Tracksuit CEO

Do you ever feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day? I sure do, especially when it comes to playing Groovy Girls with my daughter. See, Groovy Girls are the TrackSuit family’s answer to Barbie Dolls (we don’t do Barbie, at least not yet). My daughter likes to play with these little dolls in her gigantic dollhouse. My wife pointed out to me that she works out her problems through this kind of play, much like I work out a lot of things through this blog. If you play with her and listen closely she will reveal a lot of how she sees the world, and when she asks me to play with her I feel it’s an honor.

The only problem is the second I walk in the door I pick up my 3 month old and I want to find out how everyone’s day went. Then there’s dinner and the daily things that keep this house running like a well-oiled machine (or at least a machine that you have every intention of keeping well oiled if you can find the time) and before you know it, it’s bedtime.

We realized that one of the reasons we don’t always drop everything and play dolls with her is that there is no definite amount of time we’ll be playing; will it be minutes? hours? We’d love to play all day but that just isn’t practical. So we came up with a good solution. When it’s time to play dolls or paint or whatever it is we’re not sure we have time to do, we give her the option of how many minutes she wants to play. Offer up 15 minutes, sometimes she wants less, sometimes more. Then set the timer and give her our total uninterrupted attention. When the timer goes off she knows it’s time for us to do something else and sometimes she’s already moved on to other things.

I’ve applied this method to other things in my life: house cleaning, desk organization. I set the kitchen timer or start the stopwatch on my sweet red digital watch (only a true TrackSuit CEO can pull off a red digital watch with business attire) and concentrate on that one task for a set amount of time.

This is a great technique for finding time to hone in on a single task in a world where our focus is increasingly fragmented by things like Twitter and Crackberry.

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