I wanted to take this post and talk about something that’s really important for a coach and a teacher, time and energy vampires. For those of you not familiar with these, time and energy vampires drain your time and energy without giving you anything back. In other words, they take away from your available time and energy without improving your life.
I teach and coach. I spend a lot of time with coaching, writing about coaching, and speaking about coaching – but I actually identify myself as a teacher first. In fact, the teaching part is the first deal killer with potential coaching jobs.
I teach special education. That means I work with students that are struggling to master fundamental skills whether those might be in terms of academics, behavior, or their ability to relate to others. With teaching, I spend time teaching my students. I have to plan how I’m going to teach them. I have to take time to read, listen to others, learn, and honestly evaluate my own teaching so that I can do it more effectively. I also have to evaluate where they are and be able to explain what that means. Finally, as a special education teacher I have a lot of paperwork and meetings.
I coach baseball and basketball. That means practices, that means games, and that means team bonding/enrichment experiences. I spend a lot of time preparing for all those things, scouting out the other teams, and honestly evaluating our performance to help game plan our strengths and weaknesses relative to our opponents. In addition, I still have to focus on becoming better each year – because every year is different. This means learning more about the sport, learning more about team building, and learning more about leadership. Sometimes this involves reading, sometimes this means clinics, sometimes this is through writing.
I’m a husband and a father to three great boys. All of those people need time and attention as well. All of those people want different things from me.
Finally, I need time for me. That means working out. That means putting puzzles together, reading silly zombie books, and studying to make myself a better person.
Those last two (family and myself) took a long time to figure out. I didn’t know that as a young coach where my focus was on knowing everything and making sure that everyone else knew how great I was. It’s one of those lessons that you only learn with time. At some point you have to be able to carry on a conversation with people that have nothing to do with sports…
Now, what are energy/time vampires? These are people or commitments that drain time and energy without adding value. Let me give you some examples:
- Negative people
- Committees
- Volunteer activities that have outlived their purpose
- Social media
Negative people:
Negative people are a huge drain on your energy and time. Negative people complain. Negative people gossip. Negative people want to visit with you about whatever is bothering them. Negative people influence your positive attitude and can make you a negative person. People that listen to negative people are often guilty by association in the eyes of other co-workers. It is your choice to be someone that negative people want to talk to and influence.
Committees:
Committees often exist just to exist and meet. I’ve worked at a university where we literally had meetings to plan the meeting, meetings to talk about what happened about the meeting, meetings to decide who will do what at the next meeting, etc. For example, I’ve served on a number of state government committees on behalf of children and individuals with special needs. In theory these committees help with services. In reality they are just meetings and nothing gets done. You need to be able to harshly evaluate whether these activities actually do what you joined them for and, if not, make some tough decisions.
This is not productive. If it’s your employer, you don’t have a choice with these – but if you are the boss it’s your choice on whether or not you are going to continue this practice. If it’s not your employer, then you need to be willing to make some tough choices – I’m not a part of those state committees anymore.
Volunteer activities that have outlived their purpose:
We’re all coaching and teaching because we want to serve others. That gets us into volunteer activities, but sometimes those activities don’t have a purpose and just waste time. I have run lots of programs for children with Down syndrome. While that is something that I enjoy, it also takes away form my child with Down syndrome and my other children – so when we reach a point where attendance isn’t what I’d want it to be I’ve had to be willing to stop running the programs.
Social media:
Time is precious, you can see above that I’m a little busy. I have found social media to be an enormous time drain that doesn’t give anything back. I used to regularly post on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. I used to get into discussions on that media. I also used to care what people who are not involved in my life think about me and my posts. I also used to read the various social media feeds and get really angry at how stupid people are (Trump did this, Clinton did this, stand for the anthem at NFL games, don’t stand for the anthem at NFL games, you see where I’m going here…).
I took Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram off my phone. I don’t post there anymore (so if you’re following me there it’s pretty boring right now). The reality is that these don’t add any value to me professionally, they just drain my time and get me angry.
What do all these vampires have in common? They are subtle and gradual. They creep up on you before you realize how much of your time and energy is being sucked away.
The point here is that you have to be willing to step back and honestly evaluate your life and your commitments. This has to be done in an on-going fashion. Once you’ve done that, you have to be willing to make tough choices to cut yourself away from these vampires.
