Track Your Time Usage Carefully
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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.”
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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.
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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 345
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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 346
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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.”
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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.