Many people in business wish they had an extra hour (or more) every day!
Well, here in the UK we recently gained an “extra” hour by virtue of the clocks going back. Now, although the extra hour happened on a Sunday, I imagine most people’s day did not alter one bit, and the hour was absorbed into the general run of affairs.
And yet, it got me thinking…
Imagine if you had an Extra Hour, every day. What would you do?
So many people simply roll up to work, and life in general, and watch the explosion unfold around them, try to make sense of the chaos, think “if I could just get my act together, I would get round to doing x” (x being the really productive stuff!), and then find they are working overtime to finish the urgent stuff.
It really is incredible what a huge difference something so small can make. When you put a simple idea into practice and it works, it is a great feeling, and I was working recently on this with someone who simply needed to set up every day better and finish off every day better. Like so many people, they were getting many things done, but just felt unfocused and not even sure whether they were getting the right things done.
So it was a simple decision to create a simple structure to help her plan each day better, and be more focused, and review each day at the end.
Imagine if you had an Extra Hour, every day. What would you do?
How about putting an extra 30 minutes at the start, and 30 minutes at the end.
In the 30 minutes at the start, allocate it as follows:
15 minutes – exercise/ walk
15 minutes – Visualisation
And at the end of the day…
15 minutes – Reviewing the day (writing up today’s Journal)
15 minutes – Action Plan for the next day, identifying priorities, and timetabling your Key Results (your three Action goals) for the day.
Now, if you are too busy “cutting down trees” to allocate this time in ‘sharpening the saw’, on the basis that no one ever died from lack of sleep, simply get up an hour earlier! Honest, it works. By the way, you know that you don’t really have to get up an hour earlier to find that extra hour. The fact that you are working more effectively means that you will create that extra hour.