Money Time and Energy

Money. Time. Energy.

Most of us have ideas about all the things we would like to accomplish in our lifetime, but seem to protest too much about not having enough money, time or energy to do them.

The solution is simple but hard. We have to plan.

Money

  • We have to create a budget to make sure we are setting money aside and not spending more than we make. Then we have to follow it, changing it as necessary.
  • Bust a Myth: Budgets are not set in stone, they can be changed as often or as little as you want. The only unchanging principle is you can’t spend more than you earn.

Time

  • We have to plan ahead and schedule in the important things. If you want to read more, schedule time each day to read. If you want to meditate more, schedule the time each day and meditate. Whatever it is that you never seem to have time for, schedule the time and then do it.
  • Bust a Myth: Schedules lock us in, they restrict our freedom, man. Actually, done right, scheduling in the important stuff and doing it actually frees us up to enjoy the remaining free time more fully, because we aren’t being nagged by our subconscious about all the things we aren’t getting done

Energy

  • In order to have energy we need to plan time to take care of our bodies. We need about 7-8 hours of sleep consistently. We need exercise or activity of some kind daily. And we need time for stillness, to clear our minds and just be still.
  • Bust a Myth: I have too many things to get done.  Sleep can wait.  I’ll hit the gym tomorrow.  Sitting still doing nothing is a waste of time. Time is money.  And so we burn out.  Our ability to accomplish tasks efficiently and precisely is greatly increased with healthy sleep patterns (when our brain kind of “reboots”), regular exercise (which increases the efficiency of oxygen flow to the brain), and periodic times of stillness (which gives us time to make sure we are on the right track or off down a rabbit trail).

Planning takes effort. It’s sometimes a painful process (at least at first). But the weird truth is the more you plan, the more money, time and energy you will seem to have.

Letting Go: Work and Parkinson’s Law

lettingGo_WORK Letting go of work?!  Where do I sign up?

Before you get too excited, I am not suggesting you give up working or that work is bad.

I am suggesting that we tend to let work take over our lives in unhealthy and unproductive ways.

 

Let me start with Parkinson’s Law (click here for a helpful article).

Parkinson’s Law – Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

 

Did you catch that? It’s our fault that we work too much. We assign more time for tasks than is necessary to accomplish them, and often create more stress and worry by allowing ourselves more time to think about something we should have already been able to complete.


 Imagine you are at work, and the boss gives you an assignment Tuesday morning with a due date of Friday morning:

Your brain subconsciously does the math (T-W-T-F = 4 days), counting Friday as a whole day even though the assignment is due that morning, and you automatically assign the project a 4-day time value for completion.

Only, the assignment could probably be completed in the next hour before you go to lunch.

For the next 2 1/2 days you use this looming assignment deadline as an excuse to miss meetings, stay late at the office, and generally give the appearance of being exceedingly busy on a BIG assignment.

Truth is, Thursday 4pm rolls around and you haven’t even started the project yet, and now you reallize that you don’t have a fourth day to complete it, and you have to get it done tonight!

You panic a bit, go for a coffee, and proceed to make the assignment as big as you indicated to everyone all week long, staying until 9pm to get it done.


The fact that most of us work in an environment that expects us to show up by 9am for 8 or 9 hours, 5 or 6 days a week, leaves us with the unpleasant task of figuring out how to fill the time so that we appear to be busy.

For this reason I suggest that the proverbial 40-hour workweek (for many it is more like 50-60 or higher) is doing many of us, and our employers, a great disservice by wasting valuable time and resources. The following practices might increase overall productivity as well as improve work/life balance:

Employees

  • Challenge yourself with shorter deadlines for each new task
  • Reward yourself by using some of the time saved to work on some of your own initiatives (which could lead to promotion, etc.)
  • Set a goal to leave the office by __pm everyday, communicate this with your boss, then show them how much more productive you are

Employers

  • Establish clear rewards for completing assignments early, like leaving an hour early, or inclusion on a cool new project team
  • Give deadlines for assignments that clearly indicate the time it should take to complete
  • Help your employees by prioritizing assignments when multiple assignments overlap

 

Referenced Link:  How to use Parkinson’s Law to Your Advantage, www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-use-parkinsons-law-to-your-advantage.html

Where Did My Time Go?

Image from images.all-free-download.com

Image from images.all-free-download.com

In a previous post I posed the question Where Did My Money Go? and realized a few days later that I could pose the same question about my time.

Time seems to sift through my fingers like the sands of, well, time.   If time is constant, but seems to fly by, and if time flies when you’re having fun, then logic would determine that I am having a lot of fun.  However, at the end of each week, I don’t necessarily find myself reflecting on what a fun week I had.  Most of the time I am trying to figure out:

  1. where the time went,
  2. what did I actually accomplish, and
  3. what did I not do that I ought to have done (like exercise or call my parents)

So what if we budgeted our time like we budget our finances?  We all get 60 secs per minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, or 168 hours a week.

Sleep = 50 hours/wk on avg
Work = 50 hours/wk on avg
Eat     = 15 hours/wk on avg
Commute = 15 hours/wk on avg (including errands, etc.)
Exercise = 10 hours on avg (including travel time)

That’s 140 hours out of 168.  What do you do the other 28 hours?  A quick Google search turned up this news article discussing the 2012 Neilsen survey figures showing that the average adult watches about 34 hours of television per week.  Whoops! That’s more time that we had left…

So, if your typical week looks like this one your time is pretty much spent for the week.  Did you get done what you wanted to accomplish?  If you did, what, if anything did you give up to get it accomplished (lunch, tv, exercise, sleep)?  If you worked more than 50 hours this week, was it worth what you had to sacrifice doing elsewhere (lunch, tv, exercise, sleep)?

There are a lot of theories out there on how to be more productive, but the one I think is most valuable is the practice of setting specific time limits on different activities.  Time limits force you to focus and get things done, where without a specific time, we tend to procrastinate or stretch a task out to fill up the time we have – see this earlier post for a great quote.

I have started scheduling my day with this concept in mind – setting limited times to produce a blog post for instance.  It is my “Ship it” deadline ( a concept I learned from author/blogger Seth Godin).  Speaking of which, my deadline is up, so I hit publish.

 

Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

 

Keeping your Attention

Have you ever worked on solving a problem that you just couldn’t seem to let go of, no matter how long it was taking? Or perhaps you have found yourself in a constant struggle to maintain focus on the solving problem, but end up doing anything else instead.  Eventually, exhaustion and time creep up on you and you finally give in, resolved to tackle it anew the next day.

Then it happens – the next day you look at the problem again, and voilà! the solution presents itself so obviously that you literally smack yourself in the head and announce to no one in particular what an imbecile you are.

Of course, you’re not really an imbecile, just perhaps a little unbalanced.  Let me explain. We all need balance in our lives; the right amount of food, the right amount of exercise, the right amount of work (yes, work is a necessary and good thing), and the right amount of leisure, to name a few.  We also need to balance our attention, especially given the extraordinary demands on it in this current information age.

Ultimately, we all have limited attention spans, and although some are more limited than others, the key is not to treat this as a problem for which we need a cure, but simply to understand and accept the limits of our attentions span and structure our life and work in a way that best complement it.

For those who tend to have longer attention spans, this may mean the constructive use of deadlines to rein in our über-attention and force us to “Ship It,” as Seth Godin advocates in his excellent book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

For those with shorter attention spans, it may mean the constructive use of time-chunking, or working in chunks of time attuned to our natural attention span, with micro breaks in between to refresh our attention for the next chunk.

My guess is, most of us fall into both categories depending on the time of day, what we are doing, or the setting we are in.  The point is, when you feel your attention slipping, it may be time to ship it or chunk it, and find something else to keep your attention.

 

 

 

Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”