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Looking at Time as a Work Variable
How much time you spend may be just as important as what you spend your time on
Reading through Richard Koch’s new book, 80/20 Daily and I’m struck with a thought about time as a work variable.
What I mean is when I’m doing work, I’m tracking the time I’m spending, but I’m treating it as if I have an infinite (or at least a lot) of time.
As a knowledge worker, most of what I do is either in developing human relationships with colleagues, stakeholders, and management OR in producing different deliverables: reports, presentations, financial analysis and more. When a deliverable needs to be completed, I spend time on it. When a deliverable needs to meet the lofty standards of quality I have, I spend more time on it. In other words, I prioritize work quality and outputs more than my inputs (time, knowledge and energy). This is mostly a function of what’s visible: people see and evaluate your outputs and don’t care (mostly) about your inputs.
What if I thought of my inputs as more important than my outputs?
Considering the 80/20 rule, 20% of my time is spent that produces 80% of the output. The trick then is to find out what 20% of my time is producing 80% of the output – unfortunately quite…
