How many times a week do you say, “Where did my day
go?”. Or, “I need more hours in a day”
or worse yet, “Why can’t I make more progress?”
Well, you are not alone. Just about everyone complains about
not having enough time to get the tasks they are responsible for done. What we
are really talking about however is productivity. In a broad sense, production
is concerned with the overall effectiveness of getting things done or
performing well. In the context of a
business or organization, it is the measure of how efficiently goods and
services are delivered.
Productivity is determined by working on high-payoff
activities, and high payoff activities mean spending time doing the right
thing, at the right time, in the right way for the right length of time. When
we spend time working on high payoff activities, we are working smarter, not
harder!
The saying, “Time is money,” is so often repeated we tend to
for that it is literally true. In fact, time is the most precious resource we
possess. We cannot make any more of it,
we cannot hoard it, we cannot get it back after it is lost and we cannot work
harder to earn more time. All we can do is invest the time we have in order to
get the best return on our “time capital.” On the positive side, time is the
one resource over which we can exert the most control to increase productivity
and performance. Everyone’s productivity is a direct measure of how wisely they
invest your time.
When we waste time, we are losing productivity and the
“opportunity” or benefit to which that time could have been used. This lost productivity has a cost just as the
benefit we could have realized has a value. From a personal standpoint, how
much is lost productivity costing you (and your organization)? What could you (or your organization have
realized in incremental benefit if time was used effectively and productively? So, what is the value of your time?
The following steps should help answer this question and
provide a thought process of helping you manage your time to become more
productive.
1.
Calculate what your time is worth. Think in terms of every hour you spend on a
task as a direct investment of the amount of money that you determine your time
is worth. The calculation is simple
enough. Divide your annual earnings by 244 eight-hour working days or 1952
hours. Then, divide this hourly rate by 60 to get the value of each
minute.
2.
Ask, “how many of the tasks you accomplish each
day are actually worth this rate of pay. Once you have determined the value of
your time you can make judgments about how to use each hour for the maximum
productivity and benefit.
3.
After examining all the activities that make up
your day, decide which of these is worth less than the amount of time you must
invest to accomplish it.
4.
With this knowledge, decide whether that
activity should be eliminated, simplified or delegated to someone whose time
costs less than yours.
Reserve your valuable time for activities meriting that rate
of investment. Once you understand the
worth of your time and set specific goals for its wise use, you will start to
reap huge dividends in terms of productivity and accomplishment and/or more
free time to pursue other life pleasures.
Blog by Joel Thigpen, Victory Lap Architect with The McGrail
Group (www.mcgrailgroup.com); a
leadership, productivity, membership development and performance improvement
company located in Raleigh, NC, affiliated with Leadership Management
International. Acknowledgement: “Effective
Personal Productivity” by Paul J. Meyer, Randy Slechta and LMI.
