It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of our daily work.
Particularly, when you’re growing something - from a project to a business - there are any number of things that need to be taken care of, and every single one of them seems important.
All tagged Time Management
It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of our daily work.
Particularly, when you’re growing something - from a project to a business - there are any number of things that need to be taken care of, and every single one of them seems important.
At the end of the day, I think the most important type of wealth we’re after is time. In particular, the freedom to do what we want with it.
I know the conventional thinking is that we’re after financial freedom, but the reason we’re after that is to be able to do whatever we want i.e. to use our time as we please.
How we spend our time on a day to day basis is materially influenced by the extent to which we're responding to signals or to noise.
In today's episode, I speak to the need to think about which cues we pick up and what we react to - the signals versus the noise.
If you look at your role and what you do on a day to day basis, the fact is that at least 70% of your time should be focused on doing your core work.
To say it more clearly, there’s typically one thing that is the raison d’etre of our work, and the vast majority of our time should be focused on that specific thing.
Expectations management is everything in business.
If you’re going to do something, do it. If you have no intention of doing it, don’t say you will. That’s pretty clear cut and I think we’ll all agree with that.
The problem arises when we get comfortable in the grey areas, at the edges of “well, this isn’t really a big deal”. We brush off - consciously or otherwise - these little things.
One of the hardest things to do in our professional lives is to say no to someone when they ask for our time.
We always want to be helpful, to lend a helping hand whenever we can. If someone wants to show us their latest product, discuss their latest activity or just get together to “network”, we feel compelled to say yes.
I've spoken before about 'meeting madness' and how consistently stacking day after day with meeting after meeting is a practice that should be outlawed in the modern business world. A similar, related issue is our compulsive need to fill out and block our schedules with "essential activities" every minute of the day.