Big Time Interruptions
Posted by mike on February 23, 2008
I’ve been bad. I allowed too many new undertakings to take me away from my blogging and other projects. So I have this pile of new unfinished business on top of old unfinished business making a mountain of unfinished businesses. I need to wrap up a few things here.
It is not unusual to hear the excuse “I don’t have time”. Once when I did a time management workshop, I asked the participants to make an inventory of where their time went daily, weekly and monthly. One of them, who always used the no time excuse for poor performance and unfinished tasks was flabbergasted to find out that her innocent 30min daily TV soap opera translated to 2 and a half hours a week and 12 hours a month. Add to that hours spent looking for misplaced items, going through her email, reading chain mail and forwarding them, deleting runaway spam, and take note: innocently exchanging one letter and one liner text messages throughout the day and the time it takes to think about the subject at hand. All in all, she spends almost 4 hrs a day, 20 hours a week or a total of roughly 8 days a month in non-essential activities when she included her non-productive moments on weekends. More than a week in a month squandered needlessly. And she believes she has no time to get anything done!
An office worker once defended her small talk, just a few minutes anyway she says. Well…sure…about 10 plus times a day. At 6 minutes a chatter, that’s an hour a day at work! We always say this won’t take long…a few times a day. Put together, it can be quite long! Where else in our life do the minutes pile up into hours and hours into days? And days into months and months into years? I am so guilty of this.
I spend an hour or two writing a sensible entry and so I think in terms of setting aside the full period to do just that. It only happened 3 times in the last 54 days. This time, with so much on my hands now, I will need to restructure my creativity. Perhaps a few minutes and lines daily will do the job then put it together on Saturdays. Maybe a corner a day of a room will get the whole room organized in time just as a page a day of a business plan is the only way to get it done. After all, a castle is built one rock at a time.
What are we building and what interruptions are keeping us from getting it done? It is written somewhere….if life was a jar of beans…how many beans do we have left and what are we going to do with them? Can we really tell how many we have left?
So there. That’s my excuse. Will somebody please buzz me when I sleep on the job? I could be on my last bean for all I know…
