I never accepted “I didn’t have time,” or, “I ran out of time” as an acceptable reason for incomplete work. And all to often now, I hear people complain about a lack of time.
But if you ask people to take a moment to reflect about their lack of time, they realise its a spurious excuse.
What, “no time” actually means is ‘it wasn’t important enough,’ popular author and entrepreneur Seth Godin writes in a recent blog post. “It wasn’t a high priority, fun, distracting, profitable, or urgent enough to make it to the top of the list.”
So please eliminate “I didn’t have time” from your life.
“I didn’t have time” is mostly a euphemism for the real explanation, “I spent an hour replying to emails to procrastinate as I didnt know where to start the report and then lost track of time while browsing Facebook before I got to the report,” sounds terrible.
Even if you manage to cut down on wasting time on things like social media, setting priorities is only the first step to using your time more effectively.
Remember, just working more hours doesn’t mean greater productivity. I’ve always found that work has a way of filling up the time set aside for it, whether its more time for work related conversations, or lengthier searches for relevant information.
Three ideas are critical to me getting things done.
1. Make the work important. If you don’t think the work you are doing is important, there is little motivation to your completing it. When you take on work, seek to find out why its important to the company. Or find a way to make it important either to the business or to yourself.
2. Strict Deadlines; begin setting yourself strictly kept deadlines for work. That you pride yourself on meeting, always, no matter what.
3. Realising good enough is better than perfect. I work towards getting things +/- 80% right. Procrastination comes is when you try to get things perfect as you always want to do more research, rewrite things to make them read better. Freeing yourself from fine-tuning minute details will help you to stay productive and reduce stress.
The solution to increasing your productivity — and finally eliminating the phrase “I didn’t have time” — is not giving yourself more time for projects. Instead, it’s creating more urgency, more desire to keep everything moving swiftly and accepting that you work will never be perfect and good enough is “good enough”.