April feels like it’s been the fastest month of the year so far. Chris and I have taken on and set up two new SA units this month and doing all that whilst keeping on top of everything else, it has felt like we’ve been non-stop hectic busy!
This week I’ve been studying a webinar on TIME from one of my non-property mentors (Peter Shallard – The Shrink For Entrepreneurs – if you’re curious to know about his work feel free to PM and ask me). The underlying message and actionable hacks are great so I thought I’d share a couple in my end of week post. So, the webinar was explaining how poor performance, stress and unhappiness comes from mismanagement of time.
I’m sure you can all relate to the sentiment that ‘busyness’ is often regarded as a sign of self worth i.e. people believe it establishes them as ‘worthy’ and we tend to use it to brag eg, “oh I did a 15 hour day yesterday”. I admit, I’ve been culprit to this many times, but its not big and it’s not cool. We have to learn to reframe this and develop self awareness around time.
If you’ve taken action on the advice that Rob and Paul give to do an audit of your time and what you get done, then you’ll know the powerful insights that can be had from doing that exercise.
Do you regularly tell yourself you have no time get things done? In the webinar I was studying, business psychologist Peter went on to explain how our brain lies about busyness. In other words there is a difference between how we think we spend time (the story we tell ourselves) versus the reality. That example I gave about the “15 hour work day” is a prime example.
We all have 168 hours in a week, here’s a deeper look at that week timeframe:
168 hours in a week
-50 hours for work = 118 hours left
-56 hours for sleep = 62 hours left
The average person has 62 hours to allocate to what matters!
By doing a thorough time audit, like a ship’s log book, to look at how we spend our time, it gives us power insights and aha’s like the following:
- Time for “Personal life” is typically under-optimised in terms of not actually doing the things we think we want to do or love doing
- Task switching, travelling can be super costly to our well being (i.e. our productivity and therefore impacting our emotional health)
- Four hours of true “in the zone” working per day is outstanding and can be planned for. (If we go into a day thinking we will do eight hours of awesome work we’re probably being unreasonable with ourselves)
- Most people need less unwinding time than they think (but to have none is a disaster)
Looping back to my super busy April, absorbing this insight on time has been, well very timely. In addition to the aha’s above, I have started to implement the DONE LIST at different points throughout the day. This reality based log serves to help me feel good about what I got done, but also remain realistic about how time has flown past and not beat myself up about it.
Bit of different post this week but this stuff has been helpful for me so I thought be may help some of you out there. If so, then great.
One other thing I learned on efficiency- we should never open and read emails unless we are also committed to responding to them at the same time as well.