difference with the previous proposition is that there is a small opening on the briefcase with a $5 note sticking out. The briefcase is built so that whenever you take the $5 note, another one appears. You cannot open the briefcase; you have to take the money note by note.
The big difference with the previous deal is that even if you take the deal you won’t know how much money there is in the briefcase. You will have to take the money, one $5 note after another, until it stops. And of course you don’t know if there is only one $5 note, and the money will stop after the first withdrawal, or if there is a hundred million dollars; i.e. an almost endless flow of $5 notes.
Would you take the deal?
So far I haven’t found anyone interested.
Yet, if you substitute money for time, this is the deal we are given. We live a minute and another minute appears. We live another minute and another one appears. No-one knows how many minutes we have in our briefcase. We could be gone in a day, in a week, in a year, in ten years. Who knows?
We are given a terrible deal with time — a deal no one would accept with money. However we place much more value on our money than on our time.
Imagine someone steals your wallet while you’re walking in the street. There might only be a few dollars in it, or a few notes, but you would try to do something about it. Run behind the thief if you can, shout, try to arrest him and prosecute him. You would be very upset.
Every day we allow our time to be stolen and we do not react. Time is far more important than money, and we place so little value on it.
Imagine that someone comes to you and asks for $100. You would ask why and would need some good reasons to give $100 away. However, when someone invites us for a meeting or interrupts us, asking for our time, we are far less careful. We give our time away very easily.
I don’t know how long you and I will be here. What I do know is that I want to make every day, every hour, every minute count as if it were gold.
In this book I have included some of the principles by which I live. I share these with my clients to make sure they are as effective as possible, helping them achieve what is important for them.
Some interesting facts about how we work
I am always surprised, and even amazed, to see how much time we waste every day on things that really do not matter. The problem is not the fact that we are spending time on non-important matters; it’s the consequences of this. It’s the fact that we are not spending enough time on things which are very important to us, such as family, health, the key projects at work which will have a big impact on our performance, and so on.
In recent years, the advances in technology at work have been phenomenal. We now have amazing tools at our fingertips which are available to everyone. If you think of email, research by the Lotus Development Corporation shows that people are receiving on average forty to fifty emails per day. Some of my clients are getting over 200 emails every day.
This is great on one view. A high level of communications ought to signify a high level of productivity in our businesses. But we are paying a high price for this. A few years ago one of my coachees heard a very interesting survey on the radio. Apparently in Australia white collar workers check their email, on average, 50 times per day …
I cannot verify this survey but I know that people are constantly looking at their inbox. We start working on something, and we stop every few seconds to check whether we have received new emails. We continue concentrating on our work, and we hear the ‘bing’ from our inbox to indicate a new email has arrived. It’s hard to resist — we humans are curious by nature — and here we are checking our emails again. We return to our work, and after ten minutes feel a bit bored. Guess what? We re-re-recheck our inbox!
Sound familiar? But it does not stop there. The recent move for many companies from compartmentalised offices to open plan workspaces adds to our lack of concentration. Research shows that, on average, people are interrupted every three minutes.
Although the above examples are mainly relevant to corporate life, they have an equally important impact upon our personal lives.
I have seen another survey which demonstrated that 66% of corporate strategy is never executed. Companies spend a lot of time and money to think ahead, to decide their long-term vision and strategy. They pay high-level consultants or recruit high fliers to do so. They involve many people and resources to produce a lovely Word document and numerous PowerPoint® slides to display their plan and strategy.
Only to see that two-thirds of it will never be executed.
In my experience, one of the biggest challenges for companies today is execution. They might be clear on their strategy, on where they want to head. But if you check what people are doing on a day-to-day basis, what they spend their time on hour per hour, you realise there is often a big gap between what they are doing and what they are supposed to do. There is a big gap between what they should be doing to have a major impact on the business, and what they are really doing.
Many people tell me one of their biggest frustrations is that they find themselves at the end of each day having worked hard on a lot of small crises, but having not had the time to focus on any of their big-ticket items.
The impact of our lack of efficiency and effectiveness does not stop in the workplace. When I ask my clients what they would like to do if they were more in control of their work and time, I often receive such answers as:
‘Come home earlier to see my kids.’
‘Have more time to go to the gym and look after my health.’
‘Avoid bringing my work stress home.’
‘Avoid waking up at night thinking about what I forgot to do.’
Inefficiency impacts us both at work and at home.
Most of us have never been taught how to work
What a bold statement to start with! However, in my view, this is one of the most important reasons for lack of execution and lower-than-expected performance. Most people are committed to their role and want to do a good job. They are neither lazy nor unwilling. But they are not working efficiently — they work hard but not always smart. They have never been taught how to work.
It normally surprises people when I make this claim, but I believe most people have never been taught how to work. We go to school, universities, and gain a qualification. We train and qualify as doctors, accountants or engineers. And one day we start working.
Let’s take some simple examples. We get a desk and a computer, and before we know it we get bombarded with information. We receive many emails and have to handle many paper documents.
In my career as an effectiveness coach I have seen many ‘information management systems’. From people who have nothing on their desk, to people who have a few piles to remind them of the things to do for the day, to people who have huge reading piles, to people who have a desk which looks like a bombsite.
I have even met a few people who had two desks: the current one and the old one. They used to work on the old one, but it became so full of paper and files that they had to move to a new desk. And they still use their old desk as a filing system. Curious filing system indeed!
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