Winning Without Losing: Beware the Time and Energy Wasters
Winning Without Losing, the CMI award-winning book as “the best book for New Managers,” explains 66 strategies on how to be successful in business, without neglecting your personal life. Martin Bjergegaard and Jordan Milne interviewed a variety of successful entrepreneurs, and through their search they found that the key to a happy and successful life, is a healthy work life balance.
Every Saturday for the next 7 weeks, we will be sharing unique strategies that aim to inspire how you can achieve success without sacrifice.
This week, the selected strategy is chosen from Winning Without Losing‘s “Beware the Time and Energy Wasters” section.
Beware the Time and Energy Wasters Strategy #13: Don’t Let Technology Control You
Technology can be an efficient tool and a luxury that fosters flexibility. It can also trap you. There are no warning labels when you buy a new smartphone or log onto Facebook. No sticker that speaks of the addiction or time loss that can occur with their misuse.
In the modern world you can work every hour of the day. You can wake up in the middle of the night and go to the computer to work on whatever pops into your head. The potential is enormous, but you need to take control and be deliberate in your use of technology and communication tools. Don’t let them control you.
Our society has created a dependency on technology. It’s hard to imagine that we have had smart phone technology for less than 10 years, and now, most of us can’t imagine a life without it. Technology, although useful, can have drawbacks.
Nowhere is this more dangerous than with email. Millions of us have read the international bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, where Tim Ferriss threw a much-needed and well-aimed punch at email. Since the book hit the shelves, however, email has not dwindled sheepishly into the background. Far from it. According to recent research an overwhelming 96% of respondents report their email use has either stayed the same or increased in the past year, while a further 96% say they expect their work email use to stay the same or increase in the next 5 years. Until someone comes up with a real alternative, email is here to stay, and we have to make the best of it.
Stever Robbins, business coach and expert in efficiency, elaborates on the dangers of email misuse, and points towards at least three problems with it:
It draws our attention away from the task at hand and the people around us by luring us in with a false sense of urgency. We need to realise that – most of the time – if we don’t answer our email immediately we are not going to miss a great opportunity or a huge problem that won’t still be there later.
Your life is what happens while you’re away from the computer, not while you’re at the computer. Think about the best times in your life. Were you writing emails? Probably not.
Email also puts you in a reactive role instead of a proactive one: answering what other people want and can’t find. Email has been described as a never-ending to-do list that someone else makes for you.
Spending time cleaning up your inbox is fine as a residual activity but the core of your time should be spent on your Wildly Important stuff. Be aware. Take control.
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