Too many people in Western societies practice rugged individualism, typified by John Wayne’s movie roles. Not so curiously, 17 years after his death John Wayne was voted America’s favorite actor. He took care of everything himself. Unfortunately, life is not a movie.
In the workaday world, you frequently see middle managers who attempt to leapfrog several positions in the company by taking on more projects, even though they’re already working beyond optimal capacity. Among entrepreneurs, you may encounter someone trying to crack a new market—even while juggling several other balls, short-changing his or her health to keep that circus going.
What are some danger signs indicating that you believe you have to do it all yourself? Consider these symptoms: You think you’ll be able to overcome obstacles by working longer; you tell yourself (or worse, your boss) that you “appreciate the challenge.” If the people around you think it can’t be accomplished, all the better; you’ll wow ’em by doing the impossible, right? You might become a little overbearing, but hey, you’re in pursuit of an important goal, and that’s what counts. Besides, you’re the “only one who can do the job.”
Certainly, working hard in itself is not a problem unless you maintain preposterous ambitions or let force of habit push you beyond the point of diminishing returns. If you’re willing to stay late, work on weekends, and minimize your vacation time, you well may be your organization’s star performer—hey, what a great deal for them!—but too many career-achievers fall into an endless cycle. These people feel their accomplishments are too small or too few; they experience disappointment, frustration, and health-threatening stress. To relieve these feelings, they work even harder in the hope they’ll accomplish more and a golden rainbow will appear.
The notion that you and you alone must take care of everything is, in a word, erroneous. If working too hard is you way to gain the respect of others—or self-respect—it’s time to rethink your whole approach.
Chronos Says Admit to yourself that you can’t do everything; acknowledge that trying harder in some instances may not be worth it. Contemplate the possibility of using help for selected segments of your life.
Some do-it-all people may have the ill-advised notion that the only way to exhibit competence is by constantly proving it to everyone else. Worse, if they never quite prove it to themselves, they live in dread of being found out as imperfect.
Especially when it comes to domestic tasks, do you get stuck in a miserly mode? Do you think that if you spend a few minutes here and there taking care of this and that you can handle all you seek to keep up with—and avoid shelling out the money to have others do it? Many people do.
Each time you avoid getting a service professional, helper, or part-timer—when such parties could aid you considerably—you’re ensuring that you won’t win back your time. If you don’t enjoy mowing the lawn, for example, every time you do that chore you add to the cumulative total of undesirable tasks in your life (as discussed in Chapter 2, “Time Flies Whether You’re Having Fun or Not”). Besides, you’re incurring all that unnecessary tissue-and-decongestant expense during hay fever season.
Time Out! Watch out if you start believing that you alone are the only one who can handle things. Many organizations tend to seek out people with such urges and expect them to over-perform forever. Only superheroes need apply.
When I make presentations to groups around the country and explain the value of shelling out a few dollars to preserve your time, invariably someone asks, “What do I do if money is tight?” I don’t presume for a second that you have loads of cash stashed away in a trunk somewhere. (Remember, most people spend more than they have.) And the thought of parting with some of your money to hire people to do what you’ve traditionally done yourself may seem like heresy at first.
But let’s look at hiring others from the vantage point of your life’s big picture. You have things to accomplish that can perhaps make you much more money than the $15 you pay somebody to mow the lawn or trim the hedges.
A Stitch In Time It makes perfect sense to pay a high-school kid $15 to mow the lawn if you can’t stand mowing the lawn. In the long run, you won’t miss the money and you’ll be glad you’re no longer stuck with a task you dislike.
If you’re an entrepreneur or self-employed, it pays to rely on outside services so you can focus on what you do best and make the overall business prosper. If you work for an organization, there are still countless opportunities for relief; you can rely on others (at work and away from work) to alleviate the piddling tasks you don’t enjoy doing. Thus you can be at your best, get noticed by superiors, and stand a better chance of getting those raises and promotions.
It’s surprising how common the do-it-all urge is. Nanci Hellmich, a reporter for USA Today, uncovered some of it when she interviewed me for two articles. The first was a brief, two-column article; in it Nanci invited readers to write to USA Today and discuss their time-pressure problems. Several lucky readers would benefit from my counsel (aw, shucks). The second article would include the results of my counseling.
Over several weeks, Nanci received hundreds of letters; she selected respondents for me to call. I lived in Falls Church, Virginia, at the time, so I made the calls from the USA Today offices in Arlington, Virginia. I had lengthy talks with a female attorney and a graduate student, among others.
The attorney was perpetually racing the clock, getting her daughters to school in the morning, seeing her husband off on his (frequently long) business trips, plying her trade as a partner in a successful law firm, picking up the children, driving them to various after-school activities, making dinner for them, reading to them, and putting them to bed.
Chronos Says You need to be rested and alert when you head into work. Having others take care of domestic tasks helps you in your professional career.
After listening to her story, I asked her why she didn’t give herself the liberty of ordering dinner a couple of times a week rather than making it all the time. She said she’d never thought about it—and, on first hearing, it seemed a little extravagant. I asked her how much she earned. It was considerable. I asked her how much her husband earned. It was more than considerable.
“Okay,” I replied, “between the two of you, you’re clearing nearly a quarter million per year. Suppose you had Chinese food or pizza or chicken delivered to your home now and then—and you didn’t cook at all on those nights. How much would it cost you, once a week, to have dinner delivered?” She thought about it and said, “Maybe an average of $16 a week, so that’s $800 a year.”
I said, “Would it be worth $800 a year if, once a week—particularly during hectic work weeks—you had dinner delivered instead of making it yourself? Would that free up some of your time? Would you enjoy it? Are you worth it?” She agreed on all counts. It’s food for thought.
The graduate student I spoke with also had a hectic schedule. Besides taking several courses, she worked in the afternoons and was a volunteer for a service organization two nights a week. Frequently she found herself arising in the morning barely in time to catch the bus. This kind of pressure was no way to start her day, yet it had become routine.
I listened carefully to her story and asked, “How much is the bus ride to school?” She said it was $1.75. I said, “How much would a taxi ride cost?” She was aghast. “I couldn’t take a taxi!” I said, “Wait a second. How much would a taxi ride be?” She didn’t know, so we paused our conversation. She called the closest taxi company and asked about the charges from her apartment to her class in the morning. The cost was approximately $4.50.
When she called me back, I asked her the million-dollar question: “How upsetting would it be to your budget if, occasionally, when you were running late, you permitted yourself to hail a taxi and pay $4.50 instead of paying $1.75 for the bus?” She thought about it and said, “Well, I suppose occasionally it wouldn’t hurt.”
I said, “You’re right. You could hail a taxi as often as once a week, and in the course of a 15-week semester, you’re only paying an extra $67.50 for the luxury of not being enslaved to the bus schedule. You could easily blow $67.50 on stuff all the time. Why not be gentle with yourself? Acknowledge that you’re handling a lot in life right now, and occasionally you deserve to take a taxi ride to school.” She relented.
If you’re a big-city career-type, the same principle applies. If you’re up on East 78th Street in Manhattan and have to get down to 43rd in a hurry, once every week or so, it won’t put a significant dent in your pocketbook to take a taxi rather than the subway or bus. Suppose it costs you $8 more per week. In the course of a year you’re only paying $400. How many times have you blown $400 in ways that were far less beneficial to your overall health and well-being?
Time Out! Don’t get caught in the trap of false economies. How many times do you get stuck in a miserly mode, pinching pennies here and there, while blowing triple or quadruple digits on items of marginal value? If you don’t watch out, you’ll find you’re sacrificing your time and wasting money.
What time/money trade-offs might make good sense in your situation? Consider a few:
A Stitch In Time Every time you successfully use one of your many helpers, you’re winning back your time!
In my book Marketing for the Home-Based Business (Adams Media), one recommendation I make to entrepreneurs is to look for local service providers. The Maid Brigade, for example, was the service I used when I wanted to have my house cleaned quickly. Rather than hiring a service that sent over a cleaning person or two and required three or four hours to get the job done, the Maid Brigade would send six or eight people at once and finish the job within 45 minutes.
Here are other types of services that probably exist in your community (they’ll be called something else in your city, of course).
There are plenty of part-time workers as well; some may be more suitable to your needs than others. These include part-time regular employees, retirees, temporaries, and students (high school, college, intern, foreign-exchange, grad school, and so on).
You probably can find a bright, motivated student to help you. Schools are full of intelligent, perceptive young men and women—many of whom are seeking an opportunity to gain some real-world experience or extra money. Their part-time status doesn’t mean they’re less intelligent or effective. Many can take a divisible unit of work and do a bang-up job on it.
Chronos Says Most communities have high-school juniors and seniors who’d be thrilled to work for $.50 an hour above minimum wage while gaining more experience than flipping hamburgers. This might not seem like a lot of money to you, but it may to them.
What could helpers do for you? Fair question. Take a look:
Identify all those non-essential-but-bothersome tasks you’ve been putting off and that a part-timer can handle.
Seed work functions best when it’s a distinct unit of work that’s easily assigned to someone else. For example, suppose you want information on the eight other local companies in your field. A high-school student can easily open the phone book or a local trade publication, visit the sites, write for the brochures (using his/her home address), and summarize the information gathered. A more experienced employee could spot trends or innovations from this data, all with a minimum of your time spent on instruction.
Watch WordsSeed work is the sort of task you can easily assign to another because the downside risk if he or she botches the task is negligible.
Whether you live in a community of 35,000 or 1,035,000, many service providers can help you with domestic as well as business tasks to free you for whatever makes the most money for you.
By now, you’re probably mildly enthusiastic to downright excited about the prospects of bringing such providers into your life. Good. If you start using such helpers in a systematic way, you’ll be far along the road to winning back your time.
Here are 10 suggestions for putting your service system in place:
Task Matrix
A Stitch In Time Create an up-to-date file of key literature and information you encounter when seeking service providers; constantly add to it. Align your life with people who can free up your time. You’re worth it.
Once you have a file of helpers, keep adding to it, keep it current, and use it.
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