On Time (part IV) - To optimise or not optimise

The first time I brought up this issue at a talk I got a bunch of weird looks from the audience followed by some hesitant questions. Aren't we, as entrepreneurs, supposed to optimise everything to increase output and efficiency?

My answer is: as entrepreneurs, perhaps, as innerpreneurs, definitely not!

The risk that comes with becoming a fantastic optimiser is not knowing when to stop.

After it has become imbued in your mindset the evaluation of the resources it takes to complete a certain task and then reducing this resource usage whenever possible, it become an instinct. You look at something that needs to be done, you evaluate it, optimise it, do it, done.

This process gets an amazing amount of things done but at the cost of focusing you on achieving the end result, the goal, the deliverable, at the expense of making the experience of actually achieving it as fast and painless as possible.

But most of the things that are really worth in life are not about the end result, but about the path you walk to get there.

Have a new personal hacking project? Why would you want to hasten the pleasure actually doing it gives you in favour of getting the project done as quickly as possible?

Having a child? Do you really want to get done with his education and upbringing as fast and efficiently as possible?

That's what actual "living" is all about. The path and the experience.

Ultimately, you already know how this project called "life" ends. It's not pretty. Most want to avoid it. So we try to experience it for as long as we can.

So know when to take you optimiser hat off and enjoy life. Work, hat on. Personal life, hat off.

That's the Way of the Innerpreneur.

On time (part III) - Little things add up

One of the most powerful and yet most underestimated techniques to better manage time is the observation and optimisation of small habits and routines.

Lets take a quick look at some examples.

Say you have a bunch of keys on your keyring, and every time you lock your front door from the outside or you open the door, you fumble around for 5 seconds until you find the right one. For the sake of creating a more realistic scenario, let us also assume that you have a building door you have to open every time you want to get in.

So that's 5 seconds to lock, 5 seconds to open the building door, 5 seconds to open your flat door. 15 seconds per cycle.

Let's assume that on average you do that twice a day. So on a given day, you spend about 30 seconds fumbling with keys. 900 seconds per month. 10 800 seconds per year.

Now let's assume that you are a small business owner in Europe, where the average hourly labour cost in the Eurozone is 29,5€ (check it at: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Hourly_labour_costs)

That's 3 hours every year spent fumbling for keys! Or the equivalent of 88,5€!

So just by buying a simple pack of plastic sleeves to organize your keyring that saves you 4 seconds each time you look for a key, which costs less than 2 € on Amazon



Buy it here!

That's 2,4 hours per year saved or, discounting the 2€ investment, 68,8€ of savings on the first year.

Think about that! 2,4 more hours to be with the ones you love you do something you are passionate about instead of... fumbling for keys!

Let us now consider one of the most used tools in the world, the personal computer.

You work with a computer that is just "good enough" in order to save money on an upgrade. Lets be very conservative and assume that, on average, a typical user opens 200 pages per day (to put into perspective, in 2007 in the US the average would be 138, source http://kickstand.typepad.com/metamuse/2007/10/how-many-web-pa.html).

If your "cheap" computer takes one second more to render a webpage than an updated computer, barely noticeable to the average user. Still, that's 200 seconds per day, or about 20 hours per year.

Even if you did nothing else than web-browsing, your "cheap" computer costs you 590€ per year in lost productivity!

So it's time to invite you for a little exercise.

For one day, pay attention to how much time you spend on the little things, the one's that don't matter much but really add up. Make an estimate. Be amazed.

All this serves a purpose. In this blog I will sometimes point to small optimisations to your life that will make you wonder if they are worth the effort.

Probably on the short run they won't. But we're playing a long game here...

On Time (part II) - The Original GTD Method

Some books entertain you and some change the way you think. But a small number of these impact your life in such a dramatic manner that it is fair to say that they have, literally, changed your life.

One such books for me was David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”. You haven’t read it, buy it here, read it, and multiply the time that you spent reading it many times over (pun intended) in future savings.

You can get it on Amazon here:

Read it! :)

This book describes a workflow that, although quite simple, as all sublime things are, is extremely powerful, as not only allows you to fit the handling of all sorts of tasks into an unified process but, most of all, allows you to clear your mind and make mode Inner-time available.

The general look of the diagram that describes the workflow can be found at the FranckCrum blog and looks something like this:

So let’s walk through the whole process.

We start by considering that you have a virtual inbox where literally EVERYTHING that requires time and work goes into. Received a letter? Goes into your inbox. Got an email? Inbox. Someone requested you something? Inbox.

Once you have everything there, go through each item one by one. For each item start off by asking:

 “Is it actionable?”

The purpose of this question is to allow you to quickly decide if that item in your inbox requires you to do something about it or is merely informational. 

So, if the answer to this is “no”, you either trash it and forget it, keep it around for further review or, if you consider ii may be important in the future, you archive it somewhere you can find easily.

A recommendation I can give you here is: whenever possible, trash it! It’s amazing how fast stuff starts to pile up and becomes impossible to manage. Although I have been steadily improving, I am terrible at this, so I can guarantee it does become a problem. 😃

If the answer is “yes”, then ask yourself immediately “can I do it now in 2 minutes?”.

If you can, then there’s no point on spending any more time noting it down somewhere, the overhead alone would make it inefficient to do so. So just do it!

Should it take longer or you are unable to do it now, then you just note it down on you task list, task manager or calendar.

How to decide where? Easy! If there is a special time you need to do it, it goes in the calendar. So meetings, parties, trips and travels and other appointments go in you calendar, everything else to your task list.

Of the tasks noted on your task list, decide which ones can be done by someone who’s not you. And delegate them. BUT keep them noted in your task list as a delegated task, otherwise you’ll have to spend Inner-time trying to remember to check-up on people.

If you do this consistently, you will immediately feel an enormous decrease in stress and increase of inner time. But this is just the basic workflow!

But more about that on a later post...