Monday, January 27, 2014

On Waste

The most abundant thing in the world is waste.



When I was still junior and somehow struggling with deadlines and deliverables, my mentor gave me a stunningly simple advice: 


"If you don't have time, you make time"

First, this advice looks impossible, obviously. You even don't have time to make time!
Then, you let it sink and realize you can make time by prioritizing and letting unimportant things off the hook. 
Then, when it really grows on you, and you realize it's about carving your life around the activities, events, people that you most care about and make that part as meaningful as you can. Meaningful is here the limiting factor.

Today's world, in all its social-techy splendour, competes aggressively for our attention span and for our time. Because now it is seductively easy to consume irrelevant news and social feeds, we tend to ignore the decades-old Habit 1 of Stephen Covey (in his highly-regarded "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People): Be Pro-active.




Always ask yourself if you should be concerned by, if you are able to influence or control events that come to your attention and based on this test decide what action is appropriate.

You would be surprised just in how many cases you should decide not to continue to read some news or to browse your Facebook stream. In those cases, make sure you curate your social and news feeds to those fields that will help you grow your influence and control and weed out the blabber.

You will easily get your wasted time and energy under control and you can focus on meaningful activities.

No comments:

Post a Comment