In a meeting I was never invited to,
the civilized world agreed long ago that I should have no more than
24 hours in a day – 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of nighttime.
I can't even add a single hour to my day. Then sleep experts got
together and decided that I spend about 8 hours of my lifetime
sleeping each day.
OK, let me clear the sleep from my eyes
and do the math: 24 hours minus 8 hours leaves me just 16 hours.
What? I should spend 1/3 or 33% of my life asleep? Could a hermit or
armadillo do any worse?
Having just 66% of this important
currency of life to work with, you would think I'd be a much better
time manager, being most diligent to make the most of every waking
hour. Sorry to disappoint you; I often find myself squandering
precious time far beyond the 33% I lose just by being human.
Years ago I learned the principles of
time management, but I have yet to master what it takes to keep the
most notorious thieves of time in check. They seem to break in at
will and rob my time treasure.
The first time thief is
procrastination. I put off for later what I should do now. I
know there are times I won't complete a task, and that's OK, but to
just kick the assignment down the road of time is irresponsible.
The second thief is perfectionism.
Pursuing a standard of excellence, whereby I give an assignment my
best is one thing, but demanding zero mistakes as the norm is what
gets me spending too much time on one thing, while another important
task gets zero time.
Thief #3 is idling, which is
when I just lie there, sit there, stand or loiter around doing
absolutely nothing worth the time. You could call it laziness, but
it's worse than that: a lazy person fails to do the assignment, but
the idle person does nothing at all. Doing nothing is the most costly
use of time.
The fourth thief of time is what I call
burning. I burn time or burn myself when I have too many irons
in the fire. It's busyness without meaningful results, except to
leave me stressed, worn out, and, well, burned out. I must trim my
To-Do list, so that it stops being a Wish List.
Stumbling is the fifth thief of
time. Stumbling is when I just let things happen to me. It's when I
sort of stumble upon what to do next. Stumbling is when I leave my
day wide open for anyone to decide how I'll spend some of my time.
Say it's Tuesday evening. A friend calls: "Hey, man, what are you
doing? Can you come over so we can watch the game in HD on my Vizio
72-inch LCD?" And I reply, "Well, I'm not... Yeah, I'll put on
something, I'll be right there." Three hours of my life fly by like
that. The lesson of stumbling is that when I don't plan my day or
time, someone or something will.
For me the worst time thief is
drifting. Distraction will be a good name for drifting. It's
the time management version of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). In communication, it's called 'changing
the subject' or 'chasing a rabbit trail'.
Drifting is
what happens to a canoe, boat or ship that has been cut from its
anchor; the vessel floats downstream, or wherever, driven by water
current. Within two hours a drifting boat could be a mile or more
away from where it was last seen.
Forget the boat. Here is how a human
being drifts: Next to the stove, I prepare a plate of food for
myself. On my way to the dining room, I spot some unopened letters.
So I place my plate on the ironing board. "Let me open this ONE
letter – it looks urgent." Then I open the next letter and
continue ripping letters open. Ninety minutes later, my plate is too
cold to eat. I must reheat it, along with my cup of green tea, which
I poured thirty minutes prior to the plate.
An electronic example: I am supposed to
read and reply that one URGENT email, but end up going through 50
email messages, then clicking links in some of them to visit the
websites, surf the net, fill out forms to receive freebies that come
in the form of new emails with links I must click to confirm
registrations and subscriptions. Three more hours go down the time
tube, thanks to my drifting ways.
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