Impact or Activity?

It’s reasonable to expect that most of us, from birth to death, will have roughly 720,000 hours to live. That’s around 82 years.

By the time you reach the age when you can legally buy a beer you’ll have about 534,000 hours left and you’ll be solely responsible for how you’ll fill those hours.

Using the standard recommended sleep time, the number of waking hours left drops dramatically to roughly 356,000. Let that sink in. Once you reach 21 years of age, you only have, roughly, 356,000 waking hours left to live, laugh, work, and love. Some of us will have more time. Some will have less. Ideally, somewhere in those 356,000 hours you’ll remember and embrace who you are and why you’re here and your life will be beautifully framed by those two things.

As you meander through the time you have in this life, you’ll decide to fill your hours with activity, or pursue impact. And the two are not necessarily synonymous.

What do I mean by impact? Well the Webster definition is “The effect or influence of one person, thing, or action upon another.”

As I write this, I’m thinking more in terms of your life, and your work, being everything that it can and should be. And given the brevity of time we all have, I’m drawn to the idea that every hour of living, working, laughing, and loving should be spent for maximum impact.

You read that and immediately felt a little tired, right? If so, keep this in mind.

Busyness without impact is mentally and physically draining and leaves us feeling as if our time was misspent. When played correctly, and with wisdom and an openness to new methods and ideas, maximum impact can actually come from less activity, and more rest.

Not all activity leads to impact. In fact, activity can actually diminish impact. Impact is the fruit of the right kind of activity fertilized by times of learning, self-discovery, rest and enjoyment.

Here are a couple of examples, one from family life, and one from work:

You could gather the family around the living room, open a bunch of books, use Google and Youtube, maybe NatGeo on television, give everyone study assignments, and agree to meet every evening for two weeks to learn all about the Mediterranean region. Or, you could pack up the family and go spend two weeks touring the Mediterranean region. Which of those two scenarios is low impact activity, and which is high impact activity? One activity feels tiring and might change minds, with facts that will eventually be forgotten. The other will change everyone’s life, maybe even generations, with experiences that will be forever remembered.

Up until a few years ago I spent 30+ years in the corporate world, the last 20 or so in a struggling, dying industry on life support. It was an industry in desperate need of impact, not just activity. Yet every day I was forced to spend my time on very low impact tasks. Time that could have been spent on high impact activity was instead spent in pointless conference calls or meetings, manipulating meaningless spreadsheets and writing after-action reports about why things happened, that nobody really read or cared about. I actually had one boss, near the end of my time in that industry, who would make us write lengthy, time-consuming reports, then read them, and with a red pen circle things like missing punctuation marks or suggested changes in word syntax, and then send them back to us to re-write. All while the company was metaphorically bleeding out in the emergency room.

I may have about 163,000 of my hours left. I’ve reached the age where I’m far more interested in impact, than activity, in both my work and my personal life.

I want to experience life, not just endure it. I want to leave an indelible positive mark on the world with the time I have left. In my work, I want to eliminate pointless activity, minimize and automate necessary low-impact activity and pour myself fully into doing the things that will have long-term maximum impact for everyone involved.

How will you spend your time today? Filling your hours with activity for the sake of activity, to appear busy? Or making a real impact on your life, the life of others, the world around you, and the success of your business?