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The opportunities available to a capable person always exceed the time available.
Balanced people don’t change the world. Passionate people do.
Most people have only three to five deeply productive hours in a day when their energy is at its peak. That’s it.
The quality and flow of your ideas when brainstorming, writing, crafting, or creating anything—from a talk to an agenda to a proposal or plan.
How well you lead or contribute to meetings.
How long it takes you to clear an inbox and write thoughtful, intelligent responses.
How quickly you move things off your task list.
How you interact with your colleagues at work. How you engage your family at home. How you feel about your job…even your favorite part of your job. Your spirits: Are you in good spirits, poor spirits, or somewhere in the middle?
To find your gifting, ask yourself and people close to you these questions: What seems effortless to me that seems difficult or complex to others? What talent do I keep using in different settings? (For example, you end up organizing events, speaking to or for the group, or being the manager even if you weren’t hired to do that.)
Pay attention to the things that fuel you.
Ask yourself what the highest-value tasks are that your employer pays you to accomplish. What are your core responsibilities? What are your overriding goals?
What can I do today/in this season that will have a significantly positive impact?3 What few things (or one thing), when done well, will help me move the cause forward? What activities, when I repeatedly do them, help me make meaningful progress? (This is a key question because your ongoing patterns and disciplines often make the biggest impact on your work and life.)
Spending thirty minutes of your Green Zone each day reading, studying, and honing your skills can make an astonishing difference.
Instead of pushing your most important work and the work you’re best at into your Yellow and Red Zones—the desert of your workweek—do what you’re best at when you’re at your best.
Your gifting is what you’re naturally good at. Your passion is what you love to do—what gives you energy.
Impact refers to those things that, when done, make the biggest difference, sometimes in the moment but often in the long term.
I use my low-energy zones to clear email, hold the lower-stakes meetings, do routine administrative work, and (increasingly) exercise.
A few principles to follow when approaching your boss: Express desires, not demands. Telling someone what you want him or her to do is far less effective than expressing what you’d love to see happen. Ask questions instead of making statements. Phrasing your request as a question rather than a statement almost always helps you go further. Make sure you’ve done everything you can do. You want to have maximized the factors within your control before you ask your leader about something beyond your control.2
Focus on what you can control, not on what you can’t.
The biggest Red Zone mistake you can make is to leave important decisions or critical tasks for this zone.
Nobody will ever ask you to accomplish your top priorities. They will only ask you to accomplish theirs.
You simply spent your day reacting to everything that came your way. That’s exactly how your priorities get hijacked.
Social media, gaming, chitchat in the office, and random texts and phone calls make life interesting, but they don’t help you accomplish your goals.
What are the 20 percent of things you do that produce 80 percent of the results?
When you spend 80 (or 100) percent of your Green Zone on the things that produce 80 percent of your results, your ability to accomplish significant things soars in your life and in your leadership.
Without a strategy for saying no, you default to yes, and your life vaporizes with other people’s priorities being realized rather than yours.
Remind yourself that you can’t prioritize the people who matter most to you if you say yes to everyone else.
Most people spend their day reacting to everything that comes their way.
Spend 80 percent of your time on the things that produce 80 percent of your results.
Researchers have discovered that it takes the average person almost twenty-five minutes to refocus after a single distraction.4
The quality of your work is determined by the quality of your thinking.
The people who want your time are rarely the people who should have your time. And the people who should get most of your premium time rarely ask you for it.
Too often you’ll ignore the people you care about most as you spend your time with people you care about less.
There are two categories of people you should be investing less time in (and almost no Green Zone time in). One is the people you feel you should meet with because, well, things aren’t going well or they’re in a crisis you feel needs your attention. The other is the people who want to meet with you but don’t need to.
Relationally speaking, the Pareto principle looks like this: spend most of your time with the people who produce most of your results and the least amount of time with the people who don’t. In leadership, that typically means you should spend most of your time meeting with your top performers. In your personal life, spend 80 percent of your time with the people you care most about (family, close friends, mentors), leaving 20 percent for others.
A further benefit is that investing time to keep your top people healthy and aligned has a trickle effect throughout your organization. Healthy at the top, healthy at the bottom. Unhealthy at the top, unhealthy at the bottom.
Starting at the center circle, Dunbar suggested that you and I are hardwired for three to five true friendships—intimate relationships with people whom you have the habit of connecting with at least once a week.
The next circle is the twelve to fifteen people he calls your “sympathy group”—friends you connect with at least once a month who share your values, interests, and often perspectives on life.
The total of twenty relationships between these first two circles is about all the people most humans can manage to truly know,
In your personal life, spend 80 percent of your time with the people you care most about, leaving 20 percent for others.
There are four key decisions for you to make when you design your Thrive Calendar: Decide what you will and won’t do within each zone. Decide whom you will and won’t meet with. Decide when you’ll do specific tasks within each zone. Decide where you’ll do your work, especially your Green Zone work.
Thrive Cycle is working, you should see these markers:
You’re accomplishing your priorities.
You’re getting better at what you do.
You love meeting with people again.
You have time for yourself and your family.
You’re happier.
Blank space on your calendar is a trap. It looks like freedom, but it’s really jail disguised as liberty.
Wise people don’t wait to adapt. If you can see overwhelm coming, if you feel it tapping at your door, get proactive.
Over time, adjust three key percentages that will help you thrive: the percentage of time spent alone versus with people, the percentage of time spent in meetings, and the percentage of time spent on the road versus at home. As an employer, you don’t want perpetually stressed employees. People bring their whole selves to the job, and when they’re thriving, so does your company.
