We can use procrastination to our advantage, explains Rory Vaden.
The book, and its provocative title, is really about interrogating why we spend our time as we do, and why our efforts to be efficient will likely fail (but this wouldn't make for such an alluring title).
“Everything you know about time management is wrong,” says Rory Vaden (co-founder of training company Southwestern Consulting). He goes on to explain why we should learn from people he calls “multipliers”.
Multipliers are those people who seem to be completely on top of their lives, who never seem flustered, and never complain about being busy.
A small part of his explanation of their success is about procrastinating on purpose, but more is about how they invest their time (spending time today to save time tomorrow) and how you can do the same.
A useful analogy that he refers to a lot is that every time we spend £3 on a coffee, we are sacrificing the chance for that £3 to be invested and turn into £30 over the next five years (the joy of compound interest).
His point is that where traditional time management techniques get us as far as considering the urgency and importance of each task, what needs to be overlaid is the ‘significance’ of each task. What the effect of the task is over time, not just right now.
If we find ourselves feeling that we never get to the end of our list; if we put things on the list just to tick them off; if we complain to our colleagues or friends that there just aren’t enough hours in the day – we’re probably working inefficiently.
Most people are, and Vader gives the stats to back that up in terms of just how many thousands of working hours are spent crafting long emails and attending needless meetings over a year.
In a nutshell, people love being busy (and telling other people how busy they are) because it makes them feel important.
Vader also has little time for the notion of ‘work-life balance’, pointing out that anything important that we want to achieve will require our full attention at certain times. This doesn’t mean we are ‘failing’ in other areas – just that we have deprioritised them for a period.
The first step is to take ownership of the commitments we have made – and stop complaining about them. Complaining makes us feel like victims. It's better to accept that we have made commitments through choice, and that we are not too busy to manage them.
The second step is to pick the most important goal to us right now – be it learning a new skill, growing our business or developing a new product. This short process should give us a sense of clarity about our goals and values.
We probably don’t actually need to do all the things in a day that we think you need to do. If we write it all down, we should find ways to get as many things off our list as possible. Multipliers give themselves permission to do this in five different ways.
1. Eliminate all the tasks you can. Take yourself off cc for emails that won’t actually benefit from your input, and politely decline meetings that don’t require your opinion. On a grander scale, this means empowering your team – let people get on with things; create a culture with less need for committee, less personal oversight, more trust.
2. Delegate all the tasks you can. Be honest with yourself about how much of what you do
could be done by someone junior (someone with a lower hourly rate than you). Invest the time it would take to train them properly – you will reap those minutes back in the future.
3. Automate all the tasks you can. This is another key way to ‘invest’ your time, and possibly your money. Spending money on systems that automate manual processes so that the team can focus on utilising their actual skills and expertise might be what saves your company from future failure.
4. Procrastinate on purpose. Don’t complete tasks in advance; do them just when they need to be done. Requirements change so often that, more often than not, attempts to get ahead just mean doing something twice.
5. Concentrate. Bring your whole mind to the task in hand. Don’t try to multitask, and do remove or ignore distractions. Creating boxes of time in your diary to focus on ongoing endeavours is a good way to enable this.
Yes – this isn’t an easy shift, and it’s definitely not for the feint-hearted. It will certainly work for those who are ambitious, passionate and devoted to their work. But the message is useful to everyone; you don’t need to suffer the stress caused by the ‘tyranny of urgency’. You can think your way to a calmer and more focused way of working.
“Time is money.”
“Let me buy you a coffee…”