There’s No Such Thing As Time Management

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“It’s impossible to manage time. You can only manage yourself in time.”

I love this quote because it emphasizes the personal responsibility and control each person has. Time is an abstract thing that exists with or without you.

It doesn’t care about you.

However, you can manage yourself within it.

I’ve mentioned my coach, Gil, before. He’s full of great quotes and this is one of them.

I wrote about his key question the other week.

It was, “The question is not what you want to be when you grow up but who are you?”

You have to take a minute to think about that but once you know, it’s essential to stop wasting time or more accurately your efforts within time and start being ruthless with those efforts.

We talked about a couple of his clients who did it well. One was the CEO of a $100m company. Every Monday morning, he sat down at his desk and the first thing he did was delete all his emails.

He told Gil, “If it’s important, it will re-emerge.”

Another wouldn’t allow any meetings to go longer than 15 minutes. The whole company was trained on how to run a 15 minute meeting and it worked.

Of course, these people were CEOs with lots of latitude to structure how things work. That goes back to my Architect Your Life post. In my view, being an owner is good for exactly this reason.

But even if you can’t do what Gil and his clients did, you can take more control over how you manage yourself within time.

A simple example is not worrying about crappy people or the election or whatever. You’re letting those subjects live rent free in your head as they say.

Each person has a unique ability or a who are you answer and a certain amount of energy. An analogy might be what tech companies call “compute.”

Companies pay for capacity from Cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure. It’s an expensive resource that needs to get a return.

Maybe we should think of how we manage our thoughts within time the same way. You’ve got limited capacity. Don’t waste it on silly and unimportant things.

Use it to produce the results you are after.

Keep growing,

Alan

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