Right Attitudes » Ideas for Impact
» by Nagesh Belludi

1. Divide and conquer. Break up large projects into smaller tasks. If you think a task will take less than five minutes, get it done right away. If you can reply to an email in less than two minutes, reply immediately and file or delete the incoming email.
2. Fight procrastination. One of the easiest ways to fight procrastination is to focus on starting your task. Commit to your task for just ten minutes. Avoid distractions and interruptions and continue to work for just ten minutes. By the end of the ten minutes, you probably get absorbed in the tasks, build momentum and can choose to continue working towards completion.
3. Put things in their place. Designate a place at your home and office for everything — your keys, wallet, watch, clothes, electronic gadgets and all personal effects. Always put each item in its proper place. Being orderly prevents you from anxiously searching for these belongings the next time you want to use them.
4. Create checklists for all tasks. Consider preparing checklists for everything from cleaning the home to packing for travel. Checklists help you remember everything critical and thus reduce the persistent worry of forgetting something important.
5. Start planning your day on the prior day. Before you leave office or before you go to bed, plan the next day and prepare a ‘To Do’ list. Check your calendar for meetings, deadlines and commitments. In addition, put out everything you need the night before. Planning ahead not only helps you start the next day with purpose, but also gets things off your mind. You can thus enjoy your time away or sleep better.
6. Pick up after yourself and clean your home and workspace. From time to time, glance through all areas of your home and office for things that are out of place. Tidy up before the clutter gets out of hand. Use the wastebasket liberally. Realize that mess leads to stress.
7. Maintain a ‘On-The-Go’ folder. When you receive your copy of a subscription magazine, tear out all the articles that interest you and dispose of the rest of the magazine. Maintain an “on-the-go” folder and file such articles. Take this folder wherever you go and read these articles during transition times — when you wait for a doctor’s appointment or when your flight is delayed at an airport. Review this folder frequently and toss out everything that is older than six months.

Recommended Reading

• Self-assessment Quiz: how stressed are you?
• The “10-minute Dash” technique to overcoming procrastination
• You have a pile of reading material at your desk?
• Everyday reflections for effective time management
• Seven habits to beat Monday morning blues

***See other articles related to time management, personal organization, productivity, stress management, getting things done, work-life balance

Brad Feld on Work-Life Balance

Here is an excellent podcast (summary here) where Venture Capitalist Brad Feld discusses his thoughts on the concept of work-life balance. He also shares the changes he implemented to achieve more balance in his life. Also, see a previous article by Brad on this very topic. Here are key takeaways:

• The sense of busyness is not the same as the sense of achievement.
• Balance is an important issue to consider at all ages, as many make the mistake in believing they will “get the balance on the back half of life” and find it shorter than they hoped (”you don’t know when the lights are going to go out (when you are going to die.)”)
• Work-life balance is an important issue to everyone, yet each person’s approach will be different. There is no one-size fits all approach.

Work-Life Balance is an Individual Choice

Balancing the various demands on our time is by no means easy. It is unrealistic to establish a ratio between ‘work’ and ‘play’ time to pursue the sense of balance.

Balance is an individual choice you have to make based on your personal and professional values and associate relative priorities between these values. Here are five essential guidelines to make such choices.

• Don’t become a slave to your work. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Work is a means of living, it is not life itself.”
• Slow down your life and develop mindfulness. Simplify your life and inculcate discipline. Focus on the simple things. Control your wants and meet your core needs.
• Talk to your family and friends and explore ways to introduce more fun into your daily routine.
• Sleep more. Help around the home. Go on more vacations. Cultivate a hobby or two. Volunteer for a good cause. Do something meaningful with your spare time.
• Learn to control how you react to other people and their demands on your time, money, or both. Consider the cost on your own resources and become skilled at how to refuse unimportant demands.

Realizing the balance in your life is your prerogative.

Recommended Reading

• My three-step process for better time management: time logging, time analysis and time budgeting.
• Fighting Procrastination: ‘Ten-Minute Dash’ technique
• Working exercise into a busy day

***See other articles related to happiness, time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, work-life balance

Blogger Carla Kay White reflects on how she “found time” by transforming her mindset about being overwhelmed.

… it occurred to me that I’m feeling overwhelmed because that’s precisely the message I’m putting out in the world. I repeat it all day long in different forms “I have no time…” or “I wish I could, but I’m busy…” or “gotta rush…”

But what would happen if I simply told myself, “I have all the time in the world”?

I repeated this to myself anytime I felt rushed. Someone stopped me to chat, I had time. Working late, no problem. Caught behind a slow driver, I chilled and enjoyed the view. In the end it actually worked. I created time.

By sending out a new message “I have time” I’m relaxing, finding a new rhythm and living in the moment. I’m focusing on one thing at a time instead of ten different things. As a result, I get more accomplished, do a better job, and truly do have more time.

So if you constantly feel overwhelmed, ask yourself — are you really? Or is it just a conditional thought that you repeated so often to yourself, you believe it and live it? Just maybe you too can magically create time through your thoughts.

How to Create More Time

The feeling of being overwhelmed is primarily a lack of sense of priority over what we need to do. Follow my three-step process for better time management.

• Time Logging: Follow this simple exercise to develop an idea of how you spend time currently.
• Time Analysis: Tally up your time logs, analyze how you actually use your time, and recognize non-productive tasks and activities.
• Time Budgeting: Follow this simple process to list your life’s values and priorities. Then, create a time budget to help you center your actions on the truly important aspects of your life and career.

Recommended Reading

• Don’t let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘done’
• Overcoming procrastination: the “10-minute dash” technique to get a task going
• Make your weekends feel longer

***See other articles related to time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, work-life balance

Preamble

This article is the final article in a series of four articles that presents the basics of diagnosing how you tend to spend your time and how you can develop the discipline of spending your time on what really matters to you. Here is a synopsis of the preceding three articles.

1. The first article established that effective time management is truly not about managing time as such; rather, it is about managing priorities. See full article here.
2. The second article outlined a simple exercise to help you track how you use your hours and minutes during a suitably long period of time, ideally a whole week. See full article here.
3. Yesterday’s article described three steps to tally up your time logs, analyze how you actually use your time, and recognize non-productive tasks and activities. See full article here.

Today’s closing article details a simple process to list your life’s values and priorities and create a time budget to help you center your actions on the truly important aspects of your life and career.

Define Your Values and Priorities

A great deal of anxiety and stress in your life is largely from doing things that are inconsistent with what you believe and what you know you should be doing. Your lack of control over your time stems from doing things that are incoherent with your core values and priorities in life and career.

Matching your actions to the truly important aspects of your life will help you be more focused, more disciplined and more effective. With this objective, spend about 15 minutes to reflect on your life and career, clarify your short- and long-term goals and discover your overriding priorities.

Identify Your Priorities in Life

1. With the help of your spouse or significant other, catalog the core values that you hold dear — the guiding principles of your life. Include personal characteristics, traits and achievements you desire to realize in the short-term and the long-term. Your list many include family, career success, well-being and happiness, prestige, wealth, sense of community or anything else that you feel is important.
2. Rank your values and goals. Sort your list in order of their importance to you. Begin with most important value or goal and end with the least important. Judge between conflicting values to help you commit to ideas and activities that are truly important. Condense your list to 7 to 10 priorities.
3. Rewrite your priorities in terms of actions and achievements that would satisfy each priority or the associated value. Consider the following example.

Example 1: Top Three Priorities of Linda, a Housewife

The previous article on time analysis featured Linda, a housewife who works part-time. Consider this list of her top three priorities in life.

1. Husband and daughter. “Love and care for my husband. Support his career and goals. Nurture our daughter and give her the best upbringing.”
2. Family and friends. “Provide for my aging parents. Support my entrepreneur-brother. Spend more time with dear friends.”
3. Part-time work. “Learn and contribute in my profession as an accountant. Supplement family income.”

Identify Your Priorities at Work

Your desire to be productive at work should begin with understanding your most important tasks in terms of what your role demands of you.

1. Collect your job description, your boss’s and your employees’ job descriptions, your organization’s objectives, any metrics that you report on a regular basis, your recent performance reviews, and your documented career plan. Review these documents.
2. List and rank your priorities. What does your role require of you? What goals have your boss and your organization set for you? What are your key projects and initiatives? How your organizational objectives direct impact your own work? Do not list any more than three major priorities (priorities that require 25% of your time or more) and two minor, comparatively less-significant priorities.

Example 2: Top Priorities of Kumar, a Middle-Level Manager

The previous article on time analysis featured Kumar, a middle-level manager at an aerospace company. Kumar aspires to reorganize his time, adopt productive means to get his work completed by working no more than 45-48 hours per week. Consider the following list of his projects, in order.

1. Project A
2. Project B
3. Coaching and developing team members
4. Initiative M
5. Project C

Realize How Your Current Actions and Priorities are Incoherent

The root of the feeling of being under constant time pressure is the disparity between your actions and priorities. You tend to take advantage of almost every opportunity that comes your way, irrespective of the significance of these opportunities in relation to your core values.

Compare your time log and time analysis report with your list of priorities and decide objectively how much time each of your activities was worth to you in contrast to the time you actually spent on it. You may realize that, perhaps, 80% – 90% of your time is wasted in non-effective activities.

As you review your time analysis report, think about everything that you do that should not be done at all or should not be done by you and recognize all the non-productive, wasteful activities. You will realize that you have been spending time instead of investing time in what really matters.

Resolve to eliminate all activities and commitments that are not aligned to your priorities. For example, Linda — the housewife referred above — spent six hours each week volunteering on the curriculum committee at her daughter’s school “just to be involved.” She realized the lack of value in spending six hours every week on an activity she did not contribute much and decided to withdraw from the committee. Kumar, the middle-level manager, spent way too much time attending meetings. He decided to attend only the most important meetings where his presence was truly required, participated via telephone wherever possible and spared 10 hours on his weekly calendar.

Prepare a Time Budget to Schedule Your Priorities

A time budget helps you decide how your hours should be used given the priorities you have identified for yourself. This is the first step in exercising more control over your time and your life. Preparing a time budget could be as simple as deciding how many hours you would devote to each of your priorities, or could be as complex as setting up your weekly calendar to reflect your priorities.

1. Beginning with your top priority, setup appointments in your calendar and block-off as many hours of the week that are necessary for your priorities. If your most important priority in life is family (it should be,) first allot time for all the activities you desire to do or share your family — set aside time to coach your kids in basketball, set aside time to help your spouse with chores around the home, etc. At work, schedule time to work on your most important projects and initiatives.
2. Locate your most important tasks hours when you tend to be most efficient. For example, if you tend to work best in the mornings, schedule your most important projects for the mornings.
3. Schedule time for your minor projects and lower priorities around your major projects and higher priorities. Decide on the right time to do email, run errands, conduct regular staff meetings, etc.

Your time budget should essentially serve as a guide for how you will spend your time. As with a financial budget, you may not necessarily comply with your time budget. Nevertheless, it is important to prepare a time budget to help you direct how you should spend your time.

Your time budget will help you decide how you can live your priorities. You will realize that by complying with your time budget, your use of your personal time improves dramatically; you are able to focus and reduce anxiety.

Example 1: Time Budget for Linda, the Housewife

Linda prepared the following time budget to help her comply with her stated priorities in life. She eliminated or reduced activities that did not directly contribute to her priorities or were not as productive. For example, she

• ‘found’ six hours by quitting from the curriculum committee at her daughter’s school
• saved four hours by seeking her husband’s help to clean her home and hiring a landscaping service to tend to her yard.
• reduced her time watching TV and on the internet.
• ‘discovered’ more time for her family and friends, exercise and well-being.

Example 2: Time Budget for Kumar, the Middle-Level Manager

Kumar, who previously could not “get it all done” in over 65 hours each week at work, reorganized his calendar around his most important projects and prepared the following budget for 45-48 hours of productive work per week.

Wrap-up: Managing Priorities (and Time) Effectively

This series of articles on the basics of time management described a simple and effective process of logging and analyzing how you use your time, and budgeting your time around your priorities. This process reveals time wastefulness and provides a structure to help you focus on your chosen priorities.

Your personal and professional values and priorities change often based on your progress in life and career. Plan to perform a detailed time analysis regularly — ideally once every six months, — monitor your time, review your priorities and adjust your time budget. Keep your focus on achieving the top priorities.

In sum, time management is, simply, an orderly discipline of controlling how you spend your most valuable resource. The singular purpose of this quest is to regulate the pace of life, reduce unwarranted stress, organize your actions and responsibilities according to the main values and priorities in your life, and realize a meaningful, purpose-driven life.

Recommended Reading

• Don’t let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘done’
• Overcoming procrastination: the “10-minute dash” technique to get a task going
• Seven habits to beat Monday morning blues

***See other articles related to time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, time logging, time survey, work-life balance

Preamble

This article is the third in a series of four articles that presents the basics of diagnosing how you tend to spend your time and how you can develop the discipline of spending your time on what really matters to you.

1. The first article established that effective time management is truly not about managing time as such; rather, it is about managing priorities. See full article here.
2. Yesterday’s article outlined a simple exercise to help you track how you use your hours and minutes during a suitably long period of time, ideally a whole week. See full article here. Here is what your log should look like.

This article describes three simple steps to tally up your time logs, analyze how you actually use your time, and recognize non-productive tasks and activities.

Step 1: Tally up Time-Use by Purpose or Project

Following an entire week of logging your time in 10- or 15-minute intervals, spend an hour at the end of the week to compile your logs.

The third column in your time log chart had identified the purpose and project of each 10- or 15-minute interval. Consolidate these projects and purposes into meaningful categories, ideally 10-15 categories. Review each day’s time log chart and add the time spent in each category, calculate percent of total time, and tabulate the results as illustrated in the following two examples.

Example 1: Time Analysis for Linda, a Housewife & Part-time Worker

Below is the time analysis for an entire week (168 hours) for Linda, a housewife who works part-time as an accountant at a law firm. Linda feels that she does not spend enough time with her friends and family.

Example 2: Time Analysis for Kumar, a Middle-Level Manager

Kumar, a middle-level manager at an aerospace company, feels he spends too much time at work and yet cannot “get it all done.” Below is the time analysis of his work week (67 hours.) Kumar aspires to reorganize his time, adopt productive means to get his work completed by working no more than 45-48 hours per week.

Step 2: Examine Wastefulness

As you tally your time by categories, ascertain the time you spent unproductively. Understand all your non-productive, wasteful activities. Identify,

1. Time spent doing things that do not directly contribute to your short- and long-term goals and, hence, should not be done at all.
2. Time spent on activities that need a lot of work, but have very little return in comparison to other necessities. These are activities that may not make any difference if you eliminate them.
3. Time spent doing others’ work — time spent doing things that could have been and should be done by someone else. For instance, the 1.5 hours that Kumar spent on booking tickets and accommodation for an upcoming trip could have been done by an administrative assistant.
4. Time wasted in transitions — for instance, time wasted when waiting for an appointment with your dentist, time wasted for a meeting to start, time lost due to a computer crash.
5. Time spent doing things that you could more productively by using the right tools, learning a new skill, changing a process (developing a standard system,) seeking somebody’s help, or using a new software program.
6. Time wasted from being disorganized. Time wasted in figuring out what to work on, or time wasted by not collecting all the resources when they could have been collected earlier, for instance.
7. Time spent handling interruptions and distractions, such as when colleagues stop-by your desk to discuss their weekends.
8. Time spent fighting fires caused by your earlier inaction or careless work. And, time spent doing things that could have been avoided had you taken the appropriate actions earlier.
9. Time spent doing things that were probably better suited for other parts of the day. For example, checking email first thing in the mornings when you, like the majority of people, tend to be most efficient.

After taking into account time wasted, the remainder of time on your time logs should be time actually spent doing something useful or meaningful at the right time — as defined by your priorities in life or your role in your organization. Contemplate habits you can develop to avoid wasting time. (Future blog articles will discuss such habits in detail.)

Step 3: Investigate Time Demands to Seek Better Habits

“Many executives know all about these unproductive and unnecessary time demands; yet they are afraid to prune them. They are afraid to cut out something important by mistake. But this mistake, if made, can be speedily corrected. If one prunes too harshly, one usually finds out fast enough.”
-Peter Drucker in ‘The Effective Executive’

For each task in your time log, ask the following three themes of questions to assess the nature of everything you spend time on.

• Theme 1: Questions to examine the necessity. Ask, “Should I do this at all? Does this relate to my priorities? Does this help me achieve my goals or my organization’s objectives?”
• Theme 2: Questions to examine the ownership. Ask, “Is this required of me? Am I the right person to do this? Do I have the right tools to do this? Can I delegate? Can I seek help?”
• Theme 3: Questions to examine the prioritization. Ask, “Can I spend less time on this? Should I do this during the part of the day when I can focus/concentrate better? Can I do this during some other part of the day or week?”

Concluding Thoughts

Asking the above questions helps you identify the nature of your activities and prepares you to discover to spend a significant portion of your time more effectively.

Tomorrow’s article will help you reflect on your life and career and catalog the principal values that you hold dear. These values define your priorities — what is really important to you in the context of your professional and personal life. You can then prepare a ‘Time Budget’ which prescribes how you should spend your time on things that are congruent with your priorities in life or at work.

Recommended Reading

• Make your weekends feel longer
• Managing time by managing priorities
• Logging where time actually goes

***See other articles related to time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, time logging, time survey, work-life balance

Preamble

This article is the second in a series of four articles that presents the basics of diagnosing how you tend to spend your time and how you can develop the discipline of spending your time on what really matters to you. Yesterday’s article established that effective time management is truly not about managing time as such; rather, it is about managing priorities. See full article here.

Log How You Spend Your Time

“Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.”
-Peter Drucker in ‘The Effective Executive’

Before you begin managing your time effectively, you need to develop an idea of how you spend time currently.

Below is a simple exercise to help you track how you use your hours and minutes during a suitably long period of time, ideally a whole week. If you follow a specific routine everyday, you may be able to approximate your time analysis by doing this exercise for a couple of weekdays and a Saturday or a Sunday. Alternatively, you may choose to do this only during your time at work. Again, more data leads to a more comprehensive analysis; hence, try to log an entire week.

1. Create a simple chart that consists of four columns as in the above illustration. Column 1 contains labels for time intervals, in 10- or 15-minute increments. Column 2 records your activity. Column 3 identifies the project or purpose that activity served. Column 4 rates the effectiveness of time spent. Itemizing all these details is the key to identifying time wasted and time effectively used.
2. Make as many photocopies of this chart as required for a whole week.
3. Carry your time log charts around with you wherever you go. Record every activity — significant or insignificant, large or small — during the entire week. Include time spent at your morning ablutions, travel time, time spent chitchatting around the water cooler, time spent helping your daughter with homework, telephone time, time spent on the internet — your sleeping time too.

Time Log Forms

Here are two PDF forms you could download and use:

• A time log form for a full day (24 hours) in 10-minute intervals
• A time log form for a work day (11 hours) in 15-minute intervals

You need not necessarily stop every 10th or 15th minute to record your activity. You can fill up the relevant rows once every hour or so. If you spend two hours on an airplane, you can mark 12 rows (of 10 minutes each) with a single comment. You need not be very precise: if you spend 7 minutes on the phone with a customer, you can record spending an entire 10 minutes.

Here is what your log should look like.

Benefits of Time Logging

The immediate benefit of time logging is that it induces a sense of significance of your time. It compels you into the right mindset to consider habits you need to develop, avoid or change and start using your hours and minutes more effectively.

The more significant advantage is that your time logs will serve as a foundation for structuring your time according to your priorities and thus enable effective time management.

Tomorrow’s article will focus on time-analysis to help you review results from your time logs and prepare you for budgeting time according to your priorities.

Recommended Reading

• The basis for managing your time
• Prepare tomorrow’s to-do list as you wrap-up today
• Everyday reflections for effective time management

***See other articles related to time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, time logging, time survey, work-life balance

Preamble

“Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday’s time is gone forever and will never come back. Time is, therefore, always in exceedingly short supply. … Time is totally irreplaceable.”
-Peter Drucker in ‘The Effective Executive’

This article is the first in a series of four articles that presents the basics of diagnosing how you tend to spend your time and how you can develop the discipline of spending your time on what really matters to you.

The Basis for Managing Your Time

Life is all about values and the priorities you assign to these values. Life entails continually managing these priorities. Effective time management, therefore, necessitates figuring out your short-term and long-term priorities and appropriating your time according to these priorities.

Consider two examples from work.

• Imagine that you lead projects A and B for your company. Say, using some metrics, you establish a 60:40 relative priority between these two projects. Clearly, this ratio should influence how you allot your time to projects A and B.
• Suppose that client M generates $100M in revenue to your organization and client N generates just $2M in revenue. No matter how hard N pushes you to serve her, your priorities compel you to spend significantly higher resources serving M. It follows that your priorities will change if client N has the potential to grow to $40M in two years — you will then reorganize your resources accordingly.

Concluding Thoughts

In effect, effective time management is truly not about managing time as such; rather, it is about managing priorities. It is the discipline of focussing on the essentials and eliminating the non-essentials.

Before you begin to manage your time, you need to develop an idea of how you spend time currently. Tomorrow’s article will outline a simple technique for ‘time logging.’

Recommended Reading

• Overcoming procrastination by getting a task going
• Finding the time to think
• Working exercise into a busy day
• How hard you should work

***See other articles related to time management, managing priorities, effectiveness, personal organization, getting things done, execution, time logging, time survey, work-life balance

In the February 2006 issue of the Entrepreneur magazine, “Smart Moves” columnist Chris Penttila offered twenty-five ways to simplify business and life for entrepreneurs. Here are his three guidelines to create more personal-time for ourselves.

• Create boundaries. Set aside 10 minutes after lunch to make and return personal calls. Set a time for leaving the office every day, no matter how busy you are. And spend at least two hours doing something fun before you burn some late-night oil. Your family will thank you.
• Shorten your to-do list. “A to-do list is nothing but a wish list.” A long to-do list leaves less time to focus on revenue-generating ideas. Instead, focus on the top three urgent tasks for the day. The rest can wait.
• Love your inner Luddite. Entrepreneurs who become slaves to gadgets “are running reactive businesses and being reactive with their time.” Try working unplugged–this means no internet connection and absolutely no phone calls–for one hour every morning. It will give you a sense of accomplishment that lasts all day.

Call for Action

“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”
– Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918,) French Poet

Balancing the various demands on our time is a challenge for most of us. Evaluate your daily routines and habits. Use the above guidelines to simplify your lifestyle and spend time on people, hobbies, travel and activities you enjoy. Brainstorm ideas with friends and family. Be realistic in what you can expect to achieve; do not over-plan. On your journey to success and prosperity in life, make sure you enjoy the journey.

***See other articles related to work-life balance, time-off, relaxation, productivity, work-life

In an article entitled “The Making of a Corporate Athlete” in the January, 2001, issue of the Harvard Business Review, authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz describe executives as “corporate athletes.” They explain the concept of recovering energy to bring the body, emotions, mind and spirit to a peak form and thus sustain high performance over the long haul.

Practices for Renewing Physical Energy

The authors consider physical well-being as fundamental to the high performance state of an executive. Here is a (paraphrased) list of six healthy practices they recommend for renewing physical energy.

1. Eat multiple small-meals a day. Eating just one or two meals a day with long periods in between may slowdown metabolism.
2. Never skip breakfast. Eating breakfast early in the morning helps maintain metabolism during the morning.
3. Eat a balanced diet.
4. Reduce the consumption of sugars. Sugars represent empty calories and cause “energy-depleting spikes in blood glucose levels.”
5. Drink at least 1.5 litres (four 12-ounce glasses) of water every day, even if you do not feel thirsty.
6. Exercise regularly. The authors recommend “three to four 20- to 30-minute cardiovascular workouts a week, including at least two sessions of intervals—short bursts of intense exertion followed by brief recovery periods.”

Call for Action

In the face of ever-increasing demands to perform, deliver and excel, both at work and outside, it is easy for us to ignore our physical well-being; most of us do.

Critically examine your current lifestyle and fitness level: your eating and sleeping habits, your relaxation and entertainment choices, and, your commitment to physical and brain exercises. In consultation with people around you, viz., family, friends, bosses and physicians make the right choices to adopt a healthy lifestyle. Pick physical activities that work for you and you will enjoy. Get to and stay in the ‘Zone’.

***See other articles related to recharging, re-energizing, energy management, relaxation, work-life, stress management, health, well-being, exercising

People are surprised when I tell them I put in 70 to 75 hours of work every week and get about five hours of sleep every day. The typical responses are “Your Company makes you do that much work?” Or, “Doesn’t your boss realize that is a lot of work?”

The New World of Work

We live in a world characterized by intense competition, globalization, greater volatility than before, and demands for higher personal effectiveness. To be successful in the new world of work, we cannot stipulate the specific number of hours we should put in every day. Our accomplishment in these hours, not the number of hours, is the yardstick of our performance assessment. In fact, a 65 to 70 hour workweek has become the norm for getting ahead in leadership roles.

What Works for You

My guideline for how long you should work is, “Work as many hours as you think you need to achieve your goals, realize your aspirations and be happy.”

Note the emphasis on individuality in the above statement. Not everybody faces the same kind of demands; not everybody is equally productive. Nor does everybody have the same kind of aspirations. The number of hours you should work should depend on the opportunities you face and what you intend to do with them. It is a choice you have to make—a choice between components of your personal and professional lives.

If you are an entrepreneur, you may need to work 80-90 hours a week developing your idea; this involves sacrificing out-of-work activities. If you have an eight-to-five job, wish to spend lots of time with family and attend all of your son’s football games, you may work as little as forty hours a week, the minimum expected at your workplace. However, this may involve slower job growth. If you are a stay-at-home mom, and would like to put your engineering skills to good use, you may find a job that will allow you to work out of home. Make the appropriate choices and chart your life course on what works best for you.

Links

• A year-2002 study conducted by the National Sleep Foundation concluded that the average American employee works 46 hours per week; see reference.
• General Electric’s Chairman and CEO, Jeffrey Immelt is regarded as one of the hardest working executives in corporate America. An article written by Geoffrey Colvin of the Fortune magazine in September 2005 quotes Jeff Immelt saying he works 100 hours a week. See this article for insights to Jeff’s disciplined work style.

*Keyword(s): work-life balance, time management, personal organization, work-life choices, career performance