Jan 23, 2017 | Food for Thought
TRIDIV DAS
If we don't notice, it doesn’t exist
A year has 8760 hours; considering a work week of 5 days, we have 2080 hours to work. Even if a best performer or workaholic works continuously, one cannot effectively utilize more than 60% of the 40 hours work week, which implies 1236 hours in a year. Therefore, your work should ideally consume 14% of the total time available in a year. However, it appears that work is the most dominating part of our life, and therefore the work - life struggle exists.
A greater part of your life gets consumed in time leaks
We all want to strike a work-life balance to achieve effectiveness in this space. We are clueless about the phenomenon - 'time leaks'. In reality we are yet to comprehend how time flies. Our mind is incapable of keeping track of time, and therefore we rely on gadgets. Now, consider if you allocate 35% of your time in sleeping, eating and changing, we still have another 50% untapped, which mostly gets wasted in this phenomenon.
Why some people are able to do more than others?
Great Leaders like late Steve Jobs and Richard Branson in their own words have talked about how having the same type of dressing for everyday saved their time. Time leaks exist in the smoke & tea breaks at work; it exists in mindlessly scrolling through the social posts on mobile, while talking to your own head, procrastinating, and many more occasions. These are the moments which our brain fails to register while they consume a large part of our day. People who practice mindfulness are able to minimize the effect of time leaks and therefore are more effective in their lives.
Four quadrants for work-life effectiveness
How to approach and optimize time? To be effective in all aspects of life, purely depends on us. How some people can do more in the same time, while others struggle to finish one? The answer is simple - lack of an effective work-life effective structure. We have 4 main areas of life to focus, which are:
While at work we are given goals, we fail to peg the goals in the other domains. Therefore, our life runs much like a car with 3 flat tires and one active; the fortunate ones run with two flat tires. How a young man can be effective at work purely depends on the time he is spending in training his body, mind & soul. If you have trained yourself for the job, you'll be able to be effective, and if you haven't then you will take more time to do the same work.
I have witnessed how communities come together to assist people in every aspect of their life, all because they stay connected with their communities. If the young man is disconnected from the communities, he will never receive any support. If he could not find quality time with his family and relationships, he may not have their support too.
Plug the time leaks to be more
From time to time, people close to us often remind us about this missing equation of life, but we choose to remain indifferent. The Time leak phenomenon exists in realm of "I don't know that I don't know", and therefore what is available here remains a secret. To discover this phenomenon, you'll you need to first discover, how many things distracts you from doing what you want to do at work, at home, at a community and even when you wish to invest in yourself.
Imagine the possibilities if we are able to plug these time leaks, we can have more time for everything.