People tell me all the time (and they tell YOU too) how hard it is to carve out time to do your create projects.
Each of us has a different approach… and when I saw this by Seth Godin, I just had to pass it along.
I don’t know if I would say you’d have a different approach to competing… but I do like the idea of changing and reframing our view of Time.
[I once had a supervisor who, when I complained of not having enough time, asked me to start saying, "I have time." It really didn't change how much time I had (have), but it really helped my perception. And it relieved some stress too. I still use that trick on occasion, when I feel pressured.]
Here’s Seth Godin:
One way to do indispensable work is to show up more hours than everyone else. Excessive face time and candle-burning effort is sort of rare, and it’s possible to leverage it into a kind of success.
But if you’re winning by cheating the clock, you’re still cheating.
The problem with using time as your lever for success is that it doesn’t scale very well. 20 hours a day at work is not twice as good as 18, and you certainly can’t go much beyond 24…
What would happen if you were prohibited from working more than five hours a day. What would you do? How would you use those five hours to become indispensable in a different way?
Go ahead, try it. Just for a week. See what happens. Even if you go back to ten, you’ll discover you’ve changed the way you compete.
I think I’ll try this idea of limiting the time available for tasks. When you have a lot of time to do a task that task can easily expand to fill the time available. Limiting the time should prevent this happening and leave more time for other things – that will have to be limited too. An alternative strategy is to leave everything to the last minute so your time is limited automatically but this tends to leave things a bit out of control.