How to hack time and resources to do more with less

Today I want to share a tool that is allowing me to live a more meaningful life.

Have you ever arrived home from work happy with that achievement of your team —which took months to build—only to find yourself faced with a major protest by your partner who feels ignored and left out?

Did you ever have that feeling that if things go well at work, it's because it won't be long before a storm brews again on the home front (and vice versa)?

When planning our life, we tend to choose those projects that we like the most or that we think will earn us the most money and sometimes we don't really consider the pain that will be caused in the future by not contemplating other people or activities: our children, partners, grandparents, friends, hobbies, or our physical well-being.

And this is how, in conjunction with the news that they finally offered us a better position, a divorce can show up, and in the new found solitude we discover that our old friendships are in a vegetative state; or the demands of your exhausted body, so often ignored, end up detonating some type of allergy or stomach problem; or maybe that child, who no longer knows how to get our attention, makes a bad choice that could have been prevented with a little more care and affection.

I guess some ways of managing life are ideal if you want to spend the rest of your life attempting to achieve a balance... If you’re looking to find a balance between your personal and professional life, it’s because today you’re probably feeling unbalanced, and that this imbalance has been generated by an unbalanced approach. Dissociated.

In other words, thinking about your different areas separately usually leads to areas of your life competing to receive a small part of your limited time and money.

On the other hand, it's much better to consider a life that doesn’t complicate our lives. That is, an integrated life (sure, it takes a little more effort to plan and formulate).

The tool I want to share is a multi-impact or multipurpose strategy: we call it the Skewer Strategy because just like a brochette, it seeks to traverse the greatest number of areas at the same time.

First, let's see what we usually do when we seek to organize ourselves: we take an area of our life or our work—not always the most important one—and we think of a project that allows us to achieve results in that area. So, we confront each area until we have no more time in the day, or money in the account to finance another project. In this way we can impact in some areas and inevitably we usually have a list of projects and passions that have been postponed for a later date.

The approach is not all bad until we consider that our life begins and ends. Maybe we don't like to think about this, but the truth is that we have a limited time. Accepting this reality can have the power to awaken us and make us aware that postponing certain passions may mean that they'll never be real part of our life.

The other thing that often complicates things is the criteria we use to choose one project over another. Often the criterion ends up being the affinity or the rough idea that it will take less effort and dedication, ignoring many other interests.

The Skewer Strategy is different. It consists of doing less but, nevertheless, obtaining more impact. Instead of focusing on doing many things looking to impact some areas of your life, the Skewer Strategy invites you to focus on doing just a few things, but in a way that impacts many of your priority areas.

Let's look at this in numbers. If, for example, you choose a project for each of the three main areas of your life you will do 3 projects and then you will have ? or 33% of your resources (attention, time, money) dedicated to each one.

But, instead of that, you could hack the time choosing a multipurpose project that impacts on those 3 important areas of your life at the same time. In this way you’ll invest 33% of your resources in a single project for which you’ll obtain triple the output, satisfaction, recognition or whatever it is you are looking for. In addition to that you’ll have a 66% of free time and resources that you can choose how to use.

Instead of resolving area by area, start by listing in order of priority the areas of your life that matter most to you. It doesn't matter if they are work related or personal. What matters is that they are important to you.

Only then can you ask yourself: What project would impact the greatest number of my priority areas? And you're going to let that question continue working inside you.

Now, the criterion for choosing one project over another won’t just be about personal taste or the short-sighted view that results from an area by area view.

Now, the winning project—the one that will receive our funding in time and money—will be the one that impacts more areas with the same effort.

As you practice this strategy, it will become a philosophy of life that can be summarized as follows:

Written by Diego Rejtman and Guillermo Echevarria

PS: On my next article I will share how I've been applying this skewer tool in my life. Stay tuned...