How do you use your time?
There are moments in time that just stick with you. The other day I heard Noel Fitzpatrick (AKA ‘the supervet’) on Desert Island Discs. Apart from his great taste in music I was struck by some of his observations on life. The main one came from his father. It was simple but profound advice “use your time wisely“.
This maybe stuck because that week our On It club had used open questions to see if I should spend time on a project that has been bubbling along in the background.
We all try to save time or use time efficiently. How many of us truly use time wisely?
Doing the impossible
This takes me to the second quote from Noel. This comes directly from a farmer named Larry: “sure everything is impossible until it happens”
Impossible, from the positive side: How many times have you faced ‘impossible deadlines’ and made them with time to spare? How many time have you fixed your work life balance and still kept your business going?
Impossible, from a negative side: How many times have you missed a deadline because of reasons outside of the partners control? How many times have you lost your work life balance despite having both a flexible business model and a flexible family life?
If use time wisely and make good things happen then we can achieve the ‘impossible’. But, if we use time stupidly we are in danger of allowing ‘impossible scenarios’ to happen to the detriment of our business and our personal life.
It’s our choice.
We all need a time monitor
We all know we can only spend the money available to us . This income is made up of either a regular salary, profit available from our business or a credit stream from an outside source. Once we have used this income up we have to wait for the next payment into our cash reserves.
Time is unusual. We all start the day with 24 hours and no matter what we do with those hours we all get the opportunity to use another 24 hours the next day…
People would argue that it is impossible to use all those hours wisely. Perhaps we should all try to prove these people wrong.
Banks and accountants monitors your money spend. Who monitors how you spend your time?
Most people might say that business/work and family are the main monitors of our time. Perhaps the true measure is that voice in your head that tells you if you have had a good or bad day and if you used your time wisely or wasted it.
What we really need is a time monitor that checks in with not how we used our time BUT if we used our time wisely.
Time Reclaimed = Unscrambling noise + Staying on Track
Our best time monitor is the little voice in our own head. It will either be very quiet because you are using your time wisely or it will be constantly niggling away at your thoughts. We can reclaim future wise time by clearing out all the noise that takes us to unwise time. We can keep hold of that time by staying on track with our time for our personal and business life.
It’s a simple equation. Time Reclaimed = Unscrambling noise + Staying on Track or TR=U+ST
Back to On It and Peer Groups.
There is something about letting that voice in your head out into the real world. We work with businesses all the time. We help them face change and fix on how to grow their business. To do this we allow them to focus on what they want and how they are going to get there. From then on we support their efforts use their time wisely to achieve these goals.
Without doubt the best way to support change is action learning in a business peer group (be it an informal group like the On It club or a formal group like the Peer Networks from BEIS). The other way of creating a small peer group is to work directly with facilitators like ourselves who help hold you directly to your plans and actions as they evolve over time.
Time is the biggest thing people say they haven’t got. Have you worked out whose eating your time? Do you need help with TR=U+ST ?
Let’s fix this. Email us now, or even immediately! Hello@thomasjardineandco.co.uk
