Having the odds in your favour

Last week I mentioned how important it is to assign a monetary value to your working hour. It doesn't matter at what stage you are in your career - understanding how to calculate the value of your time at work can bring about a lot of changes in your approach to your responsibilities. In my case it significantly altered the way I saw my role within my firm.

Once you've made these calculations you can determine which actions can be delegated to others, which ones should be cut, and, above everything else:

You truly become proactive with your time. You decide how best to spend your time and you realize that it's up to you to maximize its efficiency.

What does it mean to raise your odds in your favour? I look at my time management and decision making process in terms of how likely they are to benefit - my business, myself, my relationships.

I'm going to share a practical example of how I use this framework in my daily routine. I've been using these business planners for 1,5 years now and my life in many ways became more organized, not only during working hours. I find them really effective because they incorporate all the ideas I've been sharing in past few weeks in my articles.

Let's begin.

The entire planner is designed for 6 months, but first section asks you to write down your plans for:

• 5 years
• 4 years
• 3 years
• 2 years
• 1 year
• next 6 months
• and you must do it in that particular order: starting from 5 years and going down the list. If you want to know why, check out my previous article about revert planning .

There are few key areas of development the planner proposes to concentrate on: skills, habits, relationships, passions, money, health, and one another of your choice. It is essential that you consider all of these as it will be much easier to keep everything in balance.

I really had to dig deep and ask myself what really mattered to me and what my general objectives were. It took a while, but once I started putting down notes instead of just thinking about them, it got easier and easier over time. Writing gives you the clarity of thought and allows to pinpoint what really matters. There are no bad answers there as long as you remain direct with yourself.

The next section focuses on your daily habits divided into two major categories: daily beneficial and detrimental habits.

It teaches you to be more self-aware and have a laser focus on your current circumstances and daily routine. Here's some of my notes:

Good ones:

• waking up without snoozing
• no phone during first hour after waking up
• meditation
• power hour at work - really zoning in on what I need to get done that day
• reading before sleep
• no screen-time 30 minutes before going to bed

Bad ones:

• scrolling through my phone in bed
• visiting random websites during work time
• no regular sleep schedule
• heavy food in the evening
• alt-tabbing and multitasking all the time

Then you zone in on your next month goals. Here's how it's organized:

• 4 objectives that need to get done
• how are you going to do these things?
• 1 or 2 habits you're going to practice this next month
• How much time you're going to dedicate to education? What are you going to do exactly?

It's recommended to put a time reference next to each item so that you can review it afterwards. If you can't track your progress or determine whether you actually did your goals, your plans are not written properly then. I'll touchbase on how to phrase your plans better another time.

As for your month planning, the planner asks you to review the following areas:

• relaxation, free time
• career
• family
• finances
• personal growth
• spirituality
• health
• your environment, surroundings

Review is a key part to check whether you contributed enough energy and time towards these. Without any due diligence, the odds are that you're not going to stick to the strategies presented here. Speaking from my own experiences I know that is the case.

Now that you've considered your next month, the planner offers weekly tips on various topics - mostly self-improvement ones. I've just opened my planner on a random week, and here's an example of the tip: do not use a snooze function in phone, and if possible, leave your phone out of your bedroom. I like that one, because after hearing my alarm, I have to get up to get it... much easier for me to get on my feet in the morning.

How about your next week? Which 5 things you need to do to consider it productive? Which tasks are of less priority? Which one habit you're going to practise?

Not only that, but after a week the planner asks you to review your last week and ask yourself if you were productive, what were you successful at, and finally what you're grateful about - I love that last part as it's very easy to be in a constant race without realizing how lucky you already are in the first place. Again, regular review is key here.

Lastly, there are pages for each day, following the same principles already demonstrated: your top 4 priorities for the day, other tasks, self-development time.

I can DM you a file I've built on the basis of that planner so that you can see yourself if that works for you.

Sounds like a hell of a lot of work, right? Are you telling me you spend hours every day just writing things in that planner of yours?

I would be lying if I told you that I use this planner to 100% efficiency - not all weeks are that planned, not all days are that organized, but using this planner regularly does increase my chances of getting what I want. It's about raising your odds of success in whichever area you deem important.

It's also obvious that if you've never written any plans you're going to feel discomfort. First day at work, first date, first anything will always make us feel out of our comfort zone. Any new habit always starts off this way and there are scientific grounds to back it up.

4 stages of competence were first introduced in the 60s at New York University. They can be visually illustrated this way:

• So, if you've never done any planning in your life, you're at the bottom of the pyramid as you don't know what you don't know.
• After reading today's article you might go into 'wrong analysis' stage, as you now understand the gaps in your knowledge in that area. You've increased your awareness and now you know what you don't know.
• Once you've started writing your goals following the right principles, you become aware of that skillset, and you can use it well once you dedicate your time and energy to it.
• Finally, if you consistently practice this habit, it finally becomes a part of you and you no longer have to dedicate energy or conscious thought to it. It can be compared to one's brushing their teeth - it becomes an obvious thing to do regularly.

I can't stress enough how essential it is to realize that any skill follows these principles. Going through that mindset shift was really huge for me as I understood that the reason why I was so terrible at organizing my time wasn't because 'I am this way and there's nothing I can do about it' - it just means that I'm on the second step of the competence hierarchy, and I haven't put enough practice into mastering that specific skill. Perhaps, I require more time to get this right than an average Joe, but it doesn't mean I should ignore it. I simply created excuses in my mind not to do anything about it to avoid the feeling of discomfort I described before.

Bruce Lee is to have said the following:

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

I always remind myself that daily habits do make a massive difference over the longer stretches of time. That is the reason why I must continuously work on my fundamentals and ensure that the basics are repeated enough times so that they become effortless to execute.

And, once somebody practiced that one kick 10 000 times it means that unconscious competence is achieved. No question about it.

If I can reach that top of the pyramid in the competence hierarchy with one specific activity that's a part of daily routine I repeat every single day I will become much more efficient.

That leads my to my final point today. Everything I've been discussing has pretty much no downswide to it. In other words: if you give it a go and implement these strategies, and you find out it's not worth your time, you don't lose or risk losing anything.

The upside potential is there as once you invest your time, and you put your effort into it, you can actually improve your efficiency and slowly increase your chances of success, whatever the definition means to you: personal happiness, great relationships, successfull career and so on.

There is one specific model on decision making that helped me understand how to better make decisions so that I further increase my chances of getting where I want to be.

Bayesian decision theory explains how we should always calculate the odds of every decision and make one that has least risks associated with it. To put it simply: take an action that has odds in your favour.

I'll leave you to go through the scientific explanation of how the framework works, but the way I apply it practically is pretty straightforward:

Does doing "x" has a high probability of benefiting my situation/my clients/my relationships/my passions with very little risks?

Going through emails all day as a Senior Key Account Manager is not a good use of my time as I also need to do research and proper market analysis to see if my clients run checks that need to get run. Perhaps instead of reading a 20 email trail I can clarify everything in one 10 minute call?

I need to continuously learn about the background screening market, what are the most efficient ways of doing it?

Sharing key data metrics with my Clients has to be done on quarter by quarter basis at least, some may require them each month. How best to present them? Which metrics are key for them? How do I interpet the data to have a clear picture on hiring tendencies?

You assess your decisions through the lenses of which are more likely to benefit your position within the firm, your teams, your businesses. And you make assessments on which actions require least risks.

Actions that benefit all parties are worthwhile as long as there are not too many risks involved that can be measured. If you aren't sure how to take your role or your business to next level, you can make similar assumptions and decide which actions more likely to benefit everyone.

One might wonder whether any framework on decision making is needed in the first place. Well, again, it's all about raising the odds in your favour, and thus, framework on decision making can't hurt. There is another reason on top of it: biases.

I've been explaining my organizing skills to few friends of mine and it was really challenging to get my point across. I was going through my data to showcase the benefits, but at one point I realized that probably I was wasting my time. I could tell that nobody was listening.

And then it occurred to me - I realized that they held a belief that none of the things I describe can work, and if you're in that bubble and you refuse to consider you might be wrong, it's impossible for another party to convince you.

Various biases that we have is the answer to that dilemna I experienced. I came across this first time when I was at Silesian university learning about students' psychology (for those who don't know, I'm a qualified English teacher). Here is some that are most common:

• Confirmation bias - you only rely on information that are aligned with your beliefs. This explains why two people may look at the same fact and never agree with one another solely because their interpretation is affected by their judgement.
• Outcome bias - You review your decision based on the outcome, for example: you buy a gadget for $400. A week passes and a 50% discount appears and you blame yourself for not waiting, even though you couldn't have known that there would be one.
• Hindsight bias - "I knew it", even though you didn't. You decided to purchase a cheap smart phone, and after a week it barely works. You say you knew that it would be a bad idea, but at the time of buying you clearly thought otherwise.

If one holds a belief that being more efficient with your time brings about positive changes in your both personal and career lives there is nothing I can write that would convince you otherwise.

This is why it's worth being aware of these so that you're able to at least consider the opposing point of view and question it rationally, without immediately jumping into conclusions.

As a final thought: we all have to start with the basics and look at our habits while considering our long-term goals. Applying four stages of learning methodology, understanding biases, and knowing how to apply revert planning and other planning strategies can increase the efficiency of your time.

That is it for today! As always, please share a comment once you've applied revert planning or mention another bias you're familiar with. Or openly disagree with all the statements, I don't mind as long as it's not influenced by confirmation bias! ; )

Cheers!

T.Z