“All I need is a few more hours in the day, a few more days in the week, a few more months in the year.”
How many times have you ever said that to yourself? If you just had one more hour, you’d go to the gym. If you just had one more hour, you’d make your lunch every week, so you’d eat better.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but this thought process is nothing but a bunch of lies.
We tell ourselves these lies to feel better — that if we simply had more time we would do all the things that we want to do or should be doing. This line of thinking can be detrimental to personal and professional achievement. In reality, you don’t need more time. What you need is to take control of your time.
Prioritize Your Goal
Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a famous British naval historian and prolific author, published “Parkinson’s Law” — first in 1955 as the opening line in a satirical article for The Economist and then as part of an entire book, Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress. The law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
Think about when you were in college and you had an essay to write, with four weeks until the deadline. You should have plenty of time, but next thing you know, the full four weeks have gone by and you’re finishing the paper two minutes before it’s due. The work could have been done in two days, but you filled the whole four weeks of time you’ve allotted for it instead of applying time management techniques to take control of your time.
Taking control over your time at the most basic level means prioritizing your most important goal and then applying razor-sharp focus to ensure that it gets completed. The first step is figuring out your wildly important goal, whether personal or professional. Maybe it’s losing weight, maybe it’s driving leads to your sales team, maybe there is a specific goal that your entire communications team needs to rally behind.
The focus then comes with identifying the things that will make the most impact on whatever it is you are trying to achieve. If you’re trying to lose weight, the focus points are on eating healthier and finding time to exercise. If the goal is driving sales, maybe you need to focus on search engine optimization and strategic advertising.
Part of taking control of your time is differentiating what can be done now and what will take longer to develop and being proactive about completing the smaller tasks when you’re first confronted with them.
The ‘Touch It Once’ Rule
I’m a firm believer that if you have something in your hand and you can deal with it right then, you should deal with it. I call it my “touch it once” rule.
A great example of this is mail. I get the mail every day after work and I bring it into my house. Often, among other things, I have to make dinner for my family, so it’s tempting to just leave the stack of mail on the counter for another time. Instead, my “touch it once” rule means I spend a minute divvying up the mail. I hand out the letters to whomever they belong to. I throw the obvious junk mail in the trash. I may set aside some of the bills for when I have more time to deal with them, but at least now I’ve touched everything once. I’ve dealt with most of it instead of letting it sit there and grow — ultimately having to deal with mail stacked up to the ceiling at some point down the line.
It’s such a simple idea, but if you adopt the “touch it once” mindset, you’ll find that you will knock more and more off your to-do list and will have more and more time to focus on the bigger things.
In part two, I will discuss additional methods of time management, prioritization and focus, including my interpretation of the 80/20 rule and The 4 Disciplines of Execution.