When you begin to think of your time as an asset (like money) you begin to think differently about how you are using it. Try to apply common money terminology to determine if we are making the best use of yours.
First a major distinction. You can always get more money (or any other resource for that matter). But you can never get any more time. You get what you get and that’s it.
Invest…Spend….Waste
We tend to use the term “spend” when we think about how we use our time. But that’s not quite true.
For example, you can “invest” your time by finding ways to do things faster or eliminating unnecessary steps. The result isn’t more time, but you do have more available for other things.
Here’s a quote from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that sums it up nicely: “…every hour I save is an hour added to my life. It used to take me five hours to fill that tank. It now takes three. The two I saved are mine-as pricelessly mine as if I moved my grave two further hours away for every five I’ve got.”
You can also invest time to create income. For example using your time to learn a new skill can result in an increase in your income.
And most important, you invest time when you use it to strengthen relationships. Forget the phrase “I’m spending time with my family” and look at it as an investment instead.
Next time we’ll look at spending and wasting time.
Top photo by thinkpanama
The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.
- Alan Saporta
During physical activity, your mind is stimulated and potentially very creative; yet few people take full advantage of this opportunity.
Use the time you spend doing physical work or exercising to come up with new ideas or resolve problems. When you do come up with solution ideas immediately pause to jot them down.
So don’t just “zone out” when doing something physical, use that increased blood flow to harness the power of your mind.
Have a great week!
- Bob
Photo by jef safi
Just before the holidays I used Survey Monkey to conduct a time management survey among people who work form home. Since then many of the participants asked to see the results, so please accept my apologies for the delay. However it took this long to get enough responses.
My objective going into this was to determine the market potential for a home-based specific time management course. For that reason can’t share the results of those questions at this time. However the most interesting results came from questions I’m happy to share.
Total responses: 92 (It took me a lot of tweets, e-mails, LinkedIn posts and everything else I could think of to get this many).
Here are the questions:
What are the two major sources of frustration and stress that keep you from being as productive as you would like to be?
Distractions and Interruptions 56%
Loneliness 17%
Telephone calls 15%
Waiting for others 9%
Everything else 3%
This is the last time I ask an open question like this. It took a while and some judgment calls to boil it down to this.
Frankly I was surprised by this. You’d think that someone who works alone would be less distracted, but the numbers speak for themselves. I must point out that many respondents indicated that children and other family members and pets are major sources of interruptions.
On average how many hours do you work in your home office per week?
0-10 5.6%
11-20 22.2%
21-30 33.3%
31-40 11.1%
41-50 22.2%
51-60 5.6%
60+ 0
Again I was a bit surprised. I expected a much higher percent in the 31-40 and 41-50 range. But that’s why we do surveys. Had I phrased the question differently, like “how many hours do work each week (taking into account time with customers and travel)”, the numbers could (and probably would) have been very different.
What tools do you currently use to manage your time? Choose all that apply?
Software (Outlook, Lotus Notes etc.) 82%
Paper-based planner 35%
Smartphone 65%
Web based service 29%
PDA 18%
None 0% (this was encouraging)
It probably would have been best to limit this question to one choice, like “what is your most used tool?” But I asked it this way to learn the to help craft a curriculum. And for that purpose it was quite helpful.
The high percentage using software and smartphones was probably skewed because the survey requests were delivered online; hence targeting an audience predisposed to using technology.
Which best describes you?
Business Owner with Staff 1%
Self Employed – Solo 82%
Employee 7%
Which best describes your business/profession?
Consulting 47%
Sales 23%
Service Business 24%
Online Business 6%
(The question also included options for legal and financial but each received zero responses)
So these are the totally unscientific results. I hope your find them useful. There were quite valuable to me.
If you have any thoughts or ideas about how to create better surveys I am all ears.
Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem, in my opinion, to characterize our age.
- Albert Einstein
When is “good enough”, good enough?
That’s a question that haunts many of us. Perfectionism, while important in brain surgery, can become a roadblock.
One of the best examples of “good enough” is the MP3 audio file format. It delivers less that perfect fidelity, but because of its ability to compress audio files with an acceptable sound quality, an entire industry was born. Witness the growth of iTunes, now the largest distributor of music in the world.
True audiophiles may turn a deaf ear to the quality of an MP3 file, but to the rest of us it’s just fine. If the creators of the MP3 format tried for perfection, we’d still be listening to CDs or even vinyl records.
Where are you striving for perfection where “good enough” is all that’s needed?
Have a great week!
-Bob
Successful people choose to do the things unsuccessful people choose not to.
- Unknown
I learned this quote from a mentor many years ago. It has stuck with me ever since.
We are blessed to have freedom of choice. But sometimes this works against us. Too often we choose to avoid doing positive things that are uncomfortable like changing habits or delivering bad news.
What are you choosing not to do?
Take a minute to identify some things you are choosing not to do. Pick one and make a conscious effort to do it routinely over the next month.
Have a great week!
- Bob
Photo by BasileLeConquerant
I must create a system or be enslaved by another Man’s.
- William Blake
Whatever system you use to manage your work must use almost no thought on your part during it’s execution. If you find yourself asking “what do I do with this” or “where do I put that”, then you aren’t performing at your best.
The purpose of your workload management system should be to get everything in its place with little thought on your part. Thus saving your energy for more important matters. Your energy is highly valuable and very limited so don’t spend it on routine matters.
The efficiency of your system can be observed when processing your e-mail. The next time you work through your e-mail inbox pay attention to your own thought process. Do you find yourself having to make a decision about each message or do yo know instinctively what to do with them? And how many times have you made a decision about some of those messages in your inbox?
If the answer is a lot, you’re spending more time an energy on this then you should. It’s time to streamline.
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
- Doris Lessing
What’s the most important thing you could be doing with your time right now? (Other than reading this post of course.)
Are you doing it?
We often gravitate toward the easy things when it’s time to decide what to do next. It’s comfortable and gives us a false sense that we’re accomplishing something. It’s an easy trap to get into when things become hectic.
Don’t get lured into this trap. Each time you have to decide what to do next, think of your time as an investment to be used wisely.
Have a great week!
- Bob
Photo by Seq
When you begin to think of your time as an asset (like money) you begin to think differently about how you are using it. Try to apply common money terminology to determine if we are making the best use of yours.