But someone is trying to steal yours.
Everybody Wants You
Look, time is the one thing that you can’t get back after it’s gone. You’re not going to earn more time. You don’t even know how much you’ve got. You can trade some of it for money by going to work and putting in your steady eight plus. You can trade even more of it for money by doing for yourself what you could pay someone else to do, like mowing the lawn or washing the car.
If you’re like most people, you watch TV. You’ll trade a big eighteen-minute chunk of your time to advertisers for the privilege of trading forty-two minutes for entertainment.
You’ll pick up your cell phone and flat out give the thing 20 minutes just scrolling between apps and emails.
Let’s face it. You? Are getting ripped off.
And that’s not all. The way you’re thinking about time at work isn’t helping you any either. We’ve all been conditioned to think in dollars per hour. If you want more dollars, you have to work more hours. But that’s not actually what’s happening at work, is it? Some people at your shop are bringing home more dollars for that hour. Why? Because of what they can deliver during that time.
Believe me, your company is certainly paying attention to the amount of money they are willing to pay for different types of work … delivered within the work day. Your company is paying you cash for results per hour. No mistake about it.
You should be looking at your time the same way. What results would you be willing to give up an hour to get? If you said you’d like to trade an hour of your life for the chance to eat four twinkies and watch one episode of “Badly Dressed Unhappy People” – I wish you well.
On the off chance that you have better things to do with your time, start taking it seriously.
At work, there’s a version of reality shows and smartphone apps too. It’s called
For most knowledge workers, we are being paid to do work that requires concentration and focus. If we’re not careful, those interruptions will suck up our work day and leave us working far into the night to catch up. Here’s four ways to take back your time.
1.
Spend the majority of your day doing the work that is most expensive or most skilled. Let’s face it – you want them to hire someone else to do the inexpensive stuff you can’t get done – not the other way around.
Once you get your head around that, it’s a lot easier to say ‘later, baby’ to the quick to get done, but not so challenging work of answering emails or filling out forms.
2.
Plan results – not time. That’s right. Don’t decide to spend three hours on coding. Decide what blocks of code you want to finish, then figure out how much time you have to do it. Push hard and settle for B- work until you get that amount of work done in the expected time. You can always come back and polish later during unit testing.
If you’re a manager, plan to get a specific task completed in a fixed time. Once you start planning results, you’ll be amazed at how it will bleed into the way you think about meetings and your personal time.
When you’re working toward a result instead of just burning time, it’s a lot easier to say no to interruptions. Combine that with the dopamine hit you get when you complete the result and
3.
Refuse to work at the expense of yourself. Once I got serious about my time, and the way I want to spend it, I stopped tolerating my tendency to sit for hours at night doggedly trying to catch up. The more I insisted on treating myself decently, the more work I got done during the work day. I’m no where near perfect at this and I still have plenty of days when I get distracted and fail to deliver on my highest priority for the day, but I’m improving every day and it feels – GREAT.
4.
Stop using work to escape your life. You heard me. Work-a-holism is no joke. Our culture loves to applaud the guy that sleeps under his desk. Your mother will forgive you for missing her birthday if you “have to work”. You don’t have to come home, you can get away with just about anything if you’re working. After all, this is American and we love us some crazy hard workers.
It takes one to know one, and for sure, I used heroic work effort to avoid a lot of stuff in my life. And now? I can’t get that time back.
If you would like to have help figuring out how to conquer chaos and get yourself hitting your goals, sign up for a free 25-minute session with me. I would love to take this work further. Click the link below to get started.
Next week – Facts v Opinions – The Ultimate Power Source.