Complaining About Time, Takes Time

Twenty-four hours. You have it. I have it. Your boss has it. Everyone in this world has twenty-four hours in a day. Money can't buy more of it, planning cannot create it. This is one place where we are all on an even playing field. Often, you hear people say, "I have no time" or "I wish I had time to do that!" Everyone has time, but people choose different ways to distribute it. If someone signs up for five committees at work, has three kids, plays baseball and goes out every Friday and Saturday night, and complains they have no time, that's wrong. You have time for anything, you have just chosen to fill it.

Some people whom I know complain the most about lack of time are the biggest time wasters I have seen. Complaining that they don't have enough time in the day to finish their work, they take 2 half-hour coffee breaks, an hour lunch and 2 fifteen-minute cigarette breaks. They have time-they just choose to fill it with other, less productive things.

Both prioritizing and sticking to a task are two of the hardest things to do in the workplace. If you master those two things, you are laughing. Interruptions always screw up sticking to a task. Often, the people that interrupt you, are the very people who complain about not having enough time to do things, but will take up twenty minutes of your time telling you about it. If someone's not in, leave a message; if they don't call back right away, don't sweat it. Almost everything in business is "urgent", so don't bother pressing the urgent button when you leave a voice mail. It only annoys the person getting the message and makes you look like a twit if the message really isn't that important.

It also gets to be known as "Crying wolf". If all your voice mails are urgent, there is no way to know which ones are "more urgent", there by making none of them all that urgent in the receiver's eyes. Nothing is really urgent in everyone's eyes, so why try to make your problem sound more important than the problem someone is working on at the time. Your inbox is always going to have things in it, even when you pass away. Nothing is too urgent.

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