In the many seminars and speeches that I have given about living more effectively, people often say, almost wistfully, “I wish I had lived a hundred years ago, when they had more time.”
My response to that is, “Really? How much more time did they have a hundred years ago?”
And the response is usually something like “Well . . . they had a whole lot more time.”
Reflecting on that widespread desire for more time, I have come to realize that when it comes to time, the only difference between now and a hundred years ago is that we have more options in how we use our time. We have more options because we can do things faster. With modern household appliances, for example, what took a few days to do a hundred years ago can now be done in three hours on Monday morning. Instead of taking two or three hours to prepare dinner, we can now do it in twenty minutes.
A hundred years ago, advances in technology had already shortened the time needed to cross North America from three months in a stagecoach or wagon train to less than a week on a railway train. Today, we can go from New York to San Francisco in four and a half hours, eating dinner and watching a movie as we fly across the continent at nearly six hundred miles per hour.
What was once the standard mode for long distance correspondence is now called snail mail. We can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world via text messaging, e-mail, or Skype instantaneously. The speed at which computers function is accelerating at a seemingly lightning-fast pace. In fact, today’s society demands speed in everything.
One seminar participant told me, “I feel like I’m in a pressure cooker. When you pull a miracle out of the hat one day, it becomes expected performance the next day. There are days when I feel as though I’ve spent all my time meeting everybody else’s needs except my own.”
In the past, when the pressures got too great, we could escape to a quiet place or leave the office and bask in the silence and privacy of the drive home. Not these days. Our communications technology goes with us everywhere we go. Mobile devices make the car just an extension of the office as we conduct business, solve problems, check out leads, check in with our broker, get the shopping lists for the market, and otherwise continue the unrelenting stress.
But the fact remains, with all the changes that have happened in our lifetime—whether we’re “boomers,” “Gen Xers,” “Millennials,” or whatever comes next—one thing has never changed nor will it ever change, and that is the amount of time we all have.
Hectic as the days of our lives may seem, we all have the same daily allotment of twenty-four hours that our ancestors had. There have always been seven days in the week, and twenty-four hours in the day, whether it is 1400 BC, AD 1400, or today. What has changed is the amount of stuff we’re trying to cram into those same hours. Freed from the daily struggle just to exist, we can let our time be filled with meaningless activity and motion or choose to spend it doing the things that matter most to us.
This choice is the root of the third gap—the Time Gap (or, as it is sometimes called, the Productivity Gap). This is the gap between what we want to do with our time and how we actually spend it. Making the best choices and closing the Time Gap requires understanding three principles:
1. the concept of event control
2. the power of daily planning
3. the discipline of managing your planning
When you acquire and apply these three productivity principles you’ll start to close the gap between where you want to spend your time and where you are actually spending it.
I’ve started hundreds and hundreds of seminars by asking someone in the audience to define time. I usually get a blank stare, and then get such responses as, “it’s money,” “it’s the clock,” “it’s the hours in a day,” and so on. None of those responses are accurate. Albert Einstein’s definition of time was
Time is the occurrence of events in sequence one after the other.
Everything is an event: walking into a room, getting out of bed in the morning, brushing your teeth, driving to work. Time is the occurrence of all these events in sequence, one after the other. When I was teaching at Merrill Lynch, a fellow handed me a three-by-five card that read, “Time is what keeps one darn thing after another from becoming every darn thing at once.”
Management, according to many dictionary definitions, involves the act of controlling. So what is time management?
The question now becomes, What are the events over which I have any control? Let me introduce you to the Control Model.
The left side of this model represents events over which you have no control. The right side represents events over which you have total control. And the middle represents everything else—the things over which you have varying amounts of control.
Consider the left side of the model for a moment. What are the events over which you have no control? Weather, death, taxes, and traffic, to name a few. Think about the feelings that you experience when you are up against the left side: frustration, stress, anxiety, maybe even some depression. The feelings that you likely have on this side are not pleasant. The bottom line is, when you are out of control, you probably don’t feel very good.
I had a fun experience a long time ago with my first time on a ski lift. My wife and I went skiing without bothering to get lessons; we just got on a lift. Halfway up the mountain, I realized that the seats were coming back the other way empty. I asked my wife, “How do you get off the lift?” She just looked at me and didn’t bother to answer. I soon discovered that the only way off the lift was to ski off. I wish I had a video of my first exit from the lift; it was not a controlled experience. I experienced all of the feelings I have described above with one addition: pain. It doesn’t feel good to be out of control.
Now, move slowly across the model from left to right. The right side represents total control. Think about some events over which you have total control: the time you get up, what you wear, how you might react to somebody else’s attitude or choices, what you eat, and so forth. Notice that all of these things have one focus in common: you. The only thing you have 100 percent control over is you; everything else falls under either the partial control or no control categories.
Using the control model to categorize events, you can choose your response to the situations you encounter. People who master event control begin the process of closing the Time Gap in their lives. They put their time to better use and the gap between what they want to do with their time and how they actually spend that time starts to close.
The closer we get to being in control of what can be controlled, the more likely we are to experience inner peace.
Once you understand the concept of event control then you’re ready to start daily planning.
Daily planning is the key to managing the events over which we have total control. Think about the last ten days, and ask yourself this question: How many minutes each day did I spend formally planning that day?
Shower time doesn’t count. Neither does driving or exercise time, even though these moments might be wonderful times to think. I’m talking about formal planning time where you sit down and consider not only the day’s activities but also your values and priorities in relation to the day’s activities.
Although there are only twenty-four hours in a day, time can be leveraged. Investing a little of your time in daily planning can actually free up time throughout the rest of the day. A daily planning session can act as a time lever. The cost is small—only ten to fifteen minutes per day—but you will enjoy the benefits all day long, such as clearly defined tasks with deadlines, increased focus on more important tasks, less time spent between projects, and a greater sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. Aren’t those outcomes worth a few dedicated minutes of your time?
Edwin C. Bliss, author of Getting Things Done, has said, “The more time we spend on planning a project, the less total time is required for it. Don’t let today’s busywork crowd planning time out of your schedule.”
In a previous book, The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management, I introduced the principle of the magic three hours, which in theory is a generally uninterrupted block of time that can be used to get your day on track both physically and emotionally. It might be late at night, early in the morning, or some other block of time when you prepare for your day. Some magic three-hour activities might include physical exercise or studying a personal core book, and it should include at least fifteen minutes planning your day.
Since the writing of that book, the pace of life has sped up, and I realize that finding a literal three hours of uninterrupted time to get the day on track is not always realistic. But there is not one of us that can’t find fifteen minutes to plan. The act of planning is an event over which we have total control. So I now refer to the daily planning commitment as the magic fifteen minutes.
Those fifteen minutes, carefully invested at the beginning of every day, will close the gap—every day—between what you want to get done and what you actually do. Those fifteen minutes can create magic in your life, and the following seven steps will help you do just that.
Step 1: Find a Quiet Place. You need fifteen minutes of real focus. Find the right place—one where you won’t be interrupted by other people, e-mail, phone calls, texts, tweets, and the like.
Step 2: Seek Inspiration. Take a moment to seek inspiration through meditation, prayer, or whatever source through which you normally find inspiration.
Step 3: Review Your Values. In chapter 2, you built your values as part of closing the Values Gap. These governing values are the core of your life, and they need to be manifested in your day.
Step 4: Integrate Your Long-Range Goals. Make sure that the things you are planning for the long term also show up in what you’re planning for the short term.
Step 5: List Your Appointments. Every life, every job, every day has appointments. These are simply events that are “time-fixed”—they have to happen at a specific time. Identify and record these activities.
Step 6: List Your Tasks. Tasks, which often end up on “to-do” lists, are “time flexible”—they can be done at any time as long as they eventually get done. Make sure the number of tasks and the amount of time required for each is well within the time available in your day. Many of us have a tendency to overplan our days; consequently, we can feel defeated by our plan before we even begin, or discouraged at the end of the day because we haven’t made a dent in our list.
Step 7: Prioritize Your Tasks. This final key is vital. Even the best plans can run aground. Unforeseen events can leave us far from the end of our task list at the end of the day. But if we’ve started with those tasks that are most important, we can have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever we’ve left undone is less critical than what we’ve accomplished.
That’s it—fifteen minutes and seven steps to create your plan for the day.
Sometimes, despite your best planning efforts, unexpected things can come up that completely throw off your original plan for the day. In fact, interruptions and unforeseen events consume much of our time in the twenty-first century because they can reach out and find us anywhere. As never before in history, social media, e-mail, texts, phone calls, and the like can bring the unexpected to us twenty-four hours a day.
Unexpected events in and of themselves are neither good nor bad; they just exist. But so does the plan that you created during your magic fifteen minutes. When an unexpected event pops up, you have a choice between putting off the unexpected and sticking with your plan, or altering the plan to deal with whatever has come up.
Some unforeseen events require you to respond to them immediately, such as a medical emergency or the immediate needs of young children. Other unexpected demands on your time come with a choice to deal or not deal with them immediately.
For example, a coworker comes into your office and says, “Hey, I need fifteen minutes of your time on this project,” but you are currently working on a presentation for your boss. You could choose to say, “You know what? I can’t do that right now. Come back in an hour, and I can help you then.” That unexpected demand on your time was trumped by your predetermined plan to prepare a presentation for your boss during that particular hour.
It is very important to make the distinction between unexpected demands on your time that do not have to be dealt with immediately and those that require you to drop everything. What you choose to do in that moment will either widen the Time Gap or narrow it.
So how can you know when to stick with the plan and when to deviate from it? The best choice grows out of knowing what you’re trying to achieve in advance.
Consider the concept of opportunity cost for just a moment. If I gave you ten thousand dollars and told you it had to be spent in the next four hours, what would you spend it on? Let’s say you decide to put that money toward buying a car. The minute you decide to spend it on a car, what have you decided not to spend the money on? Everything else. So the opportunity cost of the car is something else you could have spent the money on.
The minute you decide to spend one hour watching TV, by virtue of that decision, what have you decided not to spend the hour on? Everything else!
When you’re presented with an “in the moment” conflict between what you planned to do and what has unexpectedly come up, choose the action most in concert with your governing values; rarely will it be the wrong decision, and your personal constitution will suddenly become a living document.
To get to this point, you may have to rewrite some principles on your Belief Window when it comes to what you do in your precious twenty-four hours. Here is a belief to consider writing on your window:
When confronted with unforeseen events, the best option will always be in concert with my governing values and best meet my needs over time.
Keep in mind that there are two fallacies of time that we are tempted to believe:
1. We think we can get more of it.
2. We think we can save it somehow.
Are either true? No. When you hear someone say, “I don’t have time,” he or she is not telling you the truth. We all have all the time there is. What they are really saying is something quite different. For example, if someone asked me to go to lunch and my response was, “I don’t have time,” I’m not telling the truth. What I’m really saying is, “I value some other event more.”
We have now discussed the Time Gap, which involves getting what we most care about done in the twenty-four hours a day that we have. Take control of how you confront the events in your life. Invest the magic fifteen minutes every day and follow the seven steps of daily planning outlined above.
Finally, learn to evaluate the opportunity cost of the choices you make in your life. Balance the unexpected with what you’ve already planned by making choices that center on your governing values, meet your needs over time, and bring inner peace.
If you are truly serious about closing the Time Gap, make the commitment to spend a magic fifteen minutes planning every single day.
McKay Christensen and I go back many years. He is the president of a multibillion-dollar, fast-growing, global company. He is highly respected by everyone he works with and by clients all over the world. His ability to close the Time Gap has resulted in a remarkable company. The hallmark of his success is his natural humility. Here is his story.
Reflect on Indiana Jones one last time. For the Time Gap, the cave across the chasm represents what you plan to do today, and the ledge represents what you will actually do. Inner peace and a dramatic increase in your ability to make a difference occurs when you move what you do in line with what you plan to do.