How many times have you
said this to yourself,
"There's not enough time!"
Let me tell you - it doesn't
matter who we've worked with.
We work with CEO's, we've
worked with celebrities,
we've worked with stay at home parents
and everyone believes this.
It's almost like it's
collectively printed into our DNA.
But what if it's not true?
What if there's time to do everything
that's worth doing in your life?
Wouldn't you want to know about that?
Now when I worked on
Wall Street the phrase
"there's not enough time" might as well
have been tattooed across my forehead.
I thought about time as like my enemy.
Right, if only I could somehow
squeeze a 1,000 hours
into a 40 hour work week,
well then I'd have enough time
to do everything I wanted.
Right, I didn't say it out loud,
but that was my secret fantasy.
So as a result of course, I bragged
to anyone who would listen about how
I worked 80, 90 hour work weeks.
Because when you think that more time
is the only answer to your life.
Well then the only
strategy, the only answer
is going to become, work
hard, work more, work longer.
But the problem is, it wasn't working.
And it probably isn't
working for you either.
I gained 70 pounds, my
chronic disease became
totally unmanageable, I had
to break off an engagement.
It was miserable.
But at least I was
successful at work, right?
Wrong. I got passed over for a promotion.
My bosses clearly didn't think
that this fat slob who couldn't
keep his personal life together
was management material.
So I'm surrounded there by evidence that
my work more to get more done
strategy is actually failing.
The weight gain, the not getting promoted,
breaking off the engagement.
But what I didn't realize at the time
was that studies show that when you
expand your work week
beyond 40 hours a week
for more than two months,
your measured productivity
slows down to match
the 40 hour week level.
So it turns out, all those
extra hours of losing sleep
was not increasing my productivity
but it was destroying
everything else in my life.
And the US Military
did a study that showed
just losing one hour of sleep per night
is the equivalent of going into work
the next day with a .10
blood alcohol level.
So the higher truth that I discovered
is it's not about managing your time.
It's about managing your energy.
With the right energy you
can do more work in an hour
than you did in an entire day.
So no wonder I didn't get promoted.
Nobody respects someone who
can't manage their resources.
And I was clearly mismanaging my energy.
So the truth is there is the time
to do what matters in life.
I love this quote by David Allen,
"We can do anything we want in life,
but we can't do everything."
I realize that I had to
replace my limited belief
that there's not enough time
with something that's more powerful.
Something that could get me
out of the hole that I was in.
A corner that I had painted myself into.
So today whenever I find myself saying
Oh god, there's just not enough time.
And it still happens.
I use something I call The
Right Action Principle.
Here's what it is, I ask myself,
am I getting the right things done,
in the the right amount of time,
to the right level of completion?
So let's go through these really quick
and feel free to just jot
them down on a sticky note
and post it right up
on your computer today.
So the first one is, is
this the right thing to do?
How many times have you finished the week
and gotten everything done except
the thing that really mattered to you.
See our big mistake today is substituting
great work for great judgment.
But in a knowledge economy
judgment is everything.
Your job isn't getting everything done.
It's deciding what should get done
and what shouldn't get done.
Saying no, is one of your
number one jobs in this economy.
Number two, is this the right time?
Think about investing your time
just like investing in stocks.
Invest into a stock too early and
you waste precious resources
that are needed somewhere else.
Invest too late and the whole thing
becomes totally pointless.
So timing your investment is crucial.
I had a client who
wanted to meet two months
before we started a consulting
engagement and I said no.
I can't afford to have part of my brain
spinning on something
until the right time.
And then you're going to
get 100% of my attention.
That's number two.
Number three, what's the
right level of completion?
Have you ever spent two
weeks perfecting something
that was pretty much finished in two days?
Just like a stock investor,
we need to balance
how much we invest into our work.
Not just the timing.
Put in too much work and
we become perfectionists
who can't really move
the ball down the field.
Do too little work and we
end up under delivering
to our clients, our
customers and our bosses.
So producing great work
is like being a chef.
Portioning out the right ingredients,
balancing out the right flavors,
and just watching to make
sure that our creation
isn't over cooked or under cooked.
So in the future, whenever that voice
pops into your head and says,
ahh there's not enough time.
I want you to replace it
and ask yourself this.
Am I doing the right things,
am I doing them with the right timing,
and am I doing them to the
right level of completion?
Awesome, I hope that helps guys
tell me in the comments
below what is your strategy
for managing your energy
as well as your time.
And check out the links below
for incredible resources
that I absolutely know
you're going to love.
