Make Time Your Most Valuable Asset

A note to young leaders.
You have more than enough time.

I was having dinner with a young leader when he sighed and lamented: “I just don’t seem to have enough time.”

“Let’s try this”, I replied. “I want you and I to meditate silently for 5- minutes. Just sit in your seat without speaking”, and with that I switched the timer on my iPhone.
When time was up, I asked quietly: “Was that a long 5-minutes or a short 5-minutes?” We both knew the answer: 5-minutes is surprisingly long.

It’s not that we don’t have enough time. It’s that we waste so much of it.

When you are at work, treat time as your most precious possession. Don’t amble casually around the office, walk briskly and with purpose.
Don’t have languid, meandering chats in the middle of the day and then complain you’re too busy to complete a presentation.
Don’t make 1-hour meetings your default setting. For me, internal one- on-one meetings are 30-minutes and external one-on-one meetings are 45-minutes. It’s amazing how much more efficient meetings are when they are a little time constrained.

Time is the juice of life. How much time you get depends on how hard you squeeze.