Authors: Steve Shipside
The Way to Wealth (7 page)
‘Leisure is time for doing something useful; this leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the lazy man never,’
said Franklin, taking leisure seriously.
We associate the idea of quality time with the time-starved, work-obsessed West Coast Americans trying desperately to tend to their neglected relationships, families and personal lives. Back in the 1750s Franklin was already on the case.
DEFINING IDEA
…It’s a new age…It’s a new age…‘Creativity’ is the word in balancing your personal and work life.
~
ROBERT EPSTEIN, CEO OF CAREERBANK
Although much is made of Franklin’s repeated calls to industry and frugality, it’s often overlooked that he also rated leisure seriously enough to distinguish between quality leisure time and wasted time. He was an advocate of taking your leisure seriously and using it for something more constructive than vegging out in front of reality TV while tucking into tortilla chips. Not that he personally suffered from the twin plagues of Big Brother and barbecue sauce-flavoured chips, but from the general tone of
The Way to Wealth
it’s a fair inference that he wouldn’t have approved of either.
If you’re flat out at work the idea that you need to do more with your leisure time might sound like madness but in fact it makes perfect sense. Doing nothing sounds like bliss when you’re busy and stressed, but in fact doing nothing is not the antidote to stress—far from it. If you can’t clear your mind of work then your downtime is likely to become an extension of your working worries, and a festering, stagnating extension of them at that.
Speaking personally, I know that as someone who works from home I have to make a special effort to get away from my work, so I really do try to get out more. That doesn’t mean pubbing and clubbing all the time (not quite, anyway), it means outdoor sports, meeting up with friends to try new hobbies, lots of short breaks away from home and plenty of travel. That doesn’t mean I can’t relax at home; far from it. I have sacred relaxation rituals (‘hammock time’) but these are special moments set aside. What I try not to do is lose time to the TV or the sofa. That doesn’t mean I don’t watch TV or slouch happily with a book; it’s just that I try to choose what to watch or when to chill. I almost never switch off at the end of the night with the vaguely unsettling feeling that I’ve just been suckered into watching three hours of junk the way you might walk away from an all-you-can-eat buffet wondering why you did it. However, I’ll admit that I only got to this stage after years of losing my life to wasted moments.
Benjamin F. spotted a long way back that the only real way to relax from work is not to do nothing, but to go out and do something completely different. Dynamic downtime is more satisfying, refreshing, rich and, above all, easier to share.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU
…Take the plunge. Grab a listings magazine, check online—however you find it, pick something you’ve never done before and do it this weekend. It doesn’t have to be hang-gliding; how about a foreign language class or a guerrilla-gardening outing? See how refreshing it can be to do something fresh.
Where lots of other writers dwell dreamily on the possibilities of ‘Tomorrow’, our Benjamin was a resolute ‘Today’ man:
‘One today is worth two tomorrows.’
Make the most of your today.
Welcome to today. It might be raining, you might have a tough one ahead, but whatever the case this is the only time you’re going to see this day. You’ll never get it back. So why let someone steal it from you?
DEFINING IDEA
…You cannot step twice into the same river.
~
HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS
There are lots of time thieves out there: institutional thieves that make you wait or jump through hoops, corporate thieves that treat you as one of millions and rank your time accordingly, and individual thieves who either steal your time to add to theirs or else purloin and waste it because they don’t know any better. Learn to spot them and snatch a bit of your time back for yourself.
Institutions, be they public or corporate, are the hardest to battle. Statisticians tell us that we spend around forty-five minutes of every day waiting for something. PDAs, mobile phones and the dreaded BlackBerry maybe known as digital leashes for their role in tying people to their jobs, but there’s no question that they come into their own when it comes to reclaiming dead time. The exec calmly ordering emails while waiting in line would be an enviable sight if it wasn’t for the fact that you know they’ll still be doing emails late at night. You don’t need technology to thwart time thieves, though. Just be prepared. Read those briefing notes, take notes of your own, just make sure you’re never ever sitting/standing there with nothing to do but wait.
Individual time thieves are both more insidious and easier to deal with.
Insidious, because you may not even notice that they’re stealing your life, but easier to deal with because (unlike institutions) you have the power to shape their behaviour. Some thieves are deliberate—they’re trying to hijack your time so they have less to do themselves. More often, though, thieves don’t even realise they’re doing it—like the insecure colleague who insists on talking through all their dilemmas in the hope that you’ll make up their mind for them, or the person who wants to talk about some meeting you’re only peripherally involved in but which is very important to them.
In which case don’t just nod and watch your own time slip away—explain in a friendly but firm way that you have a rush job right now but what they’re saying sounds very important, so they should jot down the key points in an email/memo for you and you’ll look at it. This does two things. The first is that true time thieves will never actually write down their musings because it seems like work, and the second is that deliberators will often come to their own conclusions when they set their thoughts down on paper (or screen).
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU
…If someone wants to talk about a document, development or agenda insist they send it to you first. If you allow them to discuss it before you see it, they’ll try to paint the whole thing in their own words (needlessly, since it already exists) or colour it with their agenda.
24
MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR WORKING WEEK
‘Employ thy time well if thou meanest to gain leisure,’
said Benjamin and I, for one, take that to mean don’t spend days of your life sitting in rock-solid traffic.
Let’s presume for a moment that your work is rewarding, challenging and deeply pleasurable with nary a wasted moment. It’s a stretch I know, but work with me. Even if all the above is true then it’s pretty much a certainty that there’s one major part of your working day that is, at best, dead time…the commute.
DEFINING IDEA
…Companies today cannot afford to ignore the issue of work/life balance. Providing employees with the flexibility to address personal commitments, without compromising the needs of the business, can make the difference between a good working environment and a great one.
~
DIANE DOMEYER, DIRECTOR OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST TEMPORARY STAFF AGENCY
Naturally there will be somebody out there who is carried to work in a sedan chair borne aloft by a bevy of attractive members of the opposite sex. That person is disagreeing with this right now. For the rest of us, crammed into late trains or sitting in traffic, the commute is one of the worst parts of the day. It doesn’t take long to do the maths. If you spend about a hour each way getting to work then you’re losing the equivalent of a working day a week sitting, stressing, swearing—and, what’s even worse, paying for the privilege. So how about working from home instead?
Strictly speaking, I’d advise you to avoid the phrase ‘working from home’ because to management ears that sounds indistinguishable from the ‘food poisoning’ so often suffered on Monday mornings. Indeed the biggest single problem of anyone who wants to stop wasting their time on transport is that they are immediately seen as a time waster. It’s as if you have to pay your dues with hours of cramped travel in order to be seen to really want your job.
That doesn’t have to be the case, however. The advent of email, broadband-equipped home computers and such technological marvels as Virtual Private Networks means that to a corporate network you are as present (absent?) at home as you are in the office—as long as you are logged on and working. Furthermore, many governments are now formally encouraging people to try flexible working, partly in response to the fact that long hours and both parents slogging away in offices aren’t seen to be in line with those family values so dear to politicians.
Few companies have a culture flexible enough to suddenly swallow full-scale flexible working, so don’t try and force it down your particular company’s throat. Try instead to secure yourself just one or two days a week, and make it clear that this means being online and on duty for the whole day or you’ll be perceived as a part timer. If you’re going to argue for a day of home working, then make sure you have agreed goals for that day’s work with your boss. These should be crystal clear and deliverable, rather than vague generalisations about being contactable.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU
…Take the initiative with your boss and note down the normal workload you achieve in the office and agree to deliver it from home. But be careful:if you’re not that productive normally, you’ll be bringing this to your boss’ attention. Not a good idea, so prepare the ground first.
Franklin actually wants us to reverse the rot and do tomorrow’s work today. At least that’s what he says:
‘Have you somewhat to do tomorrow, do it today’…
That sounds a bit ambitious—until you consider that really it’s a sneaky way of Franklin making his point about procrastination again in a slightly different way. By exhorting us to take on tomorrow’s work today he’s really just trying to strike back at the way work tends to get mugged by that mañana spirit.
DEFINING IDEA
…Procrastination Procrastination is opportunity’s assassin.
~
VICTOR KIAM, THE MAN WHO LIKED THE RAZOR SO MUCH HE BOUGHT THE COMPANY
It’s particularly unfair that we opt for a Spanish word to portray procrastination since it’s pretty much a way of life for most of us. In fact in our household I don’t think I would ever get round to doing the washing up if it wasn’t for the occasional writing deadline. Let’s say the washing up is all done, however; you’ve polished the windows, done the ironing and cleaned the mouthpiece of the phone handset. You’re running out of things to do and there is that sneaking suspicion that you might be putting something off. Now is time to try to figure out why.
The most likely reason is that the job in question is one you don’t want to do. It might be hard, it might be scary, but whatever it is you’d rather see if somebody else could make the bad thing go away. That’s natural enough, but instead of waiting and hoping you have to either decide if you’re just being work-shy or whether the putting off is down to a fear that the task is too big to handle. In which case, don’t wait for someone to make it go away; either hire someone to do the job or delegate it to someone else.
First, be honest with yourself about the difference between a genuine decision to delay doing something (because conditions will be more appropriate at a later date) and an irrational postponement.
Then think about these points:
• Consider if you can break the job down into bite-sized morsels and tackle those one at a time.
• Is indecision plaguing you? If so, lay out the criteria as you see them and set a deadline for the decision.
• Afraid of failing? Afraid of success? Try not to focus on the task or your fear but instead onvisualising the finished task and the rewards this will bring either in itself, in time freed for other things or in relief that it’s all over.
• Can you really not be bothered? If you don’t care about it then ask yourself why this task has fallen to you. It could be that you do care, really, but have lost sight of the goal (personal, financial, etc.). Or it could be that you have nothing invested in this job and perhaps somebody else would be better suited to take it on. You know it can’t be right to hog something you don’t want to do.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU
…If you realise that it’s just a question of rolling up your sleeves and getting on with it, then pick a time for the job right now. Make sure you’re not going to be distracted—because you know you’ll be more than happy to abandon something you’ve put off this long.