Our drinking time often looks like the problem, but the hours leading up to it matter too. We run late, skip food, carry work home and finish the day with five things still open in our head.
Then alcohol looks like the fastest way to draw a line under all of it. Here, time management is about making the usual drinking time easier to handle. We don’t need to squeeze more work into the day.
Notice where the day usually goes wrong
The pressure may not build all day. It could come from one predictable part of it.
Maybe the last meeting runs over, we leave lunch too late or we keep starting another task just before we meant to finish.
By itself, each choice looks small. Together, they can leave us tired, hungry, frustrated and much more likely to think about drinking.
We don't need to manage every minute. We need to find the points that keep setting up the same evening.
For a week, we can look at the two hours before the usual drinking thought. What time did we last eat? When did work run over? What was still unfinished in our head? The same setup may appear more often than we expected.
Then we can change the setup rather than relying on a stronger decision at the end. That could mean a protected lunch, no new task after a certain time or a short list before we leave the desk.
Give the end of work a clear finish time
For many business owners and professionals, work doesn't naturally finish.
There's always another message, task or idea we could deal with. If we wait until everything is done, the day has no ending.
A finish time won't make the work disappear. It tells us when we're no longer dealing with it today.
Writing down what comes next can help because we aren't asking our brain to hold every unfinished job through the evening.
A simple closing list can have three lines: what was finished, what is still open and the first thing to do tomorrow. Once it’s written, we don't need to keep rehearsing the whole workday during dinner.
We also need to decide what counts as an exception. A real emergency can break the rule. An email that feels uncomfortable to leave until morning usually isn't an emergency.
Leave some room between work and evening
Going straight from a difficult workday into the usual drinking place can make the routine feel almost automatic.
Even a short gap may help. We might change clothes, walk around the block, eat, shower or sit somewhere other than the place we used to pour the first drink.
Give the workday time to end before the old evening routine begins. We don’t need to fill every second.
Plan for the day we really have
A schedule built for our best day won't help much on a difficult one.
If we know Thursday is always late, we can eat earlier or keep the evening simple. If a work event is coming up, we can decide in advance how long we'll stay and what we'll say when offered alcohol.
And if the plan falls apart, we haven't failed. We just deal with the next hour instead of deciding the whole day is ruined.
Good time management doesn't make us perfectly disciplined. It simply stops us making the evening harder than it already is.
— Brent