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when you focus on what you do best, on what brings you the most satisfaction, there is plenty of space for everything.
you can choose how to spend your 168 hours, and you have more time than you think.
Effective people outsource, ignore, or minimize everything else. The coming chapters will talk about how to identify these core competencies at home and at work. You’ll need to change your life to spend more time on these things, and less on the things that are neither meaningful nor pleasurable for you or for people you care about.
An individual’s core competencies are best thought of as abilities that can be leveraged across multiple spheres. They should be important and meaningful. And they should be the things we do best and that others cannot do nearly as well.
Broadly, those who get the most out of life try to figure out and focus on their core competencies. They know that at least one key difference between happy, successful people, and those just muddling along is that the happy ones spend as many of their 168 hours as possible on their core competencies—honing their focus to get somewhere—and, like modern corporations, chucking everything else.
by trying lots of things you think you might enjoy, you will learn more about yourself, and what you are actually good at, what might be your core competencies, and which of the biggies are worth going for. You may be shocked by what you discover. This is why you just have to keep an open mind and try things.
People who get the most out of life spend as much of their time as possible on these core competency activities, and as little as possible on other things.
Like choosing the right spouse, being in the right job can give you amazing energy for the entirety of your 168 hours.
They found that people were happiest when they were completely absorbed in activities that were difficult but doable, to the point where their brains no longer had space to ruminate about the troubles of daily life.
Any “work” that is not advancing you toward the professional life you want should not count as work. It is wasted time.
“I generally don’t work a lot on weekends,” he says. “Almost everything can wait until Monday.”
Here’s how this usually works for the core-competency parent: Treat the hours between 5:00 and 8:00 p.m. (or 5:30 and 8:30, or 6:00 and 9:00 if you’ve got night owls) as sacred. This is family time. Block it out on your calendar. Use it to plan activities with your kids that leverage the things you do best. But then, a few nights per week, open up the hours of 8:00–10:00 or 11:00, after your kids go to bed, for work.
it does little good to have your children enrolled in many different activities if the fragmentation means that Mom and Dad can’t build the kind of happy marriage that children crave.
Schedule a “spouse conference” for the last half hour before bedtime. Talk through your days. Talk about your kids and talk about your dreams. If one of you is traveling, have the conference by phone. If you’re both in your house, have the conference in your bed. What this leads to is up to you.
It certainly is a parental core competency to care for a family, but culturally, many people still believe that “caring for a family” means cooking, scrubbing, vacuuming, lunch packing, weeding, and laundry, in addition to the emotional work of nurturing children’s brains and souls. For years, all these labors have been roped into the job description of “mom” or occasionally “dad.” But does it make you a better parent to stand there in the kitchen every morning packing elaborate lunches that will get soggy when $2-3 for the hot school lunch would suffice? Is that really what kids need? Or do
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Likewise, long weekend hours can easily disappear into chores, Blackberry breaks, shuttling children around, and checking what’s on TV. Then, suddenly, it’s Sunday night and you feel about as relaxed and rejuvenated as you would in a clashing cardigan and polo shirt, or in the middle of a Latin American hostage situation.
We don’t spend much time thinking about what we’d like to do with our free time, even though no one would take a 30-hour-per-week job without clarifying the job description. Because we don’t think through our leisure time, we often don’t even recognize when it’s appearing, and so we wind up spending big chunks of it in the most frictionless way possible: in front of the television.
Time is too precious to be lackadaisical about leisure.
When you turn off the TV at night in order to talk with your partner, you will sleep better. When you sleep better, you’ll be more focused at work. When you’re focused at work, you will get more done in less time and get home earlier. When you get home earlier, you’ll have more energy to play with your kids. When you’re having fun with your kids, TV will seem a lot less interesting.
