Series 1: Personal Growth

by Phil Latz

Hi, welcome to the seventh blog in my personal growth series that I hope will help you become more successful in your business.

As a business owner myself for many years, I understand the challenges that you face.

Today I’ll be demonstrating to you why you need to prioritise your time.

This flows on from my previous blog in this series in which I spoke about the four quadrants and the need to discern the difference between urgency and importance.

These two blogs have another thing in common, they’re both based upon concepts that were developed and made famous by the American author Steven Covey.

I was mainly referring to your work or business time in my previous video, but today’s demonstration applies much more holistically to your entire life.

No matter how wealthy or successful we become, we cannot buy any more hours in the day. We all have exactly the same 24 hours per day, seven days per week and 52 weeks per year.

So why is it that some people seem to achieve so much more in a year than others?

Let me give you an illustration.

Imagine a glass jar that represents your time. Its sides are rigid. You can’t stretch a jar.

Large rocks represent the things that are most important in your life. They’re not necessarily in exact scale to their relative importance That would be very hard to figure out and might change over time.

The rocks have labels on them: Family, Holidays, Community, Exercise, Sales, Marketing, Team Management, Strategic Planning, Customer Relationships and Major Project.

Meanwhile a pile of gravel represents hundreds of other things that you can spend time on. This could be everything from watching TV to playing video games, spending time on social media, washing your car if you have one, mowing your lawn if you have one, shopping and a hundred other things. It could also be a hundred and one jobs that often bog you down at work. The list is long. 

I’m not saying that any of these things are bad, or that in many cases they’re not necessary or fun to do.

But with our finite 24 hours, if we make these our first priority, we’re filling our jar with gravel first. 

Then the big rocks won’t fit in.

Let’s start again, but this time, fill our jar with the big rocks first. 

Amazingly, we can still fit in all of the gravel into the same jar. All we did was change the priority.

You can take this illustration a step further. Our jar is now full of big rocks, surrounded by gravel, right?

Wrong!

Imagine how much sand we can fit in!

Sand represents smaller tasks and smaller snippets of time.

I’ll now add another thought that is not in Steven Covey’s original illustration.

The jar is surely full now, right!

Wrong! Imagine how much water we can fit in.

I would compare water to times when we mix and combine two or more activities at once. 

For example, when you walk the dog and talk to your family member on the phone at the same time, you’re actually achieving three things at once: keeping your dog healthy and happy, maintaining your family ties and exercising yourself.

Please don’t get the impression from this illustration that you’re only succeeding if every last minute of your day is spent in compressed, intense activity. Remember, some of your big rocks might be family, holidays, health, downtime and so on. These large chunks of time could, at face value, appear to be wasted, with large periods of inactivity, relaxing on the beach or whatever. But of course, this is not wasted time at all if it’s recharging your batteries and reminding you of the sheer joy of living and the natural beauty that surrounds us.

To summarise, put your big rocks in your time jar first! Otherwise all the gravel, sand and water will leave no room for them.

In the next blog in this series, I’m going to continue looking broader than just your working life and look at your physical, mental and spiritual health.

I believe that with passion, consistent effort and wise advice you can succeed in your business.

I wish you all the best and I’ll see you next time.

Latest Blog Posts

• 
  Marketing | Keep Front of Mind of Your Customers
  by Phil
  July 30, 2021
• 
  Marketing | Why Your Website is Still Important!
  by Phil
  July 16, 2021
• 
  Marketing | Social Media & Public Relations
  by Phil
  July 5, 2021

by Phil Latz

Hi, welcome to the sixth blog in my personal growth series that I hope will help you become more successful in your business.

As a business owner myself for many years, I understand the challenges that you face. 

Today I’ll be sharing with you about how to make the most of your time.

Do you find yourself wanting to do more things than you have time to do? 

Do your days seem to race by with half the things on your ‘to do’ list still not done by the end of the day?

If your answer is Yes, then welcome to the club! Just about anyone with any level of ambition will tell you that they don’t have enough time to do all the things they’d like to do.

That’s not because they’re lazy. But because our time is finite.

You need to start by understanding just how precious time is. Time is more valuable than money.

If I give you a thousand dollars, I can go out and earn some more money to replace it.

But if I give you an hour of my time, it has gone forever. No amount of money can buy you more time.

I recently watched an excellent Netflix documentary series entitled ‘Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates’. It’s a behind the scenes look at the life of the richest man on the planet. Bill Gates is worth something like $100 billion US dollars, but he is unable to buy a single extra minute in his day. He has to live with the same 24 hours that everyone else gets.

So what does Bill Gates do about it? He makes the most of every moment. 

He employs personal assistants to carefully manage his meetings. He prioritises. Interestingly, he studies voraciously, constantly reading and learning.

These days, Bill no longer works at all at Microsoft, the company he founded that continues to drive his wealth. His focus is upon eliminating diseases and advancing other humanitarian causes through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. If anything, Bill Gates who was born on 28th October 1955, is more driven than ever.

I’ve read a lot about time management over the years, but one methodology that I first read about back in the early 1990’s has always resonated with me. So much so, that whenever I hired a new team member into our company, I would sit down with them and share this idea.

You can read about it in this book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey. In an age when business books can be out of date in a year or two, this book, which was written back in 1989, remains a best seller.

I’d recommend that you read or listen to this book. Remember, the more you learn you earn.

There are many wise teachings in this book of which the Four Quadrants, that I’m going to share with you now, is just one.

Every single task that you do in your working life can be divided into four quadrants.

The vertical axis denotes importance. The bottom is unimportant, the top is the most important tasks.

On the horizontal axis denotes urgency. The left side is most urgent, the right side is not urgent.

So the quadrants can be described like this:

Quadrant 1 tasks are both urgent and important

Quadrant 2 tasks are not urgent, but important

Quadrant 3 tasks are urgent, but not important

Quadrant 4 tasks are not urgent and not important

How can you discern if a job is urgent or important? Urgent jobs are right in front of us, the phone ringing the person asking for an answer. If you don’t respond to them quickly, there will be an immediate consequence.

Important jobs are more closely linked your mission, your values, your high priority goals. You could say that they’re the bigger picture jobs. They won’t shout at you like the urgent jobs, but if you neglect them, you’ll wake up one day years later and wonder how you could have worked so hard, for so long to achieve so little.

The key question to ask yourself is, ‘In which quadrant should you be spending most of your work time?’

Think about it and speak out your answer now.

I’ve asked this question many times over the years to my new staff members and other people I’ve trained.

Chances are that you gave exactly the same answer that almost all of these people gave me, ‘Quadrant 1 of course because it’s both urgent and important!’

Please don’t take offence, but you’re wrong. Your key to long term success is to spend as much of your time in Quadrant 2, not urgent, but important.

Note that I added the words ‘long term’ before ‘success’. Right now, you might well have a pile of Quadrant 1 tasks that are demanding your attention. But if you shift your thinking, you’ll gradually be able to make more time for Quadrant 2.

Spend your time in Quadrant 2 and your benefits will include vision, perspective, balance, discipline, control and fewer crises.

On the other hand, if you stay in Quadrant 1 your business life will be accompanied by stress, burnout, crisis management and constantly putting out fires.

So exactly how can you make this change?

Initially, the low hanging fruit will be Quadrant 4. You should try to eliminate these tasks entirely. Quadrant 3 tasks should be batched up and done as quickly as possible, or better still, delegated if you have anyone helping you.

Allocate all the time you’ve saved into Quadrant 2 tasks. These include things like working on your business, not in your business, budgeting, planning, learning, making important decisions. 

If you procrastinate on Quadrant 2 tasks, they migrate across to the left, to Quadrant 1.

Meanwhile, there’s no avoiding the fact that you have to deal with the pre-existing Quadrant 1 tasks that are upon you right now.

It might take months or even years to restructure your life and your mindset to eliminate Quadrant 1. You might never fully achieve this, but even if you can increase your Quadrant 2 time from say 5% to 20%, that would still be a fourfold increase that would reap huge benefits for you.

To summarise, remember that your time is the most precious asset. Think carefully about how you are spending it and prioritise the important over the urgent.

I hope that this blog has given you a helpful plan for how to allocate your work time.

In the next blog in this series, I’m going look at another aspect of how to make the most effective use of your time.

I believe that with passion, consistent effort and wise advice you can succeed in your business.

I wish you all the best and I’ll see you next time.

Latest Blog Posts

• 
  Marketing | Keep Front of Mind of Your Customers
  by Phil
  July 30, 2021
• 
  Marketing | Why Your Website is Still Important!
  by Phil
  July 16, 2021
• 
  Marketing | Social Media & Public Relations
  by Phil
  July 5, 2021