Learning Time Management from My Sugar Daddy

I used to be a mess when it came to time management. Was late to everything. Didn’t know how to end a conversation so that I could get to the next thing on time. Suffered from time blindness and somehow always got stuck in traffic.

And I’ll own up to the fact that it cost me a few relationships. By the time I was 25, the only friends I had left were the ones who were also terrible with time management, so they didn’t mind my antics. My family had gotten into the habit of lying to me about when things actually started, which would often lead to arguments. And when it came to my sugar partners, well, many of them simply didn’t tolerate it. And instead of telling me directly, they would just ghost or say that they had gotten busy.

It wasn’t until I met Shel that I really understood this last point. He was the only one who actually took the time to tell me that my lack of time management was a problem.

“Look,” he said kindly after I had shown up 25 minutes late to our second date. “I don’t believe in holding things in or being polite when it’s more important to be direct. This,” and he showed me the time on his phone, “is something that I can’t tolerate. And I’m not saying that you’re a bad person, nor am I looking for excuses. I’m saying that I choose to spend my time with people who are respectful of my time. So, if it’s something that you really struggle with and want help with, give me a call. But otherwise, I’ve already transferred the cost of this date plus a little bit extra so that there’s no hard feelings.”

And then he got up, and he left.

Since I was suddenly alone, I decided to call up my best friend who lived nearby and ask her to come have dinner with me.

When she got there, I started railing on this man and his audacity.

But for the first time in our friendship, she was taking the man’s side.

“Girl,” she said, “You were almost half an hour late to your date. Are you really surprised?”

I was speechless.

“I love you, but you know that this time, it’s all on you. He said that he’d be willing to help you, right? My advice is that you call him, apologize, and let him coach you. Seriously.”

So I did. And over the next few months, Shel became my time management coach. It was hard to implement all of his techniques, but the man really changed my life. And, because I want other sugar babies to benefit from my experience, here are the key points that Shel was kind enough to share:

Observe

The first thing that Shel wanted me to do was work on my time blindness by becoming more aware of how much time my daily tasks actually took. He had me keep a detailed journal about what I did throughout the day.

This part was so eye-opening. I was able to realize that certain things, like showering and doing my hair, consistently took more time than I thought. While other things, like cleaning the dishes, were quicker than expected. Oh, and I was spending way too much time on social media every dang day.

When I was actually able to see my daily life documented minute-by-minute, it was clear that I was not organizing my time well.

Get a planner

Part of why I was struggling so much with time is that I didn’t have a visual plan for how I wanted to spend my time. I just floated from one thing to the next as I thought about them, and then all of a sudden, I would remember that I had to get ready for a date starting in two hours, and that wasn’t enough time to get ready and drive to the location.

So, Shel suggested, I should start every week with a loose plan and then every day with a more specific plan. He said that I should make it as addictive as possible, which, for me, meant buying a cute planner and a box of colorful pens so that my schedule and my to-do lists would be fun to look at.

Schedule in the “nonsense” time

Something Shel was sure to tell me was that time management isn’t about using every single moment of the day to be productive. “We’re not machines,” he told me, meaning that it was unreasonable to assume that we wouldn’t have moments of the day that we would just stare out the window, scroll social media, or take a little power nap. Plus, there would inevitably be times when we would get stuck in traffic or behind someone with a million coupons at the grocery store (do people still use coupons? This seemed like an example that Shel pulled out of the olden days, but anyway, I got his point.)

The key was to add buffers into the daily schedule to accommodate these “nonsense” moments.

Use the treat method

Some people call this the pomodoro method, but Shel calls it the treat method. The idea was to schedule my day into manageable chunks and then reward those completed chunks with a “treat.”

On my days off, this might look something like, wake up and exercise for an hour, and then treat myself with one 30-minute episode of a show, then I would spend 20 minutes cleaning the kitchen, then I would treat myself with 20 minutes of scrolling or calling a friend.

I found it to be so much easier to commit to doing a task when I had a limited amount of time to do it. And, setting alarms and having a treat all lined up were two key elements of this.

Get better at saying no

Another surprising thing that Shel told me was that sometimes it was more important to do less than to try to fit in more. One of my problems was that I didn’t know how to say no to things. Happy hour with the girls? Sure, I could fit that in before pilates. Last-minute phone call with my mom? I could do that while taking the dog for a walk.

The problem was that I was saying yes to too many things, and the result was that my mind was overwhelmed and my schedule was always teetering on the brink of going off the rails. I would push things around while trying to be flexible, which was actually impacting my ability to do things well or in a timely manner.

I wasn’t quite sure how to start saying no to things, so Shel gave me a couple of tips:

• If it’s not scheduled and it’s not urgent, it’s an automatic no. Getting better at time management is all about becoming more protective of your time. And sometimes that means declining a call from your bestie when you’re busy with something else or saying no to that last-minute invite to brunch if you know you should be running errands.
• Let go of the guilt of saying no. One thing that Shel told me was that he noticed that I said yes to a lot of things out of guilt, obligation, or even FOMO (fear of missing out). Saying no, he reminded, wasn’t a rejection; it was a commitment to doing things with more intention and care.
• If you want to say yes, put it in the calendar. Getting organized doesn’t have to mean foregoing all of the things that make life fun, like concerts and dates and downtime at home. But these things, just like tasks and deadlines, should be scheduled into the agenda so that they get the undivided attention they deserve.

Have some grace, this takes time

Learning how to take control of my schedule was something that I struggled with for months before things started to click. And luckily, Shel anticipated this. He told me that learning to be more conscious of time and letting go of guilt around saying no to things were not easy tasks. I would keep getting things wrong for a while before I started to train my brain into organizing time well.

Sometime around four months of this (and many, many dates to which I showed up 5 minutes early!), Shel decided that we should celebrate. He surprised me with a weekend getaway with one caveat:

“No schedule,” he said. And that was easy to say yes to!