10,000 days

More often than not the busy takes precedence over the important. However, you pay the price in the long term.

Albert Einstein spent a great part of his career thinking about time. As he put it “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”

For us mere mortals, time takes on a somewhat different challenge. Maybe I have 10,000 days left to live, if I am lucky or it could be less. I graduated when I was 23 and started working immediately. I might have had 20,000 days at the time I graduated. Somehow half of my adult life is likely behind me. As a friend of mine said “you have a great career behind you!” He is a good friend, so I didn’t take offense, however, the important part here is that as you grow older, what you spend your time on becomes exponentially more important. Less time to fix mistakes. Less time for relations that doesn’t matter. Less time to re-orient your priorities and see the effect.

Every day matters. The accumulation of doing the right things important to you day in day out over 3, 5, 10 years is what creates results in your life. It is the great compounding machine of life, so hard to see in the day to day toils, but so important in the big scheme of your life’s work. How do you manage this? I am sure you have periods where you feel that you are not very productive and then other periods where you are in the “flow”. The state where things seems to happen naturally, pieces fall into place, things happen, relationships work almost with no effort.

Managing time is a highly relative construct but by virtue of being a reader of this post you are probably already very good at managing your time, defining your goals and driving towards them. I am not talking about work only. It matters as much for your private goals whether it is that room renovation in the attic, the next family holiday or just spending more and higher quality time with the people close to you.

Sometimes I listen to interviews with highly effective and successful people. It can be very exhausting to listen to these high achievers. How can they run their life like that? They can serve as an inspiration, but at the end of the day we all have to find out what works for us at the given period and given circumstances of our lives. Children, bosses, illness, unforeseen events, they all tend to torpedo even our best intentions. The margins in life can be razor thin.

If you talk with practitioners in palliative care you never hear them talk about patients that wish they had spent more time in the office … Work life balance is what creates long term results. I know many of you are leaders and entrepreneurs building businesses and there are periods where work seems to take over our life, however, we all need to find ways to manage ourselves in these periods to avoid alienate our colleagues as well as our nearest and dearest.

What hit it home for me in the “10,000 day” observation was that time is NOT GIVEN to us, time is always TAKEN away. So, what you do with the time matters immensely. In my experience more often than not the busy takes precedence over the important. Our daily routines are so full of demands from everyone around us and the catch is that you are rarely faulted for doing the urgent. However, you pay the price in the long term!!!

Last year I went through a 6 months exploration to identify the things important to me. I started questioning “what is important?”. To me. Not anyone else. That sounds self-centred and it is, but only by figuring this out can YOU prioritize and do what is right for YOU whether at work or at home. Sometimes the important overlaps between work and private life. Sometimes it doesn’t. That’s ok. But you need to figure out the priorities for yourself, not what others think they should be.

It is an exploration and there are many ways and many tools you can use. But make sure you don’t rush to any conclusion. Give it time. Allow yourself to reflect in quiet downtime, ask the people nearest to you what they think of you, what they think is important in their life. This all sounds simple in principle; believe it or not the hardest thing can be to figure out what IS IMPORTANT. To YOU. Oh, and by the way, also get rid of the stuff that you know you are not good at. The things that drains your energy, that doesn’t motivate you, that you always push out if possible.

So, every morning I think through what I want to do. I think about what is urgent and what is important. Few urgent things will have serious negative impact in your life if you don’t do them. You might even become better at delegating work or sharing tasks and chores at home differently. The daily routine will start bringing your important tasks and goals to the top of your day. And if things are NOT important and NOT urgent … you can probably strike them out.

When you manage to first find out what is important and then do the important every day, little by little you will become the best YOU can be. And then YOU will be the best for everybody else around you.

Be the best YOU!