Archive for the ‘Randomize’ tag
Protect Your Time: 8 Ways to Stay Focused on Important Stuff
Happy Monday! If you value your time – and who doesn’t – you need to be be protecting it at all costs. It’s far too easy to spend hours each day doing things that don’t end up resulting in personal or professional gain. You pick your head up at the end of the workday just to realize that out of all the things you got done, none of them were particularly meaningful.
This happens to everyone… at least once!
The key to good time management is to protect your time from the unimportant in order to focus on the important. It’s really that simple. But in practice, it can be difficult. Because it sometimes means being a jerk. Or at least coming across like one to people who enjoy time-wasting activities because it’s the only way they know how to work.
We have a word at Microsoft we use when our time is wasted: randomize. I was randomized by him. Please don’t randomize me. This meeting is going to be randomizing, we can do this over email. What a randomization! I’m not exactly sure where it came from – likely from the comparison of wasting time to a random number generator – but the basic idea is that if something is randomizing, it’s to be avoided at all costs. I suppose it’s nicer than saying “you’re wasting my precious time”, especially for people who don’t know what the word means in context.
Don’t be randomized!
The single biggest time-waster in the corporate world is the all-too-prevalent meeting. Most meetings are 50 minutes of people hearing themselves speak and 10 minutes of useful dialog or conversation. You may not be able to avoid them completely, but you can sure as hell try. More important stuff happens outside of meetings than in them.
As you may have read in My Day: The Way I Work, Rest, and Play, my workday can easily be filled from 9-6 if I’m not careful. This certainly isn’t unique to my situation; it applies to lots of people. Many people end up using evenings and weekends to “catch up” instead of for much-needed downtime. Not fun.
Worse, they’ve convinced themselves that their job is to go to meetings. I don’t know anyone whose job is just to attend meetings – or just read email for that matter – no matter what role they’re in… and for those who think it’s their job, my guess is that they’re filled with guilt because their contributions are severely limited. They’re not actually doing anything. Also not fun.
No matter what you do, you want to maximize your contribution. You want to spend more time creating and producing than consuming. You want great output. You want to be someone who pushes the boulder another foot up the hill each and every day. You don’t want to run in-place like the people around you! Unless you’re a full-time hole puncher with 30 years of experience, you have something unique and significant to contribute. Useless meetings take away from that. If they’re not wasting your time directly, they’re still breaking up valuable opportunities to find flow in your work. Meetings aren’t where you’ll make your mark.
