What Santa Claus Taught Me About Time Management
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
Do you believe in Santa, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth fairy? I apologize if I'm the person who is about to crush your soul. They don't exist. Now that your entire childhood is a mess of emotion, I'd like to take this opportunity to karate chop your reality out from underneath you. You can add time management to that list. It's nothing more than society's way of slipping a tooth under your pillow and telling you to go back to sleep and be a good little worker bee.
That's to say, it's more so a way of running out the clock when you have eight hours to fill.
Whether you're dissecting the day of Bill Gates, Brene Brown, Tim Ferriss or even Jay Z, what makes each of these people unstoppable forces has nothing to do with how they manage their time.
They are who they are because they manage something far more important.
They manage their focus.
They each recognized early in their careers that time management is a strategy used for when you haven't identified your wildly important work to focus on.
Rather than manage their time, they guard their time with a ruthless approach that prunes the distractions that pull them away from their wildly important work. Bill doesn't start his day with a scattered to-do list. Bill starts his day by asking what is truly worth focusing on today? What is not?
You might be thinking that it feels hard, if not impossible to answer those questions. From my experience, in nearly every case this is because you don't have a clear destination in mind.
Let's say you've decided to plan a road trip from New York to Seattle. You've given yourself six days to get there because you have a ferry you need to catch that's taking you up to Alaska. You're looking at about 4,900 km you have to cover. That's around 800km or 9-10 hours driving a day.
You're probably starting to see that this doesn't give you a lot of time to waste. Getting lost or stopping at Uncle Terry's Autobody and "World's Best Sushi" in Wyoming is probably not a great use of your time.
You choose your focus and you commit to the time frame to make it happen. That's to say, some projects are day trips, some are week-long adventures, and others require a lifetime.
This may sound like you have to live a life with drill sergeant discipline. Which is true if you want to create work that matters. But the enemy is not an unmade bed or a pair of shoes in need of a polish.
Steve Jobs knew there was a force at work that created far more damage for ambitious people. “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.”
People often mistake discipline for being anti-fun. It's actually the opposite. Discipline gives you the freedom to enjoy fun time and without the feelings of guilt creeping in. Because filling an 8 hour day with tasks is not your goal.
Saying no to everything you've identified as a distraction is your secret weapon.
And here's the beautiful part... when you're focusing 100% of your energy into the work that gives you the results you want, you actually work far less because everything you do has an impact.
Want to stop at Uncle Terry's for a California roll? Go right ahead. You know you have time because you've mapped out the rest of the trip.
PS - Do you want a simpler, less frustrating way to perform at your best? Download my free guide. It will help you escape the hustle so you can focus on the wildly important 👇
Why do we put off decisions that could give us a better future? I've been at that crossroads many times in my life. Whether it was a decision to start my own business, launch a podcast or even ask my partner to marry me. I knew all three of these decisions would give me a better life. But in the back of my head, all I could think about is what if I ended up being a colossal failure?