The Young Entrepreneur

Time management is bull*%#@!

Almost all young entrepreneurs can be more effective with their time.  Whether you are ultra busy or ultra idle - it doesn’t necessarily matter.  Because the way we treat time in modern society is fundamentally WRONG.  The time-management industry (sales of planners, organizers, consultants etc) is a billion dollar industry worldwide that doesn’t tackle the main problem with time mis-usage.

Despite the overwhelming flow and exposure to time management - The average hours in an Australian working week keeps rising! 

Why I don’t like time management

Well…truthfully, its because I’m lazy. I do not like the idea of having every single half hour of my day accounted for.  I’m not saying its a completely useless FAD (as a lot of people do claim to squeeze an extra 20% out of their days) - but I believe it is missing the core of the problem.

And that core is that we DONT KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH OUR TIME!  Conventional time management strategies ASSUME we know what to do with our time.  Often, we categorize our ‘to-do’ list into A,B.C and D priorities.  In practice, WE DONT KNOW what our priorities are - so we class everything as either A or B…

Leading us to the false conclusion that…we are short on time.  Well isn’t that the reason we were interested in time management in the 1st place?

A time obsessed culture

Its almost gotten to the point where we worship time.  Time lost can never be regained…scream the time worshippers of this world.  Working people cram every single minute of their day with activity - under the premise that they must use all the time they have.

Ask someone ‘How’s work?’ and hear them proudly reply… “Awww mate…I’m swamped”.  We perceive these busy people as successful, because they ‘use’ their time.  Whereas someone who doesn’t seem that busy is perceived as ‘lazy’ or ‘unmotivated’.

This comes from a deeply ingrained ‘work ethic’ that has been present throughout history.  It comes for our innate nature to see the virtue in hard work - and therefore enjoy it.  Whilst work ethic is fundamentally a good thing - it leads to a BAD MENTAL ASSUMPTION that effort = reward (Hint…IT DOESNT!).

How to make more time

Most of what we do is of low value to us.  The average way in which we spend our time does not further our greater goals or purpose.  Thus most of our effort is wasted on meaningless, or semi-meaningless tasks.

Have you ever noticed how most of your achievement is done in a minority of time?  Like that 2 hours of furious work before the deadline for an important project.  Whereas before that 2 hours, your time seemed to disappear into a black-hole… answering emails, the phone, unnecessary meetings etc.

So why micro-manage your low value activity into 30 min blocks - when you can overhaul  how you spend your time!

Based on an 80/20 principle of a time revolution - I will show you (In my next post :P) - how you can spend less time and achieve more!

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