What if I could show you a way to save several hours of your time per week. Would you be interested ?
In my last blogpost (on the Pomodoro technique), I talked about the importance of cutting up your day into segments. One thing I mentioned is that doing this helps me see when I am spending too much time on a task or activity and move on.
See, I am a perfectionist by nature – no point in trying to hide it. When I say that to people, they often don’t see the problem. Somehow, the word “perfectionist” has almost come to be synonymous with attention to detail, quality and not quitting until the job is done.
That’s all true, but something else is true as well. Perfectionism comes at a huge cost – your time. In the past (and the occasional slip-up), I frequently spent way too much time on things that did not matter. On some occasions, I was probably spending 3-4 times the amount of time I could have (and still gotten the desired result).
If you look at that over a week, month or year, that’s a lot of time just wasted.
When I first started using Pomodoro, it really forced me to think about what I was doing, and whether it was really worth the amount of time I am investing.
Since then, I have become convinced that most people (including myself) can only be productive for 5-6 hours per day. That doesn’t mean “working time”. It means the amount of time you spend performing at your peak, delivering truly great work and output that matters.
Now imagine compounding that time.
If you lose 30 minutes or even an hour on doing something that doesn’t add very much to your personal bottom line, that’s a lot. Imagine for a second you could shave off 30 minutes per day – that 2.5 hours per week.
Now imagine doing that for only four weeks. Relentlessly cutting away the things that don’t matter, and putting a time limit on those that do. Meetings ? 30 minutes instead of 60. Phone call ? 5 minutes.
E-mail ? Two blocks of 15 minutes per day.
Whatever you do, whatever your day looks like, chances are you will be able to find those 30 minutes. Imagine the impact after a week.
Two weeks. A month. A quarter. Six months. A year. Imagine what you could do with all that time.
The problem most of us have is not that we do not have enough time – it is that we are careless with how we spend it. Realizing this, and using a simple technique like this to make sure I spend more time where it matters – and less where it doesn’t – has truly changed my life around.
Maybe it could for you too.
