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TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-06-01
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2X7c9TUQJ8
you may have thought that we started late but it is ironic that the first beaker would be the author of the book procrastinate on purpose how is it that we have more tips and tricks tools and technology calendars and checklists than ever before and yet we still always seem to be behind how is it that we work longer hours were moving faster than we've ever moved
in history and yet we never seem to be caught up how is it that we know more about time management today and yet stress is it an all time high the reason why is because everything you know about time management is wrong I first started to realize this a couple years ago was early on a Saturday morning I was at my business partners house and I
was picking him up for a very important international leader planning retreat he has this two year old baby girl named haven and haven is the sweetest little thing you can imagine she has curly brown hair in the sweet soft brown eyes we live in Nashville so she has a little southern accent that's developing and as I'm picking up dust and were about to leave haven come
sprinting down the hallway and she leaps and she latches on to Dustin's leg and she says Daddy where you going and he looks down at her he says all I'm sorry baby haven Daddy actually has to go to work today and she looks up at him and her eyes well up with tears and she says no Daddy please no work today no work Daddy and in
that moment I realized two things first is that I myself I'm not ready to have kids just yet the second is that even though everything that you've ever heard about time management is all logical tips and tricks tools and technology calendars and check was its absence all logic when I realized then that from a two year old is that today time management is no longer just
logical today time management is emotional and how our feelings of guilt and fear and worry and anxiety and frustration those things dictate how we choose to spend our time as much as anything that's in arts in our calendar on our to do list in fact there is no such thing as time management you can't manage time time continues on whether we like it or not so
there is no such thing as time management really there is only self management what was the first big realization that I had in order for you to understand the second only take you on a quick history of time management theory and that really began in the late fifties and sixties and it came during the industrial revolution and an early time management thought was all about it
was one dimensional it was all based on efficiency and the idea with efficiency was that if we could develop tools and technology to help us do things faster then theoretically that would give us more time well there's nothing wrong with efficiency all things being equal efficiency is is better and yet there is an unfortunate limitation to efficiency is a strategy for time management and and it's
evidence very well by the fact that we all carry around miniature computers in our pockets and yet somehow were still never caught up well in the late eighties Eric to time management thinking emerged I feel like it was pretty much single handedly ushered in by the late great doctor Steven Covey and and doctor copy introduced what we are referring to as two dimensional thinking he gave
us something called the time management matrix where the X. axis was urgency in the Y. axis was importance and that's the beauty about this was that it gave us a system for scoring our tax and then based on how they scored in these two areas we could prioritize tasks one in front of the other prioritizing is all about focusing first on what matters most and for
the last twenty years this is really been the pervasive mode of thinking as it relates to time management theory and it's not that there's anything wrong with prioritizing in fact prioritizing is is valuable of swill skill today as it ever has been in history and yet even though we throw that word around like it's the end all be all the time management theory right we say
get your priorities in order or it's just you don't have the right priorities well unfortunately maybe that's not really the case because there is a massive limitation to prioritizing that nobody ever talks about and that is this there's nothing about prioritizing that creates more time all prioritizing does is take item number seven on your to do list and it bounced up to number one which is
valuable in and of itself but it doesn't do anything inherently to create more time it does nothing to help you accomplish the other items on your to do list I mean if you think about efficiency efficiency kind of like running on a hamster wheel if you think of prioritizing it's really about borrowing time borrowing time from one activity to spend on another it's kind of like
juggling and that really describes the way that we even talk about time I'm I'm juggling a lot I'm trying to balance a lot and in that paradigm there's only two strategies one is to do things faster or to do more things and that is what the world kind of feels like right how does it feel to know that really all we are is a bunch of
juggling hamsters sprinting towards an inevitable crash landing we cannot solve today's time management problems with yesterday's time management thinking we've noticed is the emergence of a new type of thinker so many that we refer to as a multiplier and multipliers use what we call three dimensional thinking while most people only make decisions based on urgency and importance multipliers are making a third calculation which is based
on significance and if urgency is how soon to something matter and importance is how much does it matter then significance is how long is it going to matter it's a completely different paradigm it's it's adding on to what is there it's in with the old but it's also in with the new because most of us if you think about that the modern day to do list
which is one of the key strategies are tools that we have we ask ourselves when we assemble our to do list we see what's the most important thing I can do today but that is not how multipliers think multipliers instead ask the question what can I do today that would make tomorrow better what can I do right now that would make the future better they're making
the significance calculation see what what I say multiply your time that might sound a little bit what super superfluous it might sound like an over exaggeration but it really is not now why it is true that we all have the same amount of time inside of one day twenty four hours fourteen hundred forty minutes eighty six thousand four hundred seconds and there's nothing that any of
us can do to create more time in one day but that's exactly the problem that type of thinking is the problem we have to do is break out of that paradigm instead think about tomorrow that brings us to the premise for how you multiply time the way you multiply time is simple you multiply your time by giving yourself the emotional permission spend time on things today
that gives you more time tomorrow that's the significance calculation you multiply time by giving yourself emotional permission to spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow the significance calculation changes everything the focus final is our attempt to create a visual depiction that codifies the thought process that multipliers go through in their head unconsciously when they are evaluating how to spend their time it's why
some people create extraordinary explosive exponential results and other people seem to cut a discrete linear traction it works like this if your tasks all come into the top of the funnel the first question a multiplier asks is can I eliminate this is it even worth doing it's another example how everything you know about time management is wrong or at least that has changed because most of
us used to do less and multipliers realize that next generation time management has much more to do with what you don't do then what you do do it it time multipliers realize that perfection is achieved not only were nothing more can be added but when nothing more can be taken away it is the permission to ignore because anything that we say no to today creates more
time for us tomorrow the challenge emotionally is that we struggle with guilt that we struggle with wanting to say no but really feeling like we have to say yes and so we go through life trying to never say no and in one of the interviews I conducted with the multiplier they said something that changed my life is so great it's you don't go through life trying
to never say no what you have to realize is that you are always saying no to something because any time you say yes to one thing you're simultaneously saying no to an infinite number of others if you can eliminate the task the next question is can I wanna meet the task anything that I create a process for today saves me time tomorrow it's like setting up
online bill pay I I never have two hours in my day to set up online bill pay I just know how time if I had two hours in my day I would never use it to set up online bill pay but a multiplier realizes that if I stayed thirty minutes a month from paying my bills by setting up online bill pay then make sense to invest
those two hours because then after just four months time I will have broken even on that investment and every month there after I will get something we call our O. T. I return on time invest it automation is to your time exactly what compounding interest is to your money just like compounding interest takes money and it makes money into more money automation takes time it makes
it into more time the way that wealthy people think about money is exactly the same way that multipliers think about time and they give themselves the permission to invest invest the time and energy to automate the process if it can't be automated and the next question is can be delegated can I teach someone else how to do this I'm reminded of a time when I was
seven years old and I'll never forget I was in the car with my mom and I hit her with this question I said mom you I think have a dad and as you might imagine that was a pretty difficult question for a single mother to navigate with her seven year old it was the first time that my mom told me her life story she was pregnant
seventeen divorced a couple years later pregnant again at twenty two and that she was divorced from my biological father six months after I was born so there she was twenty two years old single mom no high school education as you explain to me she said Rory I decided at that point I would never have a man in my life because I haven't had good luck with
men and we may not have a lot it may not have a dad but we're gonna have love and I and so we went back and forth for a little while I said well you know mom I love our family I really do I love our family but I think it would be really cool I have a debt and so she said well I tell you
what honey if if you wanna dad then why don't you go out and find yourself a good dad what kind of crap is that it just so happened that that was my first day at a new Shaolin kung fu center and I'd been studying martial arts since I was five and so they put me in this all adult school to be a little more advanced and
there's another gentleman who walked in it was his first day also but this guy was much older than me he had long hair and tattoos all up and down his arm and leather jacket and he came in on a motorcycle and this guy was about the scariest dude you can imagine if you're seven years old and he gets paired up as my sparring partner his name
was Kevin he turned out to be pretty nice well we started to advance to the belt levels together in and so Kevin started bringing me home from class every once in awhile then before you know it Kevin came over on the weekends and we would we would practice our forms and then we caught a movie and then before before long mom came with us to the
movies and and so was the three of us that we're going to movies together and I'll never forget the first time the two of them went to a movie without me was it turns out Kevin I tested for black belts together on the same day when I was ten years old they got married two weeks later a couple years after that Kevin adopted me and I
change my last name from Roy McLaughlin to Rory Vaden and they have been married for twenty years ever since and the point of that story is that you can delegate anything but if you ask the average person you said are there things you know you could be delegating to somebody else we would say yes but then you say well why don't you train do it and
what most of us it saves you see while the as they just can't do it as well as I can and that may be true once maybe twice but it is only true absent the significance calculation because if you think longer term you realize they'll be able to master the task just like you were significance changes everything it's how you multiply your time it's giving yourself
the permission of in perfect for a little while because over time they'll be able to figure it out now if you can eliminate the automate or delegate a task that task drops out the window bottom of the final in at that point there's only one remaining question and that question is should I do this task now must it be done now or can it wait until
later if the task must be done now then that's what we call concentrate it's the permission to protect alright for the permission to protect it's it's it's all about focus in eliminating distractions and honestly there's nothing all that exciting or new there however if you ask the question can this wait until later and you decide that the answer is yes then that's not eliminate automate or
delegate that is what we call procrastinate on purpose procrastinate on purpose so you got going to procrastinate outline it for ever you're gonna pop that activity back to the top of the funnel at which point it will enter into a holding pattern where it will cycle through the focus final until inevitably one day eventually one of the other four strategies will be executed on whatever that
task is and what you find is that it's on the key continually weights often what happens is you eventually develop the courage to do what you should have done in the first place which was eliminated or you discover a system for how automated or someone rises up to the call of leadership the rise up to the occasion and it ends up being delegated where it ends
up becoming something that is significant enough for you to spend your time on a lot of people say worry waited in in the take the stairs book right intake the stairs you said procrastination was the killer of all success you said procrastination was the most expensive invisible cost in business they use at procrastination is the foundation of all mediocrity and now you're ask me on purpose