Trim Minutes, Save Hours

Wealth is the accumulation of riches. There are seven types of wealth: financial capital (money), social capital (your network of personal and professional relationships), intellectual capital (your ideas), experiential capital (lessons learned from your life's experiences), spiritual capital (having a sense of purpose in what you do), energy (your capacity to move into action) and time.

Of these, time is the most precious because it perishes for all of us at the same rate every day. You simply cannot generate more time or retrieve lost time. We all get the same amount. No more and no less.

Consequently, the greatest challenge to maximizing wealth is maximizing the use of time. We can't manage time by saying we need 36 hours next Tuesday, but only 12 hours this Friday. We can only manage what we do within a given hour. I suggest you make three lists on a sheet of paper (I learned this concept in my all-time favorite book: "Good To Great" by Jim Collins):

1. My highest priority outcomes for this week:

2. My To Do List (The activities that will generate these outcomes):

3. My Stop Doing List (The activities that I will stop doing so that I will have the time do what is necessary to generate my highest priority outcomes:

The hardest and longest list to generate is the third one. While there may be three key things you can do to generate any specific outcome, there are literally hundreds of things you can do at any given point in time. The real work is not doing an activity. The real work is not allowing your self to do the myriad of things that will have no real impact on driving better results.

Here's a partial list of activities I suggest you consider dropping if they are still happening during the course of your day:

Reading or sending SPAM e-mail (Virtually every e-mail that gets forwarded to me gets forwarded to trash. Sorry, but the one in 100 that is worth reading is not worth searching for if I have to read the other 99. Of course, that doesn't include you forwarding this e-mail to someone else.)

Complaining (It doesn't matter whether you're complaining about your boss, the economy, the stock market, your customers or your competition. Common old complaining is just simply a waste of time. You don't feel better when you're done and you're no closer to achieving your desired outcomes. A close cousin to complaining is gossiping. Again, this is cotton candy. Feels good for a few minutes and then bad the rest of the day.)

Meaningless Meetings (Be much stricter about the meetings you attend. Don't go just because your boss says you have to go. Challenge your boss to clarify the connection between this meeting and better results in the organization's highest priority outcomes.)

Virtual Reality Leagues (These things can suck hours and days out of your life. Ask yourself if they are really worth investing your most precious resource into.)

Keep searching and eliminating time wasters. (After you've cleared the decks, you can always come back and add something back to your calendar.) Then pour a reasonable number of hours each week into doing the few things that will accelerate your highest priority outcomes.

Republishing Articles

Each month my e-newsletter gets republished in approximately 20 blogs, on-line publications, and internal publications for businesses, universities, and not-for-profit organizations. If you would like to republish all or part of my monthly articles, please send me an e-mail at dan@thecoughlincompany.com with "Republishing Article" in the subject heading. I will send you the article in a word document. All I ask is that you include my name as the author of the article and a short paragraph at the end of the article about me with a link to my website.

Take care and have a great month!

Dan Coughlin

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