Achieving what’s Important

We all care about different goals.  Some want to run a marathon; others dream of getting a first for their art history degree.  Some care passionately about delivering an important project at work, and going on to yet greater responsibility and job satisfaction.  Others are frustrated with lack of success in completely different areas.  Whilst all our goals are very different, they are tied together with more commonality than differences.

What’s very clear is that achieving what’s important to us matters a lot.  It matters for our happiness, our financial security, and our ability to make choices in how we live our lives

There are just four steps to achieving your highest priorities:

1.      Be specific about what you want to achieve. 

2.      Plan what you will do to be successful.

3.      Make time to do the big, important things, as well as fitting in everything else.

4.      Stay in control of your days.

It’s short, specific and anyone can do it.  But not everyone does, even though there is a mountain of research to demonstrate that it works.  The reason for this anomaly, despite everyone’s protestations about how important their goals are, is equally short and specific.  It’s self-discipline.

It’s not that we don’t know what to do; it’s more that it’s a lot of effort to do it. 

A recent Horizon programme called “The Truth About Exercise” promised a way out of hours in the gym, at least for some people.  One minute of high intensity training, three times a week, can keep you fit.  Sounds good, doesn’t it?  Almost as good as a silver-bullet list for achieving your goals.  The difficulty is that one minute of truly high intensity training is not pleasant; I know because I’ve tried it.  I’d go as far as to say it’s unpleasant.  It’s certainly not an easy option, but it does get you fitter.

There’s the rub.  If you want to compete at the Olympics you have to get up early and train hard, so hard that you start to dream of opening a sweet shop in Devon.  If you want to achieve your goals you have to work at it - not on an exercise bike until you feel queasy, but at your desk until your brain hurts.  And then some.

The good news is that whilst you may not be a natural athlete, you can achieve important goals where you do have the necessary ability and motivation, providing you are disciplined enough to do what needs to be done.  Discipline isn’t a fashionable word, or a particularly agreeable notion in a world of instant-gratification.  On the plus side, if you want something badly enough, you don’t have to wait to win the lottery.  You can go out there and get it.

Want to do Great Things? Be Under-Employed

My yoga teacher was always telling me to slow down: “What’s the rush? Put your suitcases down and let the train carry you along”.  I was always the one late to the class, worrying about something and fidgeting to leave before the end.  “We are human beings”, he would calmly point out, “not human doings”.

“Just being” was, and still is, very hard for me.  While I could hardly sit still for a moment, he seemed to spend his days taking long walks in the woods, practicing yoga and volunteering at the local hospice.  His serenity and calmness was a world away from my life of busy activity.

But rush doesn’t accomplish much.  Running around trying to get lots done, without time to think or rest, leads to burn out and confusion.  James Watson, who together with Francis Crick discovered DNA, said “It’s necessary to be slightly under-employed if you are to do something significant”.  I’ve always found that a rather shocking and controversial idea when I try to make good use of every moment.  Their breakthrough was one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the last Century, and laid the foundation stones for molecular biology.

Beethoven also understood the need to let his mind relax and come back refreshed.  He worked only from sunrise until two or three o’clock in the afternoon.  His mornings also included a number of breaks outdoors, where he “worked while walking.”  He never worked in the evenings.

Beethoven struggled with his compositions, working and reworking themes over and over again, yet he created some of the most beautiful music ever composed. 

Whilst it is counter-intuitive, it seems that making time to do nothing pays off; even if your ambitions are less lofty than discovering DNA or writing a symphony.

The value of knowing where time goes

Time and tide, as we all know, wait for no man.  There’s no better time of year to be reminded of that as we review the past year.  What projects did you complete?  Which ones weren’t even started?  What should have got done, but didn’t?  What was important to you?  What was your greatest success?  What was your greatest failure?  What would you do differently if you could replay the year again?

It’s an interesting exercise, and if you haven’t yet reviewed the year I’d urge you to do so.  I gained a number of insights from reviewing my 2011.

Certainly, the big things that I accomplished during 2011 were done with the aid of quite a bit of planning, focus and time.  Now that’s not to say that everything that gets planed, focus on and time to will have a successful outcome, unfortunately, but it does increase the chances.  And when I look back over my life at my major successes, I also recall the planning, focus and time that went into them. 

Which brings me to the value of knowing where time goes.  Because of the nature of my work, I analyse how my time is spent.  It provides an invaluable additional dimension to reviewing the year.  I can see how much time I spent on various different activities, and how much time I spent on my important projects.  It gives me another lever to make changes – whether I should be giving more or less time to certain activities or projects.

I don’t think many people do this, perhaps because it reminds us of “clocking in and clocking out” and “command and control” type management systems.  No one likes someone breathing down their necks to see what they are doing every minute of the day.  And sometimes we don’t want to see the unpalatable truth ourselves.  But, certainly for me, unless I know where my time goes, I’m in danger of not giving enough attention to the important-but-not-urgent things. 

Eisenhower apparently remarked that “what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”  Which may go some way to explain why important things don’t always get done.

So one of my New Year resolutions is to track my time more carefully, and analyse it side by side with the big things I’ve want to do this year.  As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of measuring things.  It will be interesting to see whether increased focus in this area brings about improvements.

Deciding what’s important and why time management isn’t

You can’t manage time.  It’s like trying to manage your cat: a frustrating and consistently unsuccessful activity.  Time passes regardless of how important or trivial whatever you are doing is.  The sea ebbs and flows, the wind blows, and time passes.  All are unmanageable and completely disinterested in our minutiae.

What you can manage is yourself and your choice of what to do.  So time management has always seemed something of a daft name for our efforts to be more effective.  Self-management might be more apt. 

But time is a useful way of measuring our focus and energy on tasks.  Or indeed the time we spend not doing things.  It is, however, nothing more than useful; it’s not the whole story.  That’s because we can’t measure the value of our activities over a given period of time.  The value of what we are doing has a much bigger impact on our success than how long it took to do.

So that’s the first and biggest secret of time management – decide what’s important.  Because unless you know what’s important and what’s not, you don’t know where best to spend your time.  Or to say it another way, you won’t know how best to spend your life.

Managing your Time as a Master Builder

Time management is a long established but curious management idea. Time, after all, is a measurement like length or depth or height. Just like physical dimensions, we can fill it with things. So a mile along a street might be filled with houses, an hour can be filled with events. Events such as the ticking of the clock, the writing of a report, or the watching of a TV programme. Or sleeping, or eating lunch, or having an argument. Or planning the following day’s work, or taking a nap, or doing nothing (a tricky one).

So time management isn’t so much the management of time, which will pass no matter what we do, but the management of the events that fill our time.

Of course not all events can be managed. There is nothing we can do about a colleague coming in to work in a lousy mood. We can’t control the Porsche trying to overtake just before a bend, nor the weather. But we can attempt to manage the events that are important to us.

Our choice of “events” or “things to do” during each hour is what determines the course of our businesses, our careers, and our lives. Just as what we choose NOT to do during each hour has the same (but less obvious) effect.

If we think of ourselves as master builders, coming to work each day to build houses, hotels or mansions on our day-long streets, we get more of a physical picture of what we are doing. We are building little houses along our days. Some days we barely manage to complete the foundations for a rickety garden shed, other days we map out grand plans for palatial extensions.

As you start your day, have a look down the street you are currently working on and inspect yesterday’s building work. Was it done according to the architect’s plans? Are you happy with the quality of the workmanship? Are other builders briefed so that tomorrow’s work can start on time? Are you almost ready to start roofing work or have you been labouring on the foundations for far too long?

Most of us manage a multitude of projects, and it can be helpful to think of abstract notions such as time, reports or software as physical things. Time as a street that we are about to walk, and our day’s work as the buildings we are constructing. Concepts such as foundations, levels, and rooms, are useful for many different types of work, whether they are tangible or intangible. Happy building!

Ten reasons time is so precious

1. You can make more money, but you can’t make more time.
2. You can store money to be used later, but time stops for no man (a bit like the tide).
3. You can borrow money to achieve an important goal, but you can’t beg, steal or borrow more time.
4. We all work with the same 24 hours, no ifs or buts and no way to inherit a tidy pile more.
5. Most resources can be bought, borrowed, sold or lent. Time cannot be traded, and so is the scarcest of all resources.
6. You can’t swap time for all the tea in China. Unless you have a plan. In which case time can be used to earn a lot of the tea in China, a bigger house or a faster car.
7. Writing a cheque won’t allow you to spend a sunny afternoon in the park with those you love, but using some of your precious time will.
8. No one ever laid on their death bed wishing they had spent more time in the office. But I suspect a few wished they had spent their time more wisely, doing the things that were important to them.
9. Time flies like the wind, and fruit flies like bananas.
10. Once a day is done, you cannot get it back again, whether it was well spent or frittered away unthinkingly. But tomorrow, said Scarlet, is another day.

What’s your time worth?

It’s a funny old question, what is your time worth? Do you know the monetary value of your time? Do you believe the figure and use it in your day to day thinking? Some do, but not too many.

In some ways valuing your time as if it were money is spot on. But at the same time it implies we are spending a small fortune as we relax watching TV, or take an hour or two to go to the gym. Yet both activities are needed unless we intend burning out early in pursuit of the holy grail of time management.

Whatever you think your time might be worth; very few think it is worthless.

Time is the basic building block on which we create value for each other and the companies we work for. Relatively few people, however, measure their time in the same way that they measure money. Yet as Jim Rohn pointed out “Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but cannot get more time.”

One of the reasons we don’t measure what we do with our time is that it is difficult. If someone came up with some software we could set running in the background that measured how we spent each minute we would find it quite illuminating – shocking even.

And what abut the time we spend thinking about problems – in the shower or driving to and from work. Half-time, if you like: half-thinking, half-driving, half-working and half-listening to the radio. Your maths teacher wouldn't like the arithmetic, but it’s pretty much how the brain works.

I routinely spend days recording my time in fine detail. It is always instructive. But it always takes some effort to do, and as I get more tired I find it more difficult to measure my time on tasks accurately.

As software developers we have to log the time we spend on project work. There are many other professional services companies who do the same – consultants, accountants, and solicitors all have to know how long they spend on each client’s work. Certainly our time records provide valuable insights into how long things actually take, rather than how long we would like them to take.

So measuring time can be a valuable addition in the armoury to improve performance. Either occasionally to gain insights into how you work, or systematically so you can see where everyone’s time goes.

Measuring time certainly poses some big challenges, but equally could reveal some big performance lessons. And it can be a great help in figuring out why something or someone isn't performing as they should.