Mind Readings: Be Ruthlessly Efficient With Your Time

In today's episode, let's talk about being more efficient, being ruthlessly efficient with your time. Before the holidays, I was in a meeting and set very clear boundaries. There was a 25-minute meeting. And the folks I was having the meeting with uh started off with a lot of fluff, some small talk, and then said, okay, now let's do some introductions. They were like, you know, I don't know, half a dozen, a dozen people on the call.

And I'm sitting here going, we have 25 minutes, and you're gonna have nine people introduce themselves. You're gonna chew up at least five minutes of this call. And sure enough, uh, after all the fluff, uh, by the time we actually got down to business, there were 15 minutes left in a 25-minute call. And so the folks who were on this call did not accomplish what they'd set out to to do with the call. They ran out of time.

And it just didn't work out for them. And I know they were disappointed. You could see it on their faces because it was a Zoom call. And it got me thinking about the things that you can do to make the most of the time that you have, not just in a meeting, but in general. And ways to implement that.

So number one, set time boundaries and enforce them. I love uh calendar appointments for meetings. And and I will let people know at the top of the call. I have a hard stop at X time. And I stick to it.

I stick to it and say, okay, we're out of time. I will, you know, let's let's reconvene again. If we need to have another meeting, we can. But after the first couple of calls, where somebody gets cut off in the middle of the call because they're rambling, they get the message pretty quick. Oh, I need to tighten up if I want to get done what I need to get done.

So be really not unforgiving, but very assertive with your time boundaries. Your time is valuable. No amount of money can ever buy time. Second, have a to do list for tasks that take relatively little time. You know, five, ten, fifteen minutes.

And throughout your day, when you have little time slices, pull out that list and knock stuff off of that list. I used to have this one coworker who drove me up a wall. They were yeah. Um, who would have like 25 minutes between meetings and would just throw their hands up and they say, Oh, I can't get anything done. I don't have enough time.

Like, you have 25 minutes. You can get a lot done in 25 minutes as long as you're prepared, as long as you know uh what is on your plate that you could get done and get it done. There's always stuff to be done, and not all of it takes deep work. Some things absolutely tape deep take deep work. Uh, which is when you spend an hour, two hours, three hours, just block off that time and say, Well, I'm not doing anything else but focusing in on this sort of thing.

The third thing, and this is one that comes from people asking the question: how do you do as much as you do? How do you create as much as you create? Is you reduce time usage for stuff that doesn't move your goals ahead. It's not to say that you just stop being unproductive, right? You absolutely should have downtime, rest time, uh time to just watch silly uh reruns, whatever.

Um, because that meant those mental breaks are important, they're necessary for your your mental health, for your productivity, you need that. But it has to be taken in balance. It has to, it has to be budgeted kind of like anything. Time is a limited resource, and you budget it like a limited resource, just like money. It is astonishing to me how many people and organizations will will budget down to the penny for for every little thing, and they won't budget their time at all.

They will not budget time even a little bit. They'll say, Oh, yeah, we're gonna do some of this marketing stuff here. We're gonna do some email marketing and stuff, and then they'll obsess about their pay-per-click budget. It's like, well, you probably should budget your time more rigorously, and you'll find that you'll have more time to do more stuff, and you may not necessarily need to then spend as much money as you do on your pay-per-click budget because you've recovered that productivity in time. So I would summarize this by saying you need to be efficient with your time.

In some cases, ruthlessly efficient. Know the people who are going to waste your time and and box them in. There's certain people, yeah, you have to deal with them. Maybe it's a a boss or a colleague or a family member or a client or whoever. And you know that dealing with them is not the best use of your time.

Box them in. Say, hey, love to talk. Have 25 minutes and then you give them that 25 minutes and at the end would they're still going to say hey I got another thing. It's been great talking to you by as with everything else people learn pretty quickly subconsciously or consciously people learn pretty quickly when when you stand up for your boundaries. You say this you have 25 minutes and there's a hard stop at the end.

Go. So I'd encourage you to do the same. Thanks for tuning in. I'll talk to you soon. If you like this video go ahead and hit that subscribe button.