All right, be honest. How much time do you spend on your phone every day? Now ask yourself that question again, because the first time you answered you were lying to yourself. We all spend way too much time on our smart phones and other connected devices. This has us working many more hours every day even when we aren’t in the office!

In an article in the Harvard Business Review, it was observed that,

“In a survey of 483 executives, managers, and professionals (EMPs), we found that 60% of those who carry smartphones for work are connected to their jobs 13.5 or more hours a day on weekdays and about five hours on weekends, for a total of about 72 hours. Assuming these people sleep about seven and a half hours a night, that leaves only three hours a day Monday to Friday for them to do everything else (e.g. chores, exercise, grocery shop, family time, shower, relax). It also means they spend 62% of their waking hours every week connected to work (82% on weekdays).”

Ouch! As you can see, connectedness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But it isn’t this connectedness that’s the real problem. It’s the lack of intention with how you spend your time. We go onto our phones and then get sucked down into a rabbit hole of emails, social media posts, and messaging apps. There’s seldom any rhyme or reason for any of it, or even a cohesive goal!

In light of how much time we spend at work overall, and how that’s still not enough to do the things we know we need to do, this just adds insult to injury!

Don’t Let the Busywork Into Your Life

But it’s not just our smartphones that get in the way. We let phone calls, random staff questions, duplicative work, low-value errands, maintenance, and all sorts of other “stuff” into our lives that shouldn’t be. We never ask ourselves whether it is worth doing or whether we should be doing it!

We run around from one task to the next without any clearly defined goal in mind. As such, we have to ask ourselves, what are we really accomplishing by doing all of this?

The next question is, what valuable things could we be doing with our time instead of all this busywork? How can that wasted time be leveraged to make us more money and be more successful in our practices?

The Method and the Challenge

Part of the process of “getting off the hamster wheel” and “making more money in less time” is replacing those random and low value tasks with intentional, high value ones! But how do you do this? Well, there are two steps.

Step 1: Identify the wasteful things that you do in the course of the day and when you do them. This will probably take up a week or so, but it will allow you to quantify just how much time you are spending on busywork.

Step 2: Plan out how you will spend that time instead. Then determine why you want to spend that time doing those tasks. Is it worth doing? Is it something I should be doing? This is powerful. Put it into this simple formula:

I will do [the task] because [the why].

The first part is what you will do; the second is why you will do it. The why gives you the motivation to do the what.

So as to give you some motivation, I challenge you to eliminate half of your wasted time in the next 30 days (you can get rid of the other 50% the following month). Four weeks should be enough time to shake out half the cruft from your calendar and tighten up your day. You” feel better, I promise you!

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