Have you ever said – “I wish I had more time in the day” or “If only there more hours in the day”?
We live hectically busy lives, you get up kiss your wife / husband, quickly pack your lunch, load the kids in the car and there the day starts – drop off the kids, sit in traffic, get to the office and have your first cup of coffee.
A normal day would usually consist of the odd crisis, a couple of meetings, three to four surprises and before you know it, it is time to go home again, kiss the hubby / wife make sure the kids have done their homework and ensure everything is still standing the way you left it this morning.
As I am sure for most of you out there, not every day is a “normal day” and if you’re lucky to have a normal day every once in a while, even once per week perhaps. For some of us a normal day might only be a distant memory or something that you wished you could ask Father Christmas for.
Unfortunately, the reality is that most of us will never have a normal day unless we consistently work at it. We all know the cliché about work-life balance, and all that bullshit, and no matter how hard we try to attain that zen state it just seems to be more like a moving target right?
I propose a solution to the problem and perhaps the start of a method that can be used in conjunction with other tools, or on its own to free up some time in your day to at least get close to the mythical normal day:
Step 1: Start with taking notes of your entire day. What did you do and for how long. Start with your morning, as soon as you get up, and end with the evening just before you climb into bed. You need to make sure here that you note every minute and every activity or non-activity. Do you smoke? Log it. Do you go to the gym during lunch? Log it. Do you sometimes find yourself daydreaming a bit? Log that too. Make sure that you have a nice baseline of time and activities for about a week, then continue to step 2.
Step 2: Start by creating a map of your activities and time spent on them daily by grouping them together. Now the 1st thing and the most obvious is to see where you’re spending the most time on activities that could either be discarded all together, or perhaps done in conjunction with other activities or just changed so that it takes less time out of your day. Let’s say you smoke, don’t you think cutting down would be beneficial for your health and perhaps save you some time – maybe changing when and where you smoke to coincide with travel or walking to meetings instead of taking time out to go outside for a smoke break maybe smoke while you are traveling to an appointment, client or meeting?
Let’s say you find that you spend a lot of time in meetings, why not try and shorten the duration of these meetings.
What about if you find yourself having lots and lots of informal conversations during the day which is taking up a lot of your time? Use techniques like putting on earphones, or blocking out time where you let your peers know that you are now focusing for an hour or two in order to limit the interruptions?
At the end of the day it does not matter what you change or what you pick up with your own map of activities, the idea here is to group them together to identify the largest time suckers and then start by making changes there.
Step 3: Once you have exhausted all options and you are now running as lean as you can, now we can look at efficiencies. How fast are doing what you need to do? There are a lot of books about productivity and how you can do better and be faster and I am not going to go into that detail here, but if you find you lack in a certain area like task management, read a book, and see how you can do it better. Let’s say you must work through a lot of mails every day, find ways to streamline that, disable the email and message notification on your desktop, combine all your mailboxes into one account or tool that you use to read your mail.
Maybe you need to change the way you run meetings, keep them short and to the point, prepare an agenda up front and ensure you have input from all parties before you go into the meeting. Insist on starting and finishing on time, if you lose time here it snowballs and before you know it you are out of pocket by 2 hours!
As soon as you have applied all the tools and techniques you can on improving your efficiency you should now at least have saved a couple of hours a day and perhaps you are closer to that normal day we all crave.
All of the above is great, but there are jobs out there or projects and clients that just require more attention than others. Unfortunately, reality and logic will have to be taken into account here as well, and that is that if you want to succeed you need to put in the hours no matter what, and work life balance should probably be looked at from a bit of a higher helicopter view rather than tracking it week by week.
Take the wins and make the most of the times where you have a semi normal day and brace yourself for the times that you just feel like there is not enough time, and basically if you have applied the above and you are still stuck wanting more time, perhaps it is just the nature of the beast and you should just keep on chipping away at the hours until you can squeeze out an hour or two daily.
So yes, TIME – there is a lot of that lying around … NOT! I think we should all try and get as much done to service our clients, and businesses but we should not lose sight of who is out there supporting us through all of this, and make time to spend quality time with your family and friends as well and at least try and chase down the elusive but not extinct yet, work-life balance.
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