Find Another Day in your Week

We all know the drill, write down a list, prioritize, use a cool method, cross stuff off…yes, we get it. Simultaneously we understand that Warren Buffet and Jimmy Buffet both have 168 hours each week. We need to sleep, exercise, be quiet and mindful, connect on social media, disconnect from social media and, oh and maybe earn a living. 

What if it seems there is no more bandwidth? Nothing else I can cram in? What if I can’t think and can’t “turn it off” because I’ve been in firefighting mode for years? What then?

1.      Admit to yourself you can’t find more of you to get more done. 

There is no more to give. In my days as an entrepreneur and father of six, I often felt like I needed to be in two places at once. More often three. Forget about Covey’s important but not urgent. My life seemed like a series of fire drills filled with the simultaneous terror that I always should be making better use of my time. It seemed like everyone else could.

 2.      There will never be an 8th day in the week or a 25th hour in the day.

Living with the mindset that I had to find more time didn’t help. I drove myself with a near obsession to multi-tasking. However, today the idea of multi-tasking is as popular as Lucky Strikes and 8-Track tapes. But for me, it seemed the only way.

 3.      The “do NOT do list”.

You can find another thing to do but you cannot find more time. The challenge is to “find” time that you are using on something or someone you shouldn’t. A valuable tool for success here: The do NOT do list. 

Sticking to a do NOT do list can lead to incredible results. Let’s do the math. With five business days a week, Tuesday is one of the five business days or 20% of the week. Stop doing 20% of the stuff you are doing now.  Suddenly your do NOT do list yields another day in the week.

You could decide that 20% of what you are doing should be done by others. If it doesn’t make you happy and it doesn’t make you money - Do NOT do it. 

I suck at painting. So, I prep like crazy in hopes of doing a decent job. When finished, I’ve taken four times as much time as a professional painter. Am I saving money? Well, that’s what I’d like to think. Does it save me time to paint a couple of rooms myself? NO. At my bill rate, the 10 hours I spent painting cost me about $3,000 of time. Ouch.  I put painting on my Do NOT do list and called John the Painter. John's hourly rate is 1/10th of mine. Better still, the painting was done when I got home from a bike ride I enjoyed.

Can’t I learn how to build my own website? It looks easy in the promo. Shouldn’t I get copied on every email in my department to keep up with what’s happening? Why not start every day by going through my email? There might be something important I guess. My browser opens with a whole bunch of tiles on interesting news stories. Surely one of them is worth reading. “These child stars now look incredible…" “Donald Trump’s Russian mistress weighs in”…The Real reason GM is building a plant in Michigan instead of Mexico.” Sure, I can probably find something worth reading about, but if I open that browser 10 times each day, yes it adds up. My do NOT do list is getting longer. 

I changed my browser home page to “about:” and no more distracting headlines and lists of the top 10 ways to lose pounds of rotting sludge I’ve been carrying around. I just “found” another hour.

Being brave, I asked my wife to add one or two things to my do NOT do List. In no time, she had five for me to think about. Commuting at rush hour when I don’t have to. Relaxing at the gym when intense and fast workouts burn more calories. Putting mail in a pile to read when I find the time, then a few more piles when I open and sort it. Using an entire hour as my default to schedule client meetings when I could start with half hour time slots. She even recommended I target a time limit in advance for casual projects.

You can't multi-task yourself to sanity. Write your own “do NOT do list” now. Don’t put it off. For other tips on finding time, reach me at linkedin.com/in/markgonska