How to multiply your Time?

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How to multiply your Time?

 Everything you know about time management is wrong.

Everything that you've ever heard about time management is all logical, tips and tricks, tools and technology, calendars and checklists, apps, it's all logic.

What I realized, is that Time Management is no longer just logical, time management is emotional, and how our feelings of guilt, fear, worry, anxiety, and frustration, those things dictate how we choose to spend our time, as much as anything that's in our calendar, on our to-do list. There is no such thing as time management.

Self-Management

You can't manage time; time continues whether we like it or not. So there is no such thing as time management. There is only self-management. That was the first big realization I had. For you to understand it, I want to take you on a quick history of time management theory, and that began in the late fifties, and sixties, and it came during the industrial revolution, and early time management thought was all about -- it was one-dimensional, and it was all based on efficiency, and idea with efficiency, was that if we could develop tools and technology to help us do things faster, then theoretically, that would give us more time. Well, there's nothing wrong with efficiency, all things being equal, efficiency is better, and yet there is an unfortunate limitation to efficiency as a strategy for time management, and it's evidenced by the fact that we all carry around miniature computers in our pockets, and yet, somehow, we're still never caught up.

Time Management Matrix 

In the late eighties, the era of 2-time management thinking emerged. I feel like it was pretty much single-handedly ushered in by the late, great Dr Stephen Covey. And Dr Covey introduced what we're referring to as 2-dimensional thinking. He gave us something called the Time Management Matrix, where the x-axis was urgency, and the y-axis was importance, and the beauty about this was that it gave us a system for scoring our tasks, and then based on how they scored in these two areas. We could prioritize tasks.  Prioritizing is all about focusing first on what matters most, and for the last 20 years, this has been the pervasive mode of thinking as it relates to time management theory. It's not that there's anything wrong with prioritizing is as valuable a skill today as it ever has been in history. Even though we throw that word around, like it's the end-all and be-all, to time management theory.  We say: "Get your priorities in order”, or "You don't have the right priorities."

Unfortunately, maybe that's not the case, because there is a massive limitation to prioritizing that nobody ever talks about and that is this: there's nothing about prioritizing that creates more time.

All prioritizing does, is take item number 7 on your to-do list, and it bumps it up to number 1, which is valuable in and of itself, but it doesn't do anything inherently to create more time, and it does nothing to help you accomplish the other items on your to-do list.

Efficiency

If you think about efficiency, it is kind of like running on a hamster wheel, and if you think of prioritizing, it's really about borrowing time. Borrowing time from one activity to spend on another, it's kind of like juggling, and that describes the way that we even talk about time. I'm juggling a lot, or I'm trying to balance a lot. The strategy is to do things faster, or to do more things, and that is what the world kind of feels like. How does it feel to know that all we are is a bunch of juggling hamsters, sprinting towards an inevitable crash landing? You cannot solve today's time management problems, with yesterday's time management thinking.

Multipliers

What we've noticed, is the emergence of a new type of thinker, somebody that we refer to, as a multiplier, and multipliers use what we call, 3-dimensional thinking. While most people only make decisions based on urgency, and importance, multipliers are making a third calculation which is based on significance, and if urgency is how soon something matters, then significance is how long is it going to matter. It's a completely different paradigm, it's adding on to what is there, it's in with the old, but it's also in with the new.

Because most of us, if you think about the modern-day to-do list, which is one of the key strategies or tools that we have, we ask ourselves, when we assemble our to-do list, we say: "What's the most important thing I can do today?" But that is not how multipliers think; multipliers, instead ask the question: "What can I do today, that would make tomorrow better?" "What can I do right now, that would make the future better?"

They're making the significance calculation. When I say: "Multiply your time," that might sound a little bit superfluous. It might sound like an over-exaggeration, but it is not. Now, it is true that we all have the same time inside of 1 day, 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, and 86,400 seconds.

There's nothing any of us can do to create more time in 1 day, but that's exactly the problem, that type of thinking is the problem. We have to break out of that paradigm, and instead, think about tomorrow, and that brings us to the premise of how you multiply time.

The way that you multiply time is simple: you multiply your time, by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today, that give you more time tomorrow.

That's the significance calculation. You multiply time, by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today, that create more time tomorrow. The significance calculation changes everything. The Focus Funnel is our attempt, to create a visual depiction that codifies the thought process, that multipliers go through in their head, unconsciously, when they are evaluating how to spend their time. It's why some people create extraordinary, explosive, exponential results, and other people seem to kind of just create linear traction, and it works like this, if your tasks all come into the top of the funnel, the first question a multiplayer asks is: "Can I eliminate this? Is it even worth doing?" It's another example of how everything you know about time management is wrong, or at least that it has changed, because most of us use to-do lists, and multipliers realize that next-generation time management has much more to do with what you don't do, than what you do. Multipliers realize that perfection is achieved not only when nothing more can be added, but when nothing more can be taken away. It is permission to ignore. Because anything that we say no to today creates more time for us tomorrow. The emotional challenge is that we struggle with guilt, and we struggle with wanting to say no, but really feeling like we have to say yes, and so we go through life trying to never say no. In an interview with a multiplier, they said something that changed my life, "It's futile to go through life, trying to never say no.

What you have to realize, is that you are always saying no to something." Because anytime you say yes to one thing, you're simultaneously saying no to an infinite number of others. If you can't eliminate the task, the next question is: "Can I automate the task?"

Anything that I create a process for today, saves me time tomorrow. It's like setting up online bill pay. I never have two hours in my day to set up online bill pay, I just don't have time, and if I had two hours in my day I would never use it to set up online bill pay.

ROTI

But a multiplier realizes that if I save 30 minutes a month from paying my bills, by setting up online bill pay, then it makes sense to invest those 2 hours, because then after just 4 months, I will have broken even on that investment, and every month thereafter, I will get something we call ROTI, “Return On Time Invested”.

Automation is to your time exactly what compounding interest is to your money. Just like compounding interest takes money and makes money into more money, automation takes time, and it makes it into more time. The way that wealthy people think about money is the same way that Multipliers think about time, and they give themselves the permission to invest, invest the time and energy to automate the process. If it can't be automated, then the question is: "Can it be delegated? Can I teach someone else how to do this?

 "Are there things you could be delegating to somebody else?" We would say: "Yes." Then you say: "Why don't you train someone else to do it?"

What most of us would say: "Well because they just can't do it as well as I can."

And that may be true once, maybe twice, but it is only true absent the significance calculation. If you think long term, you realize they'll be able to master the task, just like you were. Significance changes everything. It's how you multiply your time.

It's giving yourself the permission of imperfect, for a little while. Because over time, they'll be able to figure it out. If you can't eliminate, automate, or delegate a task, that task drops out to the bottom of the funnel, at that point, there's only one question, and that question is: Should I do this task now? Must it be done now, or can it wait until later? If the task must be done now, then that's what we call "concentrate". It's the permission to protect. It's all about focus and eliminating distractions. And honestly, there's nothing all that exciting, or new there. However, if you ask the question: "Can this wait until later?", and you decide that the answer is yes, then that’s not eliminated, automated or delegated, that is what we call "procrastinating on purpose". Now, you're not going to procrastinate on it forever, you're going to pop that activity back to the top of the funnel, at which point, it will enter into a holding pattern where it will cycle through the focus funnel, until inevitably, one day, eventually one of the other 4 strategies will be executed on whenever that task is. And what you find, is that if something can continually wait, often what happens is you develop the courage to do what you should have done in the first place, which was to eliminate it. Or you discover a system for how to automate it. Or someone rises to the call of leadership. They rise to the occasion, and it ends up being delegated. Or it ends up becoming significant enough for you to spend your time on.

·         'Procrastination is the killer of all success.'

·         'Procrastination is the most expensive, invisible cost in business.'

·         'Procrastination is the foundation of all mediocrity.'

and now you're telling us to procrastinate on purpose?"

And yes, that is what I said, and it's exactly true how I said it. But there's a major distinction to realize and that is there's a difference in waiting to do something that we know we should be doing that we don't feel like doing, versus waiting to do something because we're deciding that now is not the right time. Waiting to do something we know we should do, but don't feel like doing, that's procrastination, the killer of success. Waiting to do something, because we're deciding that now is not the right time, that isn't procrastination, that isn't the killer success, that's a virtue, and it's an art form that the world needs, which is patience. The patience to put off the insignificant things. Like checking email 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You multiply your time, by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today, that create more time tomorrow.

God has created this perfect world, and it says something amazing that we're created in. "Be fruitful, and multiply."

 

Thank you