Time Marches On

DO you hear it? Listen carefully. It is very, very faint and easily drowned out by the louder random noises that clutter your life. There it is the subtle sound of sand running through the hourglass of
your life. It is the invisible, inevitable process of time ticking away never to be regained, never to be reused.
This morning, unless you are one of the unfortunate souls whose time was permanently cut short, you woke to 86 400 seconds of precious time to be spent in any way you see fit.
Here is a nasty experiment, subtract your age from 70. Now take that number, divide it by 0,7. The answer is the average percentage of your life you have left.
If you are on the other side of 35 the answer is a real shocker.
We do not really have a lot of time. So I get rather annoyed when someone tries to waste it.
I spent some time on the doingbusiness.org  website, part of the World Bank Group, after someone suggested I look at it.
If you google “doing business in Zimbabwe” the first search result is our national profile so I would say it is worth having a look.
The results were not very encouraging: 90 days to register a business from scratch, 106 days to get electricity to a new factory, 53 days on exports.
It was a painful read. Ninety days to register a business is only three months, but compared to South Africa’s 19, America’s six, and China’s just over 30, it looks like a living hell.
Did you know that there are 49 taxes and rates to be paid during a business year?
It is all there giving potential investors a snapshot of business in our nation and the burden of bureaucracy that snares us up.
The burden that wastes the little precious time that we all have.
Now you may question the accuracy of the results on the website all you like, but that is what the world sees and reads.
The real question is anyone doing anything about it?
As consumers are we demanding better services from our authorities or are we all blindly fetching the municipal inspector when we have already paid a fee that would cover his transport.
Inefficiency costs us. We can rant at the authorities all we like for the lengthy processes they put us through, but we then proceed to put our clients through the same pain.
Why should we wait for more than 20 minutes at the doctor’s office for a scheduled appointment?
If the meeting is from eight to 10, why does it start at 8.30? We have a culture that tolerates tardiness and excuses late delivery.
How much quicker would you get things done if I deducted 10 percent from your fee for every day you failed to deliver on time?
You cannot manage time. You know this. You cannot speed it up, you cannot slow it down.
You cannot command the sun to set earlier or later, or the seasons to halt their progress from one to the other.
You cannot manage time, but you can manage yourself.
Time management is self-governance.
Plan
Use “spare” time to plan your day. Spare time includes that increasingly long drive to work.
Reschedule your daily programme if it makes you more effective. If getting to work takes you an hour, try leaving earlier to beat the traffic.

Explore different routes to home and work
I take a different route home in the evening to my morning trip simply because it is so much quicker.
Under promise and over deliver. Leave a little margin for error on the end of every shipment, but personally ship within the time-frame.
Do not use your margin as an excuse but use it as a way of showing great service when your product arrives “early”.
Show up early for meetings
Include travel time when planning meetings. Do not set a meeting for 10am when you know that you have one earlier that only ends at that time.
It is so easy to overlook this when staring at your diary that works in one hour long blocks.
Leave a margin for travel if you are not hosting consecutive meetings at the same location (anyone doing business in Johannesburg knows this).
If someone is 15 minutes late for an hour long meeting then they only get 45 minutes of your time.
If you are 15 minutes late and have not had the decency to call or reschedule give them the whole hour, but make sure you call before your next meeting to reschedule.
Listen carefully. Do you hear that? The sand of time is still flowing away in the hourglass, you had better do something with it.

Busy and Productivity : The Great Myth

'Bingity bingty beep' goes your phone as yet another Whattsapp text from some random group pops onto your screen. 'Boip' another email enters your inbox. 'Plop' the messenger drops a REAL letter on your desk. Your Skype notification informs you that Adam in America has come online (you never speak to him, but it is good to know he is online). The ticker on your twitter feed keeps going as another one of the important people you follow (in case they ever actually bothered to notice your own posts) spews out some random comment about their breakup/new single/world peace. Perhaps it is time to check Facebook again and see if your news feed has changed in the last ten minutes. What about Instagram and Linked In? 'Boig' goes your email...or was it the phone? So busy. There is no time. So distracted. So unfocused.

We live in this illusion of being busy and think that being busy equals results. Then when an opportunity presents itself we are too busy to give it a second glance. But are we busy or are we just distracted. With all the extra sources of information and distraction in our lives it is easy to think that we are solving the world's problems when in fact we are getting nothing done. Being busy and working hard is only half the equation. You should also be effective. Unless Facebook is an effective part of your work (and you better have a good measure of how much revenue you generate from spending time on it) save it for another time or deactivate your account and watch what happens to your time.

Rare are the humans that can truly multitask. Sorry to break it to you there but your mind is capable of a single chain of thought at one time. Need proof? Think of the happiest event of your life. Now simultaneously think of the worst. See you can't., flip flopping between the two does not count. You can jump chains of thought but you can only ride the train of your mind on one piece of rail at a time. That means every time your phone rings while you are focused on your computer screen you have to leave what you are doing, answer the phone, and then try to recapture that molecule of neuronal firing you had five minutes earlier. Voltaire said that no problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking. Sustained thinking people, he did not say 'the assault of broken thinking'. If you find yourself jumping from task to task every five minutes you will probably never get any of them done effectively.

So how can we take our 'busy' and translate it into 'effective'.

You should have a priority strategy. There are a number of strategies that work for different people from simple numerical ranking of your to-do-list to more complex time framed algorithms. I do not really care about what you use but decide what is important and what is not. Here is one that I use regularly. Take a piece of paper and divide it into four squares. Label them: High Priority/High Urgency, High Priority/Low Urgency, Low Priority/High Urgency, Low Priority/Low Urgency. Put what you need to do into one of the boxes. Then start tackling the first box. Not sure about what is high priority, here is a list of things that should take priority from Emergingideas.com . Priority: thanking people, doing the biggest task first, reading and writing more, connecting people, producing results, being helpful, being present, brainstorming, following up and following through, finishing assigned responsibilities.

Invest time into activities. Chunk out time to do things, enough time to bring you to completion of the activity or to a set point. In order to get this article out I need to chunk at least an uninterrupted hour to write it out (that does not include the other chunks set aside for brainstorming, the research, and conceptualising of the article). For that hour my phone is on silent (real silent and not vibrate), my secretary knows not to interrupt me unless the world is ending, and I am alone in my little world focused on producing the best possible article for you to read. See you didn't know that you were that special.

If you absolutely have to use social media then chunk it as well. Set aside the time to do it, and set an alarm so you only spend the allocated amount of time to the task of gossiping through news feeds. Treat emails with the same contempt. Check them twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and less on weekends if at all. If it is really that urgent the person will call you. Turn off your smart phone feeds (it will save you internet cap), or switch them onto silent at least. Control the volume of information coming at you, come up with reporting strategies that allow you to keep tabs on your business without micromanaging every order and task.

The successful are busy but they never respond 'I've been busy'. Shift your perspective to being effective. You will probably still be busy, but you will get what matters done.

Leave and Work

THE Easter break has come and gone and if you are like me you are back at work relishing the idea of a short week due to the past long weekend.
My calender resembles Swiss cheese the way the next two months are peppered through with breaks.
We have pretty good leave and holiday terms here in Zimbabwe and unless you are paid hourly or facing a crippling overtime bill there are no complaints about the extra time off.
Seeing as we have all this free time floating around I thought we could address it a bit, the good and the bad.
Breaks are important. There is no doubt about that. Humans need regular rest time, physically, mentally and spiritually.
Across the world we have weekends, time off and holidays of various lengths, most of it enshrined in legislation and contract.
Keeping the Sabbath holy has been around for thousands of years. So here is the good part.
Take a day off once a week and do nothing. Nothing is not quite true.
Keep physical exertion to a minimum but take the day to reflect and recharge.
Engage in spiritual activity, the Sabbath is not so much about rest as about honouring God. Meditate. Think or read. Now for the part no worker really wants to hear.
The flip side of taking one day off a week is you have to work the other six! What, work six days a week and not five?
That is correct. What about the weekend? Is not the two days off at the end of the week entrenched in the core of our very souls?
No it’s not, now work. I am not just talking about office work you munchkin.
Work on your home, your garden, your family or your vehicle (if you wash it with your kids you get to hit car and family at the same time).
And if you want, work on your business. Make your day productive, not just spent vegetating in front of the “idiot box”.
“But you don’t understand I am so tired after Friday”. No I understand perfectly, you are lazy.
Working that extra day is a 20 percent boost to your life’s productivity.
So I had a job. I got a month vacation leave, 12 days annual leave, 11 public holidays, three months sick leave, periodic compassion leave, and weekends.
It is a wonder I got anything done. Between the first three alone that works out at over 15 percent of my time off work while I got paid for doing nothing.
I am not against leave.
I just think we need to be a little smarter about it, both as employers and employees.
Would two weeks leave a year be enough? Perhaps not, but it is a question worth asking.
I can see mental cogs turning, employers going “but we would need to increase salaries to make up for the extra time worked”, employees going “work more you got to be kidding me right”.
The real issue is that we need to shift away from a mentality that seeks to screw over the system for everything it has got, to one that values productivity and fosters growth.
In the organisation that offered me the job above no one worked overtime, people would stop working 30 minutes before the end of the day in order to pack their bags so that they could leave right on time.
Any attempt to put in any extra effort earned you the wrath of your colleagues.
It was a very destructive community and I got out as soon as possible.
Now I believe in breaks and vacations. There is nothing more energising than an extended time away from your desk.
But use the time wisely. Rest a lot but also use the time to achieve things you would not normally be able to do.
Too many people go on leave and just sit at home and do nothing more than wear out a path between the fridge and the sofa.
It is fine to do that once in a while, but not for an entire month. Plan your leave time. Go away.
Travel and expose yourself to other ideas. Even if you cannot get out of the country, head somewhere locally and not so you can just sit in your hotel room the whole time either.
Google things to do and see in the area. Use your holiday to expand yourself, take books to read, plot family activities, explore a different culture.
Do not do so much that it tires you out, but stay productive all the same.
Keep a journal, jot down ideas for the office that may come up so you can put them into practice when you get back to work.
Switch off your phone, forget your email, and remember what it is like to live without interruptions (see how much you can actually get done without interrupting your chain of thought to check your Facebook account every half hour).
Make it a memorable time in building relationships within your family.
Take the concept of productivity and expand it beyond the boundaries of your office.
I went through two and a half books this weekend, they were fun, easy reading but expanded me a little bit more in terms of exposure to good writing.
There is a balance between work and play. Too much work and you will have an early heart attack.
Too little and you may not have enough money and starve to death.
In the words of ancient wisdom “A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest and poverty will come upon you like a thief and want like an armed man”.