My Dad always told me. Success isn’t measured by the number of digits in your bank account, or the cars you drive… the watches you wear. It’s about how you manage to find a balance in life and be happy. How we all achieve that all boils down to one thing: Time.
We’re all given the same amount of time in our lifetimes. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. What determines where we end up in life, what impact we make and the relationships we build is how we spend this time. I’ve always struggled with allocating my time properly though. I tend to often find it sometimes too shifted to work and I think it’s something many of us find.
Then one day I joined this organization called Entrepreneur’s Organization. There we are taught that there are 3 areas that entrepreneurs need to focus on when reflecting on their lives. These 3 areas are business (or career), family and personal. As I was reflecting to myself yesterday, this is how I spend my time in these 3 areas.
Business (or career)
It’s easy to spend too much time at work and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. When I spend too little time at work sometimes I feel like I’m not working to my full potential of what I could really be. The one thing I have going for me though is that I am by nature a very efficient worker.
When I have things to do I spend very little time procrastinating and most of my time focusing on getting the task done. By the end of the day a morning I would have finished a list of things that you’d think I would have taken a day to do. When I host and conduct meetings, I like them to be quick and to the point. Not long and draggy. I also set my meeting schedules almost back to back so it forces me to be self disciplined with my meetings. So that I’m forced to wrap my meetings up quickly and go on to the next one.
Technology helps too. Well… technology can be a distraction (time spent on FB, Twitter, Dayre etc)… but it’s also meant to be a tool for productivity. Heck 10 years ago the only way we could answer emails is in front of a computer. Now we all do it from our phones. I use technology to cut out almost every idle time I have. When I’m waiting for an elevator, waiting for someone to arrive for a meeting, or even just walking around sometimes.
With all this, I make sure that I leave the office by 5.30-7PM. If I have any work leftover I finish it at home after dinner.
Family
Family time for me is in the morning before I leave for work, night after I come back from work and weekends. The one thing I learned about family time is that it’s not really about how much time you spent. Like if I had a family dinner and all the time I spent looking at my phone, it’ll be as if I wasn’t even there in the first place. Family time is about quality. So on weekend nights after work I make it a point to talk to Shorty for half an hour or so without distractions. We have deep conversations about what we did with our days or what’s going on.
Then I spend the same amount of time or more playing with Fighter. Again… with attention undivided and with no distractions. I call my parents at least once every two days and have weekly meetings with my brother and sister in KL.
Personal
When I first joined EO and was introduced to the concept of personal time, I was first asked what I did for my personal self in the past month and it was a question I struggled to answer. I learned later that it’s an answer a lot of people struggle to answer too. We are all too bogged down with work and family that sometimes we forget about doing things for ourselves that make us happy.
Personal time isn’t just doing things that make you happy. It’s also doing things for your personal development (like reading up on stuff) and most importantly… health. For me the two things I do is golf and cycling. Cycling for example is one of the things that hit two birds with one stone for me. I thoroughly enjoy it… and it’s good for health. I make it a point now to go cycling every weekend.
As for personal development… I read a lot. Every day in fact I look around for things to read. I buy magazines … mostly Businessweek, Fortune, Forbes… not because I think that’s the only magazines I think we should read for personal development but because I so happen to have an interest in these things. If you have an interest in photography or even cars then read up about cars.
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So that’s how I manage my time. I want to write this down here because in a few years I want to see if I manage it differently from how I manage it now. Do I spend more time with family in future or in work. Whatever it is… this will be my reference point… of how I used to spend my time in the year 2014.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space