The biggest and most unusual deadline of the year
Every year before New Year we realize and wonder that a year has passed without really noticing it and very likely without having spent as much time on the important things as planned. In fact, 80% of New Year’s resolutions don’t last.
New Year is a deadline with an unusual dynamic. It’s not like all the other deadlines where we speed up and start getting done 5x as much stuff to meet it. Instead, we slow down, we look back, we recall all the exciting plans that we’ve made at the beginning of the year and wonder how few we’ve actually achieved.
And then that little sad voice in ourselves asks:
“Why did I not take care that much about my health, played with the kids, followed my passions or spent time exploring the world?”
Interestingly, the simple answer is to say that we did not have the time. But why? Well, almost always we go like: “I was too busy working”.
Turns out this is the #1 reason why as kids or elderly we have plenty of time but in between it’s a rare thing to have.
Don’t get us wrong. Work is a good thing, but the common work culture is not. When it comes down to decide between work and life, we almost always opt for work and there are good reasons to do so. Work pays the bills, gives us safety and makes us feel good. However, we at Timeular really believe, that if we do it right, we can still achieve great things at work and have a great life too.
The first thing we have to change is how we judge our performance
It’s not about how many hours we work, it’s about what meaningful outcome we achieve within those hours. It’s about saying no to all the distractions and fake-urgent things and focus on the really important tasks instead. In sports we all know that training a huge amount of hours a day is counter-productive, so why do we keep pretending it’s good at work?
We at Timeular want to change this by helping you to spend more time on your important things and keep being successful at work. We support you to understand where your time is going and to improve from there.
Imagine you could stop after 8, 7, 6 hours working very productively, then recharge by enjoying the other beloved things in life and come back the day after full of energy. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
We like to say instead of working harder and play harder, we have to work smarter and live healthier. It’s easy to be busy and it’s super hard to be not because you have to say no to many things, but believe us, once you get there, you’ll enjoy a much higher quality of life.
The #1 way to get there, is to start taking control over your precious time and prioritize how you spend it. It’s time to find out what you are spending most of your time on and what to change. The key to success here is to change one thing at a time. It’s a step by step journey where it will be easy to fall into old habits and to avoid that we need to start with only one goal. One! Sorry, we can’t stress it enough.
If you want to make 2019 better, apply this loop:
- What’s currently your number one important thing you want to spend more time on? Trust your gut. How much time does that require per week? Common examples are doing sports twice a week, playing with the kids at least 1 hour every day and cooking a healthy dinner every day.
- Measure where can you take the required time from and how e.g. you find out that you spend 3h per week in unnecessary update meetings which could also be done via email and asynchronously. Time to change that.
- When you know that, start shifting time from that one thing to the other step by step. After you’re done start over with 1. again.
If you think it’s not possible to shift time because other things are more urgent and important, just look back at 2018 and at how often you or your boss thought something is super urgent and important and looking back as of today it was not.
What’s important to you personally should be your highest priority and if you manage to spend more time on those things you will see that next year in December the unusual thing will not be the New Year dynamic again. Instead, it will be you having a happy smile on your face because you and your life have both improved a lot.
And if it was us that helped you to do so, we will be smiling with you, because we want to make your time count!
P.S. If you want to increase your chances to succeed, share this article with your team members because you can’t change your team’s work culture alone.