Time Is Not As Limited As You Think

There are 1,440 minutes in a day. That’s a lot less than most of us need to sleep, exercise, eat, run errands, and do our best at work.

Sadly, however, that’s what we’ve got. The Earth is not going to rotate any slower than it does, and no amount of daylight savings time will change our finite allotment of minutes.

While we can’t change the clock, we can change our relationship with it. To do so, we must shift our mindset from one of time scarcity to one of time abundance.

Part of the reason it’s so easy to feel time-poor is because there are an infinite number of ways that you can spend it – especially at work. There are meetings, the largest time investment most knowledge workers make each week. And then there’s email – a steady barrage of meaningful, meaningless, and mixed messages demanding your attention. Add to that the frequent fire drills created from lack of planning and prioritization and suddenly it’s true – there’s simply not enough time.

When we operate from scarcity – the sense that there will never be enough – we activate our brain’s alarm bells. Because our brains don’t do a great job distinguishing between types of resources (e.g., food, safety, time), when we start telling it we’re running out, it starts to panic. And panicking diverts resources from our thinking zone – the prefrontal cortex – to the fight, flight, or freeze zone at the base of the brain.

In that state, we’re much more likely to play Candy Crush or scroll the news than come up with a smart strategy for investing our time. It’s similar to the reaction many of us have to operating on a “fixed income” in retirement – a bit of short-term panic. But then we remember all the smart decisions we’ve already made to fund the future, and we can start thinking about where to save and where to spend.

Your day-to-day challenge is the same – where to save and where to spend. Operating from time abundance enables you to shift your relationship with the daily constraint. You can recognize that the trick is to make conscious decisions about where and how to invest your time, rather than letting your clogged calendar do the deciding.

Here are some guaranteed time-savers to embrace:

• Decline meeting invitations unless they have a clear purpose and your expected contribution
• Proactively block time on your calendar for the most important work you need to get done and let meetings flow around it
• Remind yourself how to work distraction-free by turning off WiFi when you are heads down in thinking work

And these are the giant time-wasters to avoid:

• Responding to unclear email threads instead of asking for clarification
• Searching endlessly for the right version of a document because your team hasn’t established conventions for document storage
• Attending meetings because of FOMO or simply because you were invited
• Grazing on email constantly just in case, such that you’re never fully immersed in a task or conversation

The Earth spins on its axis without our assistance. But time, and the collaborative pitfalls that waste it, require active management. Make better use of your time, and you’ll find that you suddenly have much more of it to use.