The Most Precious Commodity (Part 1)

Yesterday I had to go visit my accountant to drop off my income taxes.  I ended up having a bunch of time in the car by myself.  I generally listen to inspirational, educational, or business news podcasts while I am driving.  Unfortunately I forgot my iPod and didn’t have anything “useful” to listen to.  Since I had nothing to occupy my mind, it got me thinking about time.

How many times have you said “There are not enough hours in the day,” “If only I had a little more time” or some similar statement.  In my opinion, time is the most precious commodity.  It cannot be created or destroyed.  It cannot be stopped from passing by.  On top of that, each of us only has so much of it to spend.

A lot of people spend thousands of hours and dollars on “Time Management” training, tools and processes.  I always get a kick out of the term “Time Management”, since in reality time cannot be managed; it is only ourselves that we can manage.  That being said, making the most of the time that we have is a critical step towards success.  In fact, my team is currently investing heavily in Time Management training for our leadership team to help us be more effective as individuals and a team.

To take it to its most basic form, the key to the effective use of time is prioritization.  It is choosing to do what is most important to you, and choosing not to do (or better yet delegating) what is not.  I will do a future post on prioritization, so I don’t want to dive into it too deep here.

We cannot be effective members of a team or an organization if we are not effective individuals first.  Do you know what your personal priorities are?  Do you “manage” your time to ensure that you achieve your goals?  “Work-Life Balance” is a term that gets a lot of attention in today’s fast-paced world.  However, to me there is no such thing as balance. 

At different stages in our lives we focus our attention, or split our focus between different areas of our lives.  When we are children, we focus almost entirely on ourselves, having fun, meeting friends and exploring the world around us.  In general, we get out of school and set out to start our career, often throwing ourselves into it whole-heartedly.  Then as we get established, we start a family.  Having a partner and children takes some of our attention away from our professional lives, so we split our focus, often giving neither the attention we feel it deserves.  As we get older and our kids go off to start their lives, we have more time to focus on our career, and often our partner.  When our career begins to wind down we focus on our partner and ourselves. 

With the exception of the very beginning and the very end of our lives, we are forced to balance competing areas of our lives that consume time. 

How do you “manage” your time?  When you look at how you are going to spend your personal and professional time, do you make your decisions based on your goals and priorities?

In the second half of this post I plan to write about the constant competition between personal and professional goals.

Thanks for reading.  Please connect with me on Linked-In (be sure the mention the blog) and follow me on Twitter (@billroth13).

Bill Roth