You probably know what’s in your bank account to within a few quid. Where your last four hours went is usually a lot harder to say.
So try it, honestly. Take the last hour first, then the last four, and break them down minute by minute. Sort every chunk into one of three piles: invested, spent or wasted.
Lost time is never found again; and what we call time enough, always proves little enough.
Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth (1758), quoting Poor Richard
Franklin wrote The Way to Wealth as a speech by “a plain, clean, old man, with white locks” called Father Abraham, stitched together from the sayings he’d dropped into his Poor Richard almanacs over the years. This one is two warnings in one sentence. The first half is obvious once you hear it. The second half is the one that catches businesses out: the project with plenty of time, the deadline that was weeks away, until suddenly it wasn’t.
Everything wants your attention
A lot of this comes down to being conscious of where your time is going. How aware are you, really?
We live in a world of constant distraction in every direction. There’s always something else to scroll on your phone or your computer. There’s always someone else sending you a message to get your attention, whether that’s an email, a WhatsApp or a Slack message. It doesn’t matter the channel. Something always wants your attention, and the question is where you choose to put it.
Time is the one resource we never get more of. You can find another client or another bit of budget. Poor Richard’s right: nobody has ever found a lost hour.
A fifteen-minute look back at your week
Knowing that is one thing. Doing something with it needs a habit. The simplest one I know is a short look back at the end of each week, followed by a short look forward.
Start with the look back. Open your calendar, and the screen time report on your phone, and put each block of the week into the same three piles: invested, spent, wasted. Then ask yourself the question I once asked on my podcast, Your Best Year Starts Here: “How much of my time did I actually spend on the things I wish I’d done?” It can be an uncomfortable question. That’s what makes it useful.
Next, pick the two or three things that matter most for the week ahead and put them in the diary before anything else goes in. Give each one a deadline. Most deadlines in business are set by someone else, so think about where you need to set them for yourself. A job with no deadline is the one that quietly gets “time enough” until it’s late.
Last, protect those blocks when they arrive. Phone in another room and notifications off. The messages will still be there in an hour. That hour won’t be.
If the phone is your biggest leak, I wrote about the simple timer trick I use to stay on one job at a time in How to stay focused in a distracted world.
Start with the hour you’ve just had. It takes a couple of minutes, and which pile it lands in is usually an eye-opener.
