Goal time versus clock time

It’s 6.30 in the morning and a company director is walking along the line of cars parked in the firm’s underground car park.

As he passes each car, he touches the bonnet to see if it’s warm. He is checking to see if the cars that are in before him were parked overnight or have indeed been driven that morning.

The director sends an email at 2:30am. Not because he was working that late, but because he set the timer on his Outlook to send it then, to give the impression to his colleagues that he was.

I hope that none of us are in a corporate culture where time spent at work (perceived or otherwise) correlates positively with prospects for promotion.

Nonetheless we can mistakenly equate the number of hours we work with the likelihood of success. The more the better.

This is what I call managing to clock time and invariably leads to frustration and disappointment – days going by with little or nothing to show for the effort.

Clock time leads us to be busy fools.

Clock time allows us to say to ourselves that we put in the hours, even if those hours are spent on distractions that have nothing to do with our goals.

By contrast goal time holds us accountable to what needs to done and does not count the hours.

My father who retired at the age of 50 as a colonel in the British Army, then went on to work for NATO, thereby pursuing two successful careers, would frequently be home in time for tea at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. He never bothered that people might think him work shy. He just explained to me that he knew what he needed to do for the day to be a success and when he had achieved that, his working day was over.

As I write this (a trap I set myself on a public webinar recently) this task was one of the three goals that I committed to this morning, in writing, in my daily journal. It happens to be about 5:20 pm. But the time is irrelevant. I know that along with my other scheduled commitments today I will finish working when I have finished writing this piece – the third and final of my goals for the day.

I also know that by ingraining the habit (using my journal) of achieving three things each day, every day, in line with my goals I will not only win the day, but the week, month and year.

Clock time would have me continuing, after finishing this piece, to work on things that I hadn’t previously identified as important for today, probably for at least an hour or two more, to no discernible impact other than intruding into my valuable downtime.

We know we spend the time. The only question is how. Working to the clock or to your goals?