Written 5/10/2024.
https://substack.com/@thebravermom made a comment about my being single and that makes it easier. I thought I’d talk about what I did when I was in the middle of rearing young kids.
First, I had a stay-at-home wife. She took the brunt of handling the kids when I was at work.
From there I ended up getting up at 5 am in order to have some time to myself before the kids arose. My goal for physical fitness was doing “something” each week, even if it meant just going for a nice walk. I would usually end up going for a run early in the morning.
The other benefit of getting an early start to the day was that I could be at work by 6 am. At the time, I worked for a firm with engineers and software programmers. They usually didn’t roll into the office until close to 9 am (core business hours were 9 am to 3:30 pm - you could flex either way outside of those hours).
This had multiple positive impacts.
The first thing I would do each day when I got to work was spend 5 minutes thinking about my day. Here are some of the questions I asked myself.
What’s the most impactful task I could do today. This is typically important/not urgent (per Stephen Covey)?
Who are my supporters for this task (people who can help me)?
Who are the people who may throw a wrench into me completing this task?
Is there something unrelated to my work functions that can help move the company forward?
Are there any items I am doing that nobody cares about/oversees that I can stop doing?
What other items that need to be worked on and priority (still using a SWOT on each when the time comes for me to work on the item)?
The most important thing I did before diving into my work was to think. The 5 minutes I spent saved me hours of unnecessary work.
Here are a couple examples: I used log my time for each task done. After awhile I figured out that nobody monitored or cared whether I put my time as F005 (administrative) or F001 (writing) for a particular project, so it eventually all went into F005. There were required reports I was doing that nobody asked for. After awhile I would do the reports, but not send them to the managers who wanted them. When nobody asked for the reports after a month, I stopped doing them.
Next, I’d do all of my important work between 6 am and 9 am when nobody bothered me. This left me free for the rest of the day to work directly with those people I needed to work with. If you are thinking that you cannot do 8 hours within 3 hours, then you’ve never worked between Christmas and New Years. A good worker does a maximum of 4 1/2 hours of work in any 8 hour day. If I got the important stuff done in 3 hours, it left the rest for the next 7 hours.
Because I had gotten to work so early, while the engineers/programmers were still having their first cup of coffee, I was already deep into my day and firing on all cylinders. This meant that when they requested something from me, I got it back to them immediately.
I could also take time to be creative and work on quadrant 2 items (important/not urgent) such as creating an intranet with all of the information that engineers/programmers requested of me so that when they asked, I could just direct them to the appropriate link.
Finally, my day ended at 4 pm. In the company I worked for, you needed to work a minimum of 10 hours a day to get ahead. I could be home by 5 pm.
This left enough time to help out and be with my family in the evenings.
Of course, that blew up in 2002. I weathered a 65% reduction in force before outsourcing my job to India. This led me to changing careers into the Insurance Industry. More about how I managed my time there in future posts.
The early bird catches the worm.