#21 — Why the single most important thing you have is time (and how to protect it)

Some weeks ago I tweeted about a day in which I packed 15 meetings (my personal record): all of them super productive, all of them perfectly on time. It was fun. Several people wanted to know how I did it and shortly after an interesting conversation on how to efficiently manage time emerged. Time is your single most important scarcest resource, even more than money. You can make money, in fact; you cannot make time. And I know something about how to optimize time… but not because I’m smart, all the contrary.

Because I made all the possible mistakes. But I also learned from them and from keeping track of how I spent my time over -well- time. After all you can’t improved what you don’t measure, right? So I started tracking how I spent every 30 mins of every hour of every day of every week… for almost three years. Since July 2011, to be precise. It’s more than 48,000 30-mins slots, yes. Here’s how I changed my behavior, hoping you may benefit as well from what I found out without having to go through the same hassle:

1. Lots of people live on their inbox: I did it for a while, and I ended up working 100h/week and *still* having pending stuff to be taken care over the weekend. I was always working, always behind, always kind of pissed off. In that moment I decided that time is gold, and -more importantly- that effectiveness/impact is not measured in hours. So instead of living on my inbox, I live on my calendar now; and how I schedule my time to achieve what result, is the single most important thing I do for myself. You should do yourself a favor and make the same decision right now.
2. You have 24 hours in a day: like everyone else, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein included. First of all, like it or not, you *need* sleep: that’s 6-8 hours to take off right away. I am fully rested with 6 hours, I’m lucky; the vast majority of the people needs 7-8 hours. That’s an inelastic demand of your body, you can ignore it for a bit but you’ll eventually pay the price if you do. So stop fooling yourself and give yourself physical energy: you’ll be hugely more efficient when you do and the world will smile again at you. Trust me: I slept as little as 2 hours/night, I was a jerk when I did.
3. Think of your schedule as real-estate. It really is. What value are your next 2 hours generating and for *who*? There are many definitions of value, yours can be very different from mine, and several beneficiaries as well (you? your family? your significant other? your boss? your friend?). Divide the not-sleep time in categories, I use four… each of them with distinctive colors in my schedule, one or more, so I know at glance how I’m allocating/spending my days/weeks. The categories are: productive work, productive collaterals, growth time, personal time.
4. Let me say loud and clear: answering emails is not work, traveling is not work, doing networking is not work. Ask yourself: what are the 3-5 important and urgent things I can do this week to generate a meaningful impact in my organization? This is “productive work”, what generates an increase in revenue or an improvement in a key metric. Define those priorities at the beginning of the week and measure yourself against them at the end of the week. Allocate and lock down actual hours in your schedule to execute, 4-6 hours/day is good enough for *focused* work.
5. Then there are the “productive collaterals”: everything that needs to be done but it’s not *real* work. Answering incoming emails, reading industry news, scheduling or following-up meetings, attending industry events… also Facebook could be part of this nowadays, if relevant. The point? The vast majority of the people say that they’re busy (“OMG I’m catching a breath now for the first time in days!”) but are actually only prioritizing for these lower-quality things. They need to be done, ok; but generate relative impact at best. Make time for them when work is done.
6. Track your daily/weekly small wins. What did you do extraordinarily well today? Also: what went surprisingly bad today? I call them *wow moments* and I put them in my calendar as well to keep me motivated to push harder. You know what the say about exponential growth, right? Do 1% better every day and one year from now you’ll have grown 37X. Thirty seven times. How powerful is that? You want to make sure, of course, that the positive wow moments are substantially more frequent of the negative wow moments, if this doesn’t happen you’ve a problem.
7. Talking about growth, allocate time for it. By executing the above, you should be able to generate meaningful impact while keeping the working hours to 50-70 per week. If you’re a founder that’s a *great* result. Since you freed some quality time, you can allocate 1-2 hours/day to become better at something not directly correlated with what you need to know right now, but to what excites you and what you may need to know 3-6 months from now. Search, experiment, pay forward. This will give you back some of the mental energy you spent in the rest of the day.
8. Finally, take time to give some love; both to yourself and your loved ones. That’s “personal time”, everything generating emotional energy: you like to watch TV series or read comics or exercise? Do it. You deserve to relax and get some time off from your professional self. Also talk to your parents (I bet 10 bucks that don’t do it very often), actively allocate time with your significant other and leave also some room to get together with your closest friends. Whatever errand you need to run (laundry, shopping, haircut, etc) goes also here *after* the above.
9. During the weekend, crunch your week’s data. Were you able to deliver all the priorities of the week? How many hours did you spend on productive work versus productive collaterals? Did you pay forward a bit? Did you learn something new? Did you generate meaningful impact? Did you work a reasonable number of hours overall? Did you acknowledge what good the other people around you did? What can you improve next week? This is what I *personally* ask myself, you should also review what’s important and relevant to you at this specific time.
10. Also allow for detours in your schedule. Constantly optimizing your time, day after day and week after week, is definitely energy-draining. Use the weekend to slow down a bit and allow flexibility in the weekday schedule. If this morning you feel like you need to take a couple more hours of sleep, just do it: you’ll be definitely more efficient the rest of the day/week. Reward yourself with your favorite cake when it’s time to celebrate a nice “wow moment” or a big goal reached. And of course serendipity happens, so be open to see things from a new perspective.