life. Measure out your time in minutes rather than in hours or days.
In a recent article in Fortune magazine, several of the most successful and
highest paid executives in America were interviewed about their attitudes
and practices toward time. Their average incomes were $1,380,000, and all
of them had worked themselves up from entry level positions in business
and industry.
It turned out that each one of these highly paid, top performers treated their
time as a scarce resource. They saw it as an indispensable ingredient of
achievement. They looked upon it as an essential tool of accomplishment.
They allocated their time very carefully.
They were very jealous of their time. They did not spend it, give it away or
use it thoughtlessly. While average employees and junior managers thought
in terms of days and weeks, they planned out their days in terms of minutes
and fractions of hours.
It turns out that the smaller the unit of time in which you think when
planning your day, the more successful you are likely to be. Unsuccessful
people think in terms of whole days, or mornings and afternoons. Successful
people think in terms of ten-minute blocks of time, like lawyers or
accountants. They make every minute count.
Time Is Your Most Valuable Resource
Time Power
Because time if your scarcest resource, you must use your intelligence to
preserve it in every way possible, and to acquire more time whenever you
can. Whenever possible, you should trade money for time. The money is
replaceable, but the time is not.
This brings us back to David Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage,
which was discussed in an earlier chapter. Whenever you can, you should
hire people to do tasks of lower value so that you can create more time for
yourself, your family and your work.
If you aspire to earn $50,000 per year, which translates into about $25.00
per hour, you must never do work that does not pay $25.00 per hour or
more. You should hire other people to do anything that they will do for less
than $25.00 per hour. If you can hire someone for $5.00 or $6.00 per hour to
mow your lawn or clean your house, you should pay the money willingly to
free up your time for higher value activities.
Apply this same principle to your spouse. Many of the successful executives
and entrepreneurs who come through our Advanced Coaching and
Mentoring Program go home and change their spouse’s lifestyle. They
encourage them to hire housekeepers, gardeners and personal assistants to do
errands and go shopping. They “buy their freedom” so that they can enjoy a
higher quality of life, and spend more time with the family and in personal
pursuits. The payoff for both parties is often extraordinary.
Track Your Time Usage Carefully
Time Power
Keep track of how efficiently you use your time. The more you think about
how you are spending your minutes and hours, the better and more precise
you will become at time management. Because they do not monitor their
time usage, most people are not even aware of the amount of time they waste
each hour.
Get a wristwatch with an alarm that beeps every fifteen minutes. Each time
the alarm sounds, stop and observe yourself. Look at what you are doing at
that moment. If possible, keep a time log and make a note of what you are
doing each time the alarm rings.
Ask yourself regularly, “Is what I am doing right the very best use of my
time?”
All of life is the study of attention. The more attention you pay to the way
you are using your time, the more efficient and productive you are likely to
be. The more aware you are of the fleeting nature of time, the better you will
use it.
Spend Your Time Like Money
When you take the short view, you look upon every request for your time as
taking away from the amount of time you have left on earth. Continually ask
yourself, “How much of my life am I willing to donate or spend on this
particular person, situation or activity.”
Time Power
Your time is at least equal to your hourly rate. If your hourly rate is $25.00
and someone wants an hour of your time, that person is, in effect, asking you
for a gift of $25.00. If someone asks you to donate your time to a particular
cause or activity, you have to ask yourself, “How important is that cause or
activity to me, and how much of my time and money am I willing to donate
to it?”
If a person or activity is not important enough for you to open you wallet
and peel off $20.00 bills to give to it, you must discipline yourself not to do
it. Just say “No!”
The Wrong Job is a Major Time Waster
In Chapter Seven, we talked about the major time wasters in the world of
work. These turn out to be personal and telephone interruptions, unexpected
emergencies, drop-in visitors, and unplanned meetings. However, working at
the wrong job is a bigger time waster than all of these put together.
Many people today are working at jobs that are they are not suited for, or
which are not suitable for them. They would rather be doing something else,
somewhere else, using different skills and abilities. The majority of working
people, by their own admission, do not feel fully challenged by their current
jobs. Getting into or staying at a job for which you are not ideally suited is
one of the greatest wastes of time in life that you could possibly make. It can
rob you of some of the most productive years of your life.
Time Power
Here is a question for you: “If you received one million dollars cash, tax
free, would you continue to work at your current job?”
To put it another way, if you were independently wealthy, is there anything
that you would change about your job, your work or your career? The fact is
that if you would quit or change your job if you had enough money, this is a
good indicator that you are working at the wrong job for you. You may only
be working at your current job because of your financial situation and your
monthly bills and expenses.
Do the Work You Love
Here is another question: Do you love what you are doing? Only a small
percentage of people love what they do, and these people are always the
happiest, the most satisfied and usually, the highest paid in every field.
You can tell if you are spending your time and your life at the right job by
examining your attitude toward your job and your future. Do you like what
you are doing enough to want to be the very best at it? If the job is right for
you, not only do you want to get better and better at that job, but you very
much admire those people that are at the top of your field. If you find that
you have no desire to excel in your field, this is a good sign that this is
probably not the right job for you.
Would you like to continue doing your job for the next twenty years? Do
you find your job challenging and fulfilling? Can you hardly wait to get to
work on Monday morning, and do you hate to leave on Friday evening? All
Time Power
successful people can answer, “Yes” to these questions. Unsuccessful people
invariably answer “No.”
There Are No Limits
There are more than 100,000 different jobs available in our economy today.
There are an endless number of jobs that you could do successfully, and
make a good living. You never have to feel stuck in a particular position,
company or industry. There is never a job shortage for good people.
One of your primary responsibilities to yourself is to select the kind of work
that you enjoy, and which you are best suited to do. It is to find a job where
you can use your natural talents and abilities at a high level. Your duty to
yourself is to work at something that gives you joy and satisfaction. You
must find a job that brings out the very best in you, and which inspires you
to want to become excellent at what you’re doing.
The Past is a “Sunk Cost”
In accounting, there is a term called a “sunk cost.” This is an amount of
money that has been spent in the past, and which has no further value. It may
be a piece of equipment that is broken and irreparable, obsolete, or
completely useless. It could be advertising just spent last year. The money
spent on these items is gone forever. It can never be retrieved.
One of the first rules with regard to a sunk cost is that you never spend
additional money to retrieve or extract some value out of it. You write it off
Time Power
as a loss and focus on the future. You get on with the rest of your business
life.
In your career, you have sunk costs as well. These are jobs that may have
taken weeks, months or even years to learn, from which you gained
considerable experience, but which are no longer of value in today’s market.
You may have a sunk cost in college education, or in courses of instruction
and training that you have taken to develop knowledge and skill that is no
longer of any use. Much of what you have done in the past in your career is
a sunk cost of some kind. It has no current or future value.
One of the worst wastes of time is for you to attempt to recover a sunk cost.
Many people take a university degree in a subject that turns out to have no
market value when they leave school. They spend months and even years
plodding from door to door, trying to find someone to hire them and pay
them a salary for knowledge acquired at school that has no economic value.
Sooner or later, they realize that they took the wrong courses, or learned the
wrong skills. Now, they have no choice but to learn new skills that have a
value in the market place.
Be Prepared to Cut Your Losses
One of the reasons for massive time wastage, and failure in life, is the
inability or unwillingness to “cut your losses.” Instead, you should
continually remind yourself: “It doesn’t matter where you’re coming
from; all that really matter is where you’re going.”
Time Power
A major time waster is an investment in your ego. You make a decision, or a
commitment of time, money or emotion, that is not successful. Because of
your ego, you are then unwilling to admit that you made a mistake, that you
were wrong, and that your decision has turned out to be in error. You then
invest an enormous amount of time and emotion, and often money, to cover
up the fact that you made a mistake. You justify and rationalize, refuse to
face the facts, and you can often make yourself physically ill.
Learn to take control of your ego, rather than letting your ego to take control
of you. Accept that you are not perfect. Most things you try in life won’t
succeed the first time in any case. Just say the words, “I made a mistake.”
Admit that you made a poor choice. Admit that, if you had to do it over
again, you would do it very differently. The unwillingness to admit error
keeps people locked in unhappy and unsatisfying situations year after year.
Once you have admitted a mistake, you no longer need to explain or justify.
You can then get on with the rest of your life. You can make new decisions
and choose new directions. You can focus your special talents and abilities
on doing things that can have a great future for you.
Take Your Whole Life into Consideration
Put your current life and your past investments, your sunk costs in your
education and career into perspective. Ask this question, “How long do I
intend to live?” Asking and answering this question immediately lengthens
your time perspective.
Time Power
Most people have never decided upon exactly how long they intend to live.
They say, “I am going to live to be 100.” But they are really not serious
because they have no definite plans to get to 100 years of age.
The average life expectancy today is 76 years for men and 79 years for
women. This means that half of the population will die above those ages,
and half of the population will die below. Because you are reading this book,
you are probably better educated, more intelligent about your health habits,
earn a higher income and are therefore much more likely to beat the
averages. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to assume that you will live to be
90 years old, or more.
The formula that insurance companies use to predict your age is to take 2/3
of the number of years between your current age and 100 and then add that
to your current age. This will estimate your average life expectancy for
actuarial and insurance purposes. If you are forty years old today, 2/3 of the
distance between 40 and 100 is 40. Therefore, your calculated age or life
expectancy is 80 years. The big companies can write insurance policies
based on these projections all day long, and they are seldom wrong.
Add Ten Years to Your Life
Many people are still stuck in the 20th century paradigm of retiring at 65.
This age for retirement was set in 1935, when social security and old age
pensions were first introduced. At that time, the life expectancy of the
average working American was 62 years. Most people worked jobs requiring
physical labor in those days, making and moving things and objects. By the
Time Power
time a working person reached the age of 62 or 65, he or she would be like a
worn out piece of machinery. Their average life expectancy was
approximately 2.7 years after retirement.
Today however, everything has changed. Today, most people are knowledge
workers. They work with their minds rather than with their muscles. They
become sharper and smarter with age and experience. They get older and
better. Simultaneously, an explosion of invention, innovation and discovery
in medicine and medical procedures has boosted the life expectancy of
people in the industrialized world by almost 30 years in the last century
alone.
What this means, in the simplest terms, is that the equivalent of age 65 for
retirement in 1935 is age 75 for retirement in the 21st century. When you hit
the age of 60 of 65, you will still be at the top of your game. You will be
sharp and alert, and possessed of all your faculties. You will be bright,
