There is a big difference between being productive and being busy. For entrepreneurs and innovators, you need to minimise the time you personally spend with your hands on the tools doing the work and maximise the time you can spend thinking, researching, strategising, problem-solving and leading.
As a business grows, these once intangible functions become a very real full-time job. It is in these high-level roles that your time is best spent. This means that as you develop the money and the resources to employ other people to do brilliantly what you should not, you eventually get to a place where you are only devoting time to the things that push the business forward, or the things that rejuvenate your mind and body.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: REDEFINING ‘HARD WORK’
On 6 April 2007, Arianna Huffington woke up under her desk at work in a pool of her own blood. As she was working, Huffington had collapsed, hit her head on the way down, broken her cheekbone and cut her right eye. In the coming weeks, Huffington visited doctor after doctor as they performed tests for brain tumours, heart disease and other medical conditions that could explain the collapse.
Fortunately, the doctors were able to clear her of any medical condition or illness. However, what caused the collapse was almost as troubling: Huffington had passed out at her desk as a result of exhaustion and sleep deprivation.
After a career as an author and a journalist for much of her life, Huffington co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005, which today is the third-largest source for online news. Forbes lists her not only as one of the Most Powerful Women in Media but also as one of the Most Powerful Women in the World.
‘At some point by default, we began defining success by two metrics: money and power,’ she told Rachel Whetstone at ‘Talks at Google’ in 2014. Prompted by her collapse from overworking, Huffington developed a third metric, which has four fundamental pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving.
‘When you look around, you see that the majority of people we know about who are successful are workaholics. So you look around and say, “Hey, they succeeded because they worked around the clock.” But there is no correlation.’
When you are clear about who you are and what you want to create in life, it can be all too easy to work yourself to the point of exhaustion. When you are burnt-out, your decision-making capabilities decrease, your problem-solving abilities diminish and your productivity, even if you don’t realise it, suffers greatly. And we are in an era where good judgement and clarity of thought are more valuable than exertion.
Today, Huffington has discovered that she can achieve just as much without working herself to the point of collapse. ‘I’m not for a minute suggesting we’re not going to work hard. I work hard now. I’m suggesting not working stupidly, and regenerating, and renewing ourselves, which only make us better at work.’
Huffington challenges the commonly held OPR (Other People’s Rules) that the harder we work, the more we achieve.
“We need more role models of doing things differently.” She suggests we need to take pauses to become re-energised and, more importantly, to feel fulfilled.
THE RESEARCH AGREES WITH HER
Mark Bertolini is the CEO of one of America’s top 100 companies by revenue and its third-largest health insurance company, Aetna. Following a skiing accident that saw Bertolini break his neck, he became dependent on narcotics as a coping mechanism, until, in his words, he ‘found his new cocktail’. His new cocktail consisted of meditation, yoga and acupuncture.
Bertolini was so pleased by the transformation that he introduced mindfulness classes that would bring each of these practices to his 49,000 staff. Shortly after introducing the classes, he brought in Duke University to conduct a cost–benefit analysis on introducing mindfulness into the workplace.
In 2015, The New York Times reported that Aetna saw a 28 per cent reduction in stress levels on average across those who took the classes. They also found a 20 per cent improvement in the quality of sleep. These benefits made people more effective and able to achieve an extra 62 minutes of productivity each week. Aetna estimates this to be worth $3000 per employee per year.
STOP AND PAUSE
Something I learnt in the first five years of my business journey was to value my downtime as much, if not more than, my uptime. I found that it was in the pauses, in the resting, the rejuvenating, that I was able to recharge.
And when the time came to get back into the work, I would do so with a wellness of mind and body, and a lightness of spirit. Managing this dynamic between applying myself and re-energising myself took me years to figure out, and will never be a perfect science.
Mark Nepo, famous poet and philosopher, says of sacrifice, ‘The original definition of sacrifice moves more inwardly, it means to give up what no longer works in order to stay close to what is sacred.’
For me, I needed to continually give up what no longer worked for me, both at home and in business, in order to stay close to what is sacred: living a joyful life that brings about the achievement of our vision and mission. This means that today, both at home and in business, I only do what only I can do.
While it took me many years to get to that position, it is a meaningful pursuit for anybody living a mission-based life. Declutter your life and your schedule of everything that either doesn’t bring you joy or doesn’t move you closer to your vision.
This clarity around how you spend your time and what you do and don’t engage in may be foreign to most other people. We live in a world that is always plugged in: phone calls, emails, text messages, Skype messages, Facebook notifications, LinkedIn Mail . . . Most people are never more than two metres away from their smartphone – even while they’re asleep or in the shower.
As such, the vast majority of people unfortunately spend their time reacting to their environment. Without a clear understanding of their highest and best use, or of what projects are most important to them, they are at the mercy of other people’s demands, which come flying at them through these different channels.
THINK
When you have done the thinking around how your time is best spent, you will no longer be reacting to outside stimulus. You will step away from your emails and commit to the most important task at hand, knowing full well those emails will still be there later.
Often, productivity is simply a function of having done the thinking to know what’s most important. It was Henry Ford who said, ‘Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.’
One of the problems entrepreneurs consistently share with me is that they are so busy hustling in their business day-to-day, that they struggle to find time to work on their business.
My team at The Entourage work with entrepreneurs to empower them to develop systems that allow their business to run without them. To book in for a free consultation with my team click here.
