How to Create More Time
The Next Generation Time Management is as much about deciding what not to do as what to do.
In fact, what might be more valuable than a to-do list is a not-to-do list.
How is elimination a version of multiplying time?
That’s a fair question and it’s pretty simple.
Anything that you say no to today creates time tomorrow.
That’s the whole premise here on how do we multiply time.
You do things today that create more time in the future.
When you eliminate things, anytime you say no to something now, it prevents you from doing something you would have otherwise been doing in the future.
That means it is creating future time that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
Eliminate, according to the multipliers, is where we have the widest swath of opportunity to multiply time.
It’s the most immediately impactful place to multiply time because it doesn’t require doing anything.
It is multiplying time by doing less.
When you have diluted focus, you get diluted results.
One of the other problems of doing many things is that they cannibalize your resources.
When to Say “No”
If you’re a small business and you’re having to manage five different products or five different lines of business, and you only have one hour available, at some point, you must choose where do I spend my hour on. Is it product 1, product 2, or product 3, 4, or 5?
You only have so much time.
And the smaller, the business that you are, the fewer resources that you have, and the more dependent things are on you.
The more things that you’re doing, the more diluted your focus becomes.
There is a time, strategically, when you expand and accelerate because it supplements what you’re already doing.
It’s a way to create more without adding more time but many times it’s just a distraction. It’s just one thing that is pulling you away from another, or it is cannibalizing another.
If we can eliminate it, then we now have this huge margin, not only of time but of mental energy, capacity, money, and resources that we would have been spending otherwise.
We are now no longer spending because we had the discipline to eliminate it.
Peter Drucker, the legendary management consultant, said it this way, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
I love that.
And eliminate, perhaps, is the simplest of all the five permissions to multiply your time.
This is not the easiest.
It’s simple because all we have to do to eliminate is to say this one little word.
It’s two letters.
We just have to get good at saying the word, “no”.
That is the first step in how we multiply.
How about you? Do you have trouble saying no in order to multiply your time? I love to know.
