It is time. If you cannot manage your time, you will not be able to manage anything else.
Effective time management is a combination of knowing how you spend your time, what you prioritize, and the self-discipline to focus on the block of time you’ve set aside for specific things.
If you know your time, you put yourself in the driver’s seat for much of what you wish to accomplish.
Nothing exciting happens. Crises are averted before they happen. Everything is orderly and consistent. Things happen the same way all the time. The machines hum along. The people show up on time. The boss pays everybody on time. There isn’t yelling and screaming because someone dropped the ball. Well-run businesses are routine, not dramatic.
The difficult decisions should be about where to steer the company looking forward. Not cleaning up yet another crisis from yesterday.
Routine, not drama. That is the mark of a well-run business.
Stop trying to be so perfect. Nobody cares. You’re not that special and I’m not that special.
After we’re dead and long gone, historians aren’t going to be looking at the windows we caulked and think less of us. They aren’t going to hate you because you didn’t spend an extra day on that little thing that doesn’t matter… because it doesn’t matter.
It only matters because it’s keeping you from getting the job finished. The truth about perfectionism is that it keeps you from being effective. (hint: therefore, it’s far from a perfect process)
We all do it. We all waste time. Distractions, tasks that others can do for us, and things that lead to wasted blocks of time.
You don’t get more time than anyone else and it’s practically the only thing out there that you can’t buy more of. It’s also always being spent and there is no way to stop it.
So track your time. Write down and log every hour of your day as you go through the day (not after the fact! memory is not reliable when guesstimating the time we spent doing this or that.)
Find the tasks that you don’t need to do at all.
Find the tasks that you can give to other people.
Find the patterns that lead to time being wasted.
Organize your schedule to best squeeze the juice out of the hours you have.
Better to add work to your hours by better optimization, then try to add hours to your workday (usually done by foregoing sleep or family or other important things.)
What you don’t track and look at, you can’t adjust and get better at. I think it’s a good idea to track your use of time throughout the day.
To make things easier for manual laborers, it means more thought-work has gone into the business. To maintain an edge in innovation and forward-looking flexibility, you don’t need to work harder physically, you need to work harder mentally. We must be more thoughtful and willing to explore ideas than do the manual lifting work when the goal is to elevate the company.
Your job at the top is to send the workers to where they can be most effective for the company and are most effective based on their skill set.
It sounds easy, but that's only if you haven't done it before. to save work for the lower level laborers requires immense work at the top level to innovate and install the systems that ensure success for the boots on the ground.
As we pass from childhood into full-grown adults, we limit the weird (i.e. interesting) ideas that pass through our brain because of the knowledge we’ve gained.
“Double-U” doesn’t mean “double-me” because we know it’s just the letter “W”. Just one of the fun tricks of the mind that a child may point out because they are unbound by the knowledge and experience that comes with life experience and formal or self-education.
The most brilliant and exciting ideas are almost always outside the bounds of common knowledge and thus would be entirely ruled out by “normal” people.
We need to find a way to suppress our knowledge/experience and allow our minds to float “outside of the box.”
The first step is to set aside time “to be creative” and use that time to relax. Nothing in the world matters. The ideas of convention, the common expectations, the way things work. It matters as much during that time as it does to a 4-year-old. Why can’t you flap your arms fast enough to fly? What happens if I write letters backward instead of forward? What can I do right now that seemingly has no useful impact on my life?
The second step is to embrace failure. Don’t even acknowledge it. If a joke bombs, a piece of artwork looks like trash, or you just spent four hours “being creative” and nothing tangible came of it, so what. Laugh it off.
Creativity (accumulating brilliant ideas) is a cyclical process: you relax into a start of creativity, you see what comes from it, you don’t care how good or bad it is, this allows you to relax even more comfortably the next creative process, this leads to even better creative ideas and brilliant observations.
That process repeats and you get better and better at being creative. But it all begins with our ability or willingness to be stupid again that we might be brilliant.
The limits lifted by our imagination are too great to explain in words. Imagination paints a future we can build and dreams to which we can aspire.
Imagination also can be a tool our brain uses to paralyze us and make us fearful.
Imagination is helpful and destructive depending on your spirit. But, in both ways imagination is a liar.
The dreams are rarely THAT good, and the suffering is seldom THAT bad.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. That should prompt us to dive more whole-heartedly into the good dreams and aspirations and leave the worry far behind.
Facts. It’s all about facts. That’s what we say. That’s what we think the real “drop the mic” moment comes from. “I believe in FACTS.”
There is a problem with facts, however. Facts come only after the event has taken place. If you have the facts, you’ve missed the boat.
Before 9/11, the fact was, nobody had used airplanes to do what we witnessed on that terrible day. That was the FACT… until it wasn’t.
Facts are what we obsess over when we become trapped on the inside. The inside of our company, our school project, our artistic masterpiece, our book, our political position, and much of our philosophical ideas.
We fall in love with fact and reason and logic. These are good things–incredibly good and important things!
But. humans are not mere reason-based or fact-based creatures, they are also perceptive. Perception is not quantitative like factual statistics, perception is qualitative.
If somebody in the Defense Department had perceived that a plane could be used as a weapon, we could have better prepared against such an attack–even in the absence of FACTS to back up that concern.
We must take care that we are not so focused on the inside of our project or business that we lose touch with the outside “real” world. We live and operate in the real, outside world and the changes in trend happen in the real world. By the time we have stats on trends, it’s too late to catch them.
The trend is important to see, but if you can spot the change in trend before it fully manifests itself, your business will be booming. It takes perception to spot changes in trend.
Don’t rely strictly on facts, data, and stats. That’s yesterday’s news. Useful to see and compare, but never let them consume you. We must be comfortable enough to allow our perception to steer decisions about the future of our work, company, and life.
“the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.”
I suppose we could live as if life was just about you or me and our own wishes and desires. However, the strange thing about only focusing on what we want is that it is incredibly unsatisfying.
Maybe for a moment, it’s exciting. We achieved our goal and got some fancy thing or hit a milestone. Hooray! But then it’s in the past.
As we get more and more, we want more and more. But also as we get more, it becomes less and less satisfying.
I’ve come to the conclusion that we are not merely born for ourselves. There is a greater purpose in the physical realm and a great spiritual purpose to life which does not terminate on how happy we feel at any moment.
It’s probably tied up in fulfilling your moral duty. When you do your duty, you find real happiness and contentment in this life, and beyond.
It’s the journey. The journey itself is the end goal. Not the finished product. That journey is the work you put in, the process you follow, and the creating you do.
The finished product is just the ashes that are left after a fire.
The fire is wild, organic, all over the place, and occasionally destructive, but it’s where all the movement and energy is.
The more you focus on doing work (i.e. the journey) and not what the work leads to, the more it will lead to better things. But you can’t let that get in your way. You can’t let making good things get in the way of just making things.
The story of Jesus walking on water is the story of a miraculous event. While we see walking on water as a miracle, I think it’s a miracle for us mere mortals to walk peacefully here on earth.
We move forward or we move backward. If you’re not sure which you are doing right now, you’re probably moving backward. Standing still is sliding backward.
Progress of yesterday is undone by resting and being comfortable today.
We convince ourselves that things will never change. That we’re good right where we are. That it isn’t worth the risk of pressing forward, it’s not worth the extra work and effort. We tell ourselves that we’ve done well and “we’re good.”
Nope. You’re sliding back. You’re losing everything you worked for. You might not feel it today, but you’ll wake up one day and suddenly realize with horror what has happened.
Then you’ll be staring at months of work to rebuild while feeling crushed by the realization that your progress has been undone.
It’s the point when most quit or find an excuse to get out. But you can always start building again.
Or, you can keep up with the work of life and accept that it’s a grind and keep plodding forward.
You’ve probably heard the saying that “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” That’s an idea that is not only for generals but for all of us.
If the plan is a complex attack that comes from the east because the strategy is to disrupt the enemy supply line, but the moment you launch that eastern attack it is blocked and the weather turns bad, you’re not married to that exact plan when you understand the wider strategy of disrupting enemy supply lines. You simply adapt and keep pressing forward with a new or modified plan.
Who cares what color paint and which exact brushes Van Gogh used? The moment you or I try painting, our initial plan of making a masterpiece of completely derailed.
Instead of focusing on the exact formula that Van Gogh used, we should focus on learning his principles. How to paint light and shadow, how to work with perspective, proportion, and colors.
If we know the principles of painting well, we can adapt and create our own masterpiece.
Seldom does the formula of others else apply to us. But principles always apply.
Everybody makes mistakes, but the effective person is willing to change when he sees that he’s made a mistake and fix the problem.
It’s usually our first reaction to become defensive when somebody points out a shortfall or error in our ways, yet if we shift our life focus from appearing perfect to the people around us and instead focus on being better in every aspect of life and work, it’s easier to crush the pride that causes us to get defensive when an error is discovered.
We all make mistakes, but only some of us fix them.
It’s all about the start. Close down all distractions and start right now. If you don’t start the day will get away and you’ll spend tomorrow trying to make it up. Then when you don’t start tomorrow, you’ll be two days behind.
Before you know it, you wake up and you’re a month, six months, a year, two years, or more behind schedule.
Do you have two years to waste? If you don’t have two years to waste, don’t waste the first three hours of your day.
The first step to productivity, on a day-to-day scale, is to believe that the first three hours of your day must be undistracted and you can have nothing divide you from your plan.
I took my kids to see some fireworks on Saturday evening. I grabbed my camera and figured it would be fun to get some long exposures of the fireworks shooting into the skies with my kid’s faces lit up by the light of the explosions. Maybe I could capture some fun expressions and some cool moments.
I assumed that the battery was charged as I grabbed the camera and tripod and loaded up the car before driving fifteen minutes into town to see the fireworks.
You probably see where this story is going. I got zero fireworks photos because the camera had so little battery that when I pressed the shutter, the whole camera just shut off and didn’t start back up.
I was too far from home to get a new battery. I assumed and didn’t prepare.
I’m pretty stupid a lot of the time. this episode reminded me of a quote I heard a while ago. “The problem with stupid people is that they’re too dumb to realize it.”
Sometimes that quote makes many of my decisions make much more sense.
Working on the right stuff is the important thing when we’re trying to be more effective and streamlined in our business. It’s not about how many windows you installed today, it’s about whether that window job was the right one for your company.
We get trapped thinking that the only “real” work is picking up a hammer and nails, but they ensure that the physical effort is correctly used, there is some thinking work that should happen behind the scenes.
Take time for the thinking work–and actually spend the time focused on thinking and being creative–and then pick up the hammer and start swinging.
It takes it out of you when you have a day out of the ordinary. Maybe you went to the zoo with your family. All that walking, the heat, the sun, the driving, the general excitement, and all of that for 8-10 hours. It’s draining.
But the body is pretty awesome. If you do a few big “zoo” days every week, your body will adapt and those 10 hour days feel normal. You aren’t wiped out and you’ve gotten more resilient.
The body adapts. Just because it feels very difficult today, tomorrow, and the third day, doesn’t mean it will be difficult forever. You will adapt.
How can you expect the absolute highest level of performance from the people around you if you don’t first expect it from yourself?
Everyone sees through the guy who screams at the people around him over everything, they see that he doesn’t hold himself to the same standard he demands of others, they see that he doesn’t hold himself responsible, and they see his sloppiness.
All of that leads to a general lack of respect which people are usually too afraid to vocalize because he’ll flip out and you’ll lose your job and also, he doesn’t accept responsibility so there is a near-zero percent chance that he will ever change.
You can’t change him, but you change you. Hold yourself to a higher standard and I’m going to work on holding myself to a higher standard as well.
The things you do on your own are what matter, not the things that you’re forced to do. When you can learn to love doing the things that you would be forced to do, that’s where you strike the perfect balance of happiness and productivity.
You must develop and practice self-discipline to change your life. It’s difficult and if you don’t keep up with it, you slide backward and lose momentum and punctuality, but it’s the most rewarding thing you’ll probably ever do.