Do You Have Ample Time?

November 15 is National Ample Time Day, and I think this is just an American thing. Europeans and those in other developed countries don’t give up their entire lives to work, whether they’re business owners or climbing the corporate ladder. Are you giving yourself ample time for the life part of work-life harmony?

Hours in the office doesn’t equate with actual work or productivity

You might be in the office for eight, ten, or twelve hours a day, but because you don’t work every minute of every hour, you’re not really working eight, ten, or twelve hours a day. Most people spend time on “social” media, whether they’re scrolling through their feeds or shopping. 

If you have your email and other notifications enabled, you lose time (up to 23 minutes) every time your focus is taken away from deep work because you heard or saw a notification.

And when you think about mission critical work, the tasks that really drive business forward, most business owners get even less of that work done. They don’t set in stone the time they need every day for this concentrated work, so it doesn’t get done. Or it doesn’t get done often enough. 

You might be “busy”, but how many of those tasks can and should be handled by someone else through delegation, outsourcing, or automation? 

Unless you’re an email administrator or you handle email newsletters for people, email isn’t work. It doesn’t get you closer to where you want to go. (If you’re using emails to communicate with clients and prospects, you might be better off scheduling Zoom meetings or picking up the phone, both of which minimize miscommunication and misunderstandings.)

If you replaced the time you spent doing busy work, or on the tasks that are not important, with focus time on your priorities, you‘d have ample time to complete your tasks each day. That opens up ample time to spend with loved ones and doing other fun activities.

If you want to be more productive, consider opportunity costs

I’ve long said I wanted to figure out a way to blend my financial background with productivity. Finally, here's something we talk about in finance that can have a profound effect on how much we accomplish.

Time for human beings is finite. You are going to die (hate to break it to you if this is the first you’ve heard about it.) That means you probably can’t do every single thing that you want to do. 

For those of us who are not multibillionaires, money is also finite. (When you’re worth billions, you essentially can’t spend all your money no matter how much you try. You could give it away in some fashion, but you can’t really go out and buy things to run out of money.)

With these limits on time and money (and attention), you have to consider what your priorities are and the things you really want to accomplish, given that you don’t have unlimited time and treasure. 

For every thing or experience that you buy or invest in, there is another use of that money that you are forgoing. For example, suppose you buy a pricey car that costs $100,000. That money is not available to invest in your business. Now, maybe you do need a car, but you could buy one for $40,000 that would do everything you need it to do and then you could invest $60,000 in your company. 

I think that concept in terms of money is pretty obvious. The opportunity cost to your time is probably even more valuable, but it’s harder to see – though no less real. You could sell another widget and earn more money, but you can’t sell anything and earn more time.

For example, let’s look at the opportunity costs of allowing email notifications. Every time you are interrupted, it can take up to 23 minutes to get back to where you were. The opportunity cost is 23 minutes that you could have used on something that’s important to your business. Or a phone call to a loved one.

Three email notifications – even if you don’t read or respond to the email – takes a full hour out of your day. Said another way, the opportunity cost of three notifications is an hour of your day.

If you had an hour of your time that you could focus and hone in on your priorities, how much could you get done? But you’re surrendering that time to notifications.

When you start taking opportunity costs into account, some of the things that you might have done in the past don’t turn out to be things you want to continue doing. For example, maybe you do whatever’s on your plate even if someone else could and should do it. You might think to yourself, it’s only five minutes.

But how many of those tasks do you do in a day? If you’re a “do what needs to be done” type, those five-minute tasks really add up. Twelve of those a day is an hour of your time. You’d have a full hour to work on the important tasks that require you, the business owner, to do if you properly delegated or outsourced or automated those supposedly five-minute tasks.

Obviously that compounds over time as well. That’s five hours a week. Five hours that could have worked on your priorities, or even spent having fun (or both). Twenty hours a month.

Being intentional about your work is a key factor in productivity

It’s easy to waste time when a notification pops up, or you know you can do a certain task that’s assigned to your staff faster than they can, or dive down the rabbit hole on “social” media. All of these have opportunity costs because your time is not infinite. They’re even easier to do when you are reactive and just do whatever needs doing at any given moment.

To be productive, you need to know what are the key tasks that move your business forward to help you achieve your goals, whatever they might be. Some of these tasks are probably the ones that only you, as the business owner with the vision and the mission, can take on. Some of these might be better handled by staff, like client delivery. But you have to know what they are.

That way, you won’t waste time on “social” media or on distractions or tasks that your staff or someone else can handle. You’ll know what your priorities are each day and do what you need to do to accomplish them – set aside hours for deep work, disable notifications while you’re concentrating, not allowing staff in during deep work time but having office hours at a different time for them to ask you their questions. 

Knowing these opportunity costs gives you the ability to be intentional about your work and only doing things that are the highest and best use of your time. Sometimes the highest and best use is walking the dog with your family or playing in your adult soccer league, because these types of things recharge your brain. 

I feel pretty confident in saying that emails, “social” media, and other apps that spout notifications like geysers are not the highest and best use of your time.

Recap (tl;dr)

Spending a lot of hours in the workplace doesn’t mean you’re getting your real work done. Time and money are finite, so there are opportunity costs to your actions. Removing the items that are not the highest and best use of your time will help you be more intentional and productive in your work.

If you need help making sure that you have deep work time every day, click here to set up your free consultation. 

Photo by Katie Harp via Unsplash.