, and the brains behind the highly successful Belle du Jour planner series. Her entire enterprise is pretty much to purvey tools to help you pull yourself together. Even when she speaks, her pragmatic advice exudes bubbly confidence. She just looks like she has it all figured out.

Of course, she denies this with the practicality of a woman whose life is maintained by a schedule. Behind the smiling veneer though, she’s a self-professed crammer, an occasional procrastinator, and she eats only one kind of food for two weeks. But this self-awareness is the first step to being more productive and handling your goals better.

Darlyn Ty-Nilo is the President and Managing Director · ‎Viviamo!, Inc.

Dar was recently invited by Gina Romeo, Connected Women founder, Unconventionally podcast host, and confessed productivity nerd, to discuss—and dispel—time management myths in a Zoom session entitled “You DO Have Time!,” meant for every one of us who've procrastinated and made excuses. 

“Everyone constantly says ‘I’m too busy and I don’t have time’,” began Gina. “It’s true. But time is such a precious resource. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, you still only have the same 24 hours in your day.”

“Time feels very elusive. [People think] that it is abstract and we can’t hold it,” added Dar. “But technically, it’s very tangible. You have 24 hours in the day. You can have 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds per minute. You can monitor it.”

Time is so tangible that the first hack to efficiency is to audit it. Gina recalled how, in the past, her business coach asked her to do a time audit because she always used her hectic work to justify all the things she couldn’t do. Examining what and where she spent time on the most allowed her to reevaluate her methods. “If you don't know where you're spending your money, then you won't be able to budget, right? Managing time [is like] managing money.”

“I read somewhere that you can say you're a professional if you can audit yourself without beating yourself up,” inputted Dar.

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Stay Curious

It seems like strange advice: be curious about time management. But it’s not about finding the best planner or calendar or work platform. Time management is about looking inward. For instance, if you’ve been postponing a project for weeks, perhaps the issue is no longer about the task at hand. 

“It's actually a signal that something's wrong,” explained Dar. “You can ask yourself why you are not getting this done without beating yourself up. Is there something about this task that overwhelms me? Is it not clear?”

Dar observed that while most of us have a measure of who we are, we don’t take an active enough role in trying to understand why: What makes us tick? What makes us do things? What motivates us to do certain tasks? 

“Be curious about the circumstances or environment that brings out the best in you,” she added. As she and Gina skimmed through the Zoom questions, Dar emphasized how every piece of counsel should be taken with context. Cramming, for example, is usually considered negative, but some thrive on pressure. Moreover, creatives aren’t able to schedule when inspiration would strike.

“If urgency, which is cramming, creates the best in you, then you just have to design a situation that would create that urgency,” she said.

Focus Management

One of the most common time management myths is the usefulness of multitasking. For women, especially, the ability to multitask has been a matter of pride. But how productive is it really?

For Gina, doing too much all at once drains her energy. “Maybe multitasking in the old days when we didn't have a lot of technology was okay. But now there are so many things happening, we're bombarded with information, all day long.” Instead of going over minute details simultaneously, she prefers ‘deep work,’ which is work performed in a conducive environment with absolutely no distractions. She turns off all her notifications and even unrelated tabs on her browser. 

What works for her is to create time blocks—dividing her weeks and days into batches and a particular task is delegated for each batch: Monday is for finance, Tuesday is for projects, Wednesday is for community. Lunch and dinner are intended for family catchups. Early afternoons are for checking emails. Then 10 p.m. is her personal time.

By categorizing her focus, she’s able to perform harder and better. 

It’s in line with what productivity experts have been advocating — that time management isn’t so much about managing time as it is about managing attention. Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and professor of management and psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania once wrote: “There are a limited number of hours in the day, and focusing on time management just makes us more aware of how many of those hours we waste.”

“Prioritize the people and projects that matter, and it won’t matter how long anything takes,” he said. 

To do this, Gina and Dar recommended the Eisenhower matrix, a productivity framework that helps you divide your to-do list based on importance and then applying the four rules of action (do, plan, delegate, and eliminate) to each one. 

Maintain Boundaries

The difficulty with maintaining a schedule is there are other factors involved. People are asking for approvals, children are knocking for snacks, sudden pressing emails arrive, emergency meetings are called. 

For Dar, managing the work environment is crucial to managing your time. “Since there are things outside our control, we need to set up structures that will create boundaries.” 

Gina’s time blocks, for example, help her regulate non-urgent tasks. Her sons know not to ask what time lunch is because it’s become clockwork at home. 

“It's about you making sure that people don't control your schedule, you still control your time. If you get this empowered with your schedule, after a while, you wouldn't want to go through life like you don't have that sense of control,” Gina said. “That's when we feel depressed and anxious because we feel a lot of things are outside our control.”

Letting others in on your system is also necessary for them to be aware where the boundaries are. 

Gina also suggested reducing decisions to hack effectiveness. Going back to your time audit and evaluating which ones take precedence, her recommendation is to not spend too much effort on those at the bottom of the hierarchy. For her, it’s clothing. Having three tops, she said, makes it faster for her to get dressed every morning.

When it comes to meal plans, she also has a foolproof scheme that not only eliminates a barrage of “what’s for dinner?” queries, but also complaints. Each day is pre-assigned a specific category: chicken on Tuesday, fried foods on Friday, takeout on Sunday. “I also delegated meal planning to each of the adult family members. This takes the responsibility from me and I don’t have to listen to everyone complaining that they don’t like the food.”

“Save your brain power,” she added. “For the not-so-important decisions, just be decisive. You’re not going to die. No one’s going to get hurt.”

Cut Yourself Some Slack

Whether it’s because of social media or just the digital landscape we’re in, there is an obsession with — not to mention pressure over — personal productivity. That if we’re not doing anything, we’re not getting things done. It’s even more intense now that the line between work and home has been blurred. 

“There’s a lot of guilt and, as women, probably more. We are amazing at guilting ourselves about managing our time better,” said Gina. “Being productive for me is not about being productive doing work or doing something productive every single minute of your day.”

She stressed how important it was to find time to do things we enjoy doing, even if they’re wasteful.

With the burden of being locked down, Gina highlighted the value of taking breaks. “It's hard enough working from home and doing all the things, finding all the energy that you need to get through the day.

“We have to forgive ourselves for not being 100%,” added Dar. “That self-judgment weighs us down and it's harder to get back up.”

Time management, focus management, however you want to call it, there’s no secret formula. The best advice is to figure yourself out. Even Dar, whose shorthand objective is to peddle pretty stationery, has a loftier ambition — she wants women to learn how to create better habits, whether or not they’re using her planners or planners at all, and become goal-oriented.

“The value of the planner is being able to ground you on paper to figure out what you want to do, what you want to accomplish this year,” she said. “Ideally, maybe it can help you project in the next three years, five years, and more so that you can assign your day-to-day life based on the bigger dream that you have.”

Indeed, being productive isn’t about ticking off a to-do list. It’s about living life to the fullest.

Follow Dar on LinkedIn:
Darlyn Sandra Ty-Nilo

Check out the
Belle de Jour Power Planner

Watch the full video of You DO Have Time!
on my @iamginaromero Facebook page.