HAVE LESS TO DO
Time-management hacks, life hacks, sleep hacks, work hacks. These all reflect an obsession with trying to squeeze more time out of the day, but rearranging your daily patterns to find more time for work isn’t the problem. Too much shit to do is the problem.
The only way to get more done is to have less to do.
Saying no is the only way to claw back time. Don’t shuffle 12 things so that you can do them in a different order, don’t set timers to move on from this or that. Eliminate 7 of the 12 things, and you’ll have time left for the 5. It’s not time management, it’s obligation elimination. Everything else is snake oil.
Besides, time isn’t something that can be managed. Time is time—it rolls along at the same pace regardless of how you try to wrestle with it. What you choose to spend it on is the only thing you have control over.
Management scholar Peter Drucker nailed it decades ago when he said “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Bam!
At 37signals we’ve become ruthless about eliminating either work that doesn’t need to be done or work we don’t want to do.
For example, we used to accept payment by credit card and check. Credit cards were entirely automated, so on our side it didn’t take anyone’s time to process. But checks were mailed in. Which meant someone needed to receive them, process them, deal with incorrect amounts, tie them correctly to the account they were associated with, etc.
Now, some companies might say, “Hey, okay, let’s hire someone else who can do that specific work.” Others might say, “Let’s spend some time, money, and technology to automate the process some more.”
What did we say? “We won’t accept checks anymore.” Yes, we decided to turn away revenue and customers who could only pay by check. But it wasn’t really a turn away, it was a trade away. We traded some revenue for some time.
We didn’t encourage someone to carve out time in their day to deal with manual check processing. Instead, we eliminated work that had to be done by saying no— no more checks.
There are surely dozens more things we don’t need to be doing at work. We’re forever on the lookout for them and always on the hunt to track them down. Not so that we can check them off the list, but so we can throw them away.
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via our book "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work"
the person who cannot hear their inner signals anymore “guides himself by clocks, rules, calendars, schedules, agenda, and by hints and cues from other people”
@ChiseHatoriLove its simple, 145 knows why something is true or false because of a fundamental understanding while 95 feels why something is true or false based on vibes, they both reach the same conclusion, mid 120 undermines his own vibe check with incomplete understanding, gets shit wrong.
@Rothmus If y’all want to keep your data private, buy something called “Synology DiskStation”, they start from like $150 and it’s basically a home server you connect to your wifi router and you can host your own cloud on your own hard drives, and you can access from anywhere