I have never known a great leader who didn’t have control of their time, or didn’t have a healthy respect for the time of others. Time is the one commodity which we can never get back. We can always make more money. We can always develop relationships and contacts, and water, air and raw materials are replenished and recycled. But time… once it’s gone, it cannot be replaced.
For years I taught workshops which included some of the lessons I had learned about how to manage my time. I have broken the way we use our time into three categories. You can waste it. You can spend it. You can invest it. Every one of the 168 hours you have each week will be used in one of these three ways.
Wasting Time – My definition of wasting time is allowing time to just pass without any return or enjoyment value. It can happen when we get distracted from what we really should be doing or because we allow ourselves to fall into a bad mood or just blindly flip the channels around. We should avoid wasting time at all costs!
Spending Time – Spending time is when we intentionally do something that we want to do, even if it is something that has little return. This can be a TV show we want to watch for the sheer entertainment value. It can be reading a book just for fun, or spending time outside on a spring day. Spending time is like spending money: you won’t get it back, but there is an intrinsic value to it because it allows you to do something that makes you happy, even if temporarily. However, as with money, if you spend too much you won’t have enough of it to do the really important things you need to do. So spend, but spend wisely.
Investing Time – The best thing you can do with your time is invest it. Investing can be in all areas of your life. Family, relationships, professional life, health, spiritual life, and other areas of your life can all be where you invest your time, which can be defined as having a return on the investment. You still will never get the time back, but the return will come as your life is rich with relationships, good health, and opportunities to be the best you can be. By all means, invest your time in yourself, your family, your friends, and your purpose-driven pursuits.
The same three categories can also be said of how you respect the time of others. Great leaders make sure that they never waste their team’s time, they help them spend it wisely, and most of all, they inspire others to invest their time in meaningful activities that bring common good.
There are lots of good time management concepts out there. One of my favorite examples is from Stephen Covey’s First Things First where he breaks time management down into four quadrants of use.
1 – Important/Urgent
2 – Important/Not Urgent
3 – Not Important/Urgent
4 – Not Important/Not Urgent.
You can pick up a copy of the book to find out all about this, but Covey strongly teaches that when dealing with our time, we must stay in quadrant two (Important/Not Urgent) in which our activities deal with preparation, prevention, values clarification, planning, relationship building, true re-creation, and empowerment. This quadrant certainly falls in line with my concept of investing our time.
Covey makes the point that all too often we fall victim to quadrant one in which everything seems to be a crisis. I would classify that as spending time, but not investing. Quandrants three and four fall squarely in my category of wasting time. We need to avoid them totally. I encourage you to grab this book as it deals with not only time management, but the broader picture of priorities and, as Covey states, “Why schedule activities and appointments that aren’t aligned with your purpose?”
I encourage you to invest some time to discover how you spend your time. I promise this won’t be a waste of time. Great leaders are masters of their time.
Lead well.