You do.
Time.
It’s that one commodity that nobody has more of than anybody else.
Everybody has the same 24 hours of the day. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, what ethnicity you are, where you live. We all have the same amount of time. I’m sure you’ve all heard that many, many times before. It’s so cliche. However, sometimes, cliches are more accurate than we like them to be.
The amount of time doesn’t matter. It’s how we use the time.
We already know that work expands to fill the time allowed to complete it. It’s known as Parkinson’s Law. So if you give yourself 30 minutes to complete a task, you’ll do it. So if you give yourself 60 minutes to complete a task, you’ll do it in 60 minutes as well.
When we ask people when they come to our website, what’s your biggest productivity challenge? Most people say time. I find that to be such a cop-out because the truth is, is that you have the time to do these things that you want to do. You’re just not using your current time the right way; you’re distracting yourself, spending time and attention on the things that are not the most effective.
One of the best definitions I think of productivity and efficiency and effectiveness I love is that productivity is producing more, efficiency is producing more with less, and effectiveness is producing the right things. So time is never the issue. You’re spending time on the wrong things period.
The biggest thing that makes me crazy is when you have people say that they don’t have time to save time.
I can’t tell you how often I’m looking at businesses that have no documented processes of any kind or if they do have documented policies, people don’t know where they are. Also, if they don’t know when they are, they’re not updated in tested regularly, which means they’re useless.
Then some businesses say, “Oh yeah, we don’t have time to start working on that.” Which is like saying you don’t have time to sleep. It’s absurd to me. It’s frustrating because there’s no change and we can’t make that change unless it’s painful enough not to change.
So I would argue that no matter how times stretched you think you are, if you restricted your time, even further, innovations would start to come.
Imagine this. You’re 20 years old, you’re working on a project that you’re spending 18 hours a day, you’re young, you’re full of energy, full of vigor, and you’re working nonstop 18 hours a day. Hard-charging, being super productive, and three years of doing that, you find yourself with a chronic illness, and it nearly kills you. All the while, you’re building up debt and not getting things done. This chronic illness takes you from working 18 hours a day to barely struggling to get an hour of work on any given day. What do you do? I think most people would probably give up.
Or…
You find a new way of doing things in that one hour that you have.
Now, that was me when I got diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and my response to that was creating a brand new system of productivity that would allow me to get a maximum amount done, actually more than I’d ever gotten done before in much less time.
If you ask somebody, who works a nine to five job, “what would you do? If you could only work till four? The answer is easy, “skip lunch,” but if you ask that same person, what would you do if you only had an hour of the day to get that work done?
It requires an entirely different kind of thinking. One that most people are not even aware of because the question isn’t what would you do? It’s what wouldn’t you do? If those things that you wouldn’t do still have to get done, who or what is going to do them for you?
The whole idea of working smarter versus harder is particularly relevant here. No time restriction says you can not be more productive. It does not exist. I’ve seen so many different situations where people thought that they had no more time, and the time was their problem.
Time is never the problem. It’s just about how you use it.
Fortunately, this is one of the things that we teach you. We have this great program called The Replaceable Founder, which we deliver as an online program or a One Day Intensive taught here in New York every month. I teach all of that content, nine weeks of it in one single day. So if you’re strapped for time, one day might seem a lot more appealing than nine weeks.
One day in New York with me can change your life, and I don’t use that lightly. It is the goal of the event. I want to change your life and your business.
I bet you can make time for that.
Click on less.do/nyc to save your spot.
