How Much Time Do You Have?

When my children were still in primary school, they would have homework but their friends would knock on the door asking if they wanted to play.

The temptation to play was often so strong that they would rush through their homework. The downside of this motivation was sometimes the quality of their work. It had too many errors because they were distracted.

I made a decision that if I spotted a certain number of errors in a row, I would stop checking their work and simply ask them to re-do the exercise.

Bearing in mind that sometimes these were question papers that would have taken them 45 minutes, it was a bitter pill for them to swallow. They soon realised their ‘over-zealous’ mother was not playing ball and would take no prisoners.

They learnt their lessons the hard way and would come back with better quality of work. This was when they were young so it was understandable.

But how many times do we as adults make choices that are no better than theirs. How often do we rush to complete a task while not being fully present?

Worse still how often do we attempt tasks when we know we are bone-tired and unable to give it our best shot.

Time is a commodity that is truly expensive and we can’t regain lost time.

My question to us this week is based on a quote I came across which says, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

This applies to every areas of our personal lives and careers.

As an interviewer, if you don’t have time to recruit the right person, you will spend precious time in the future managing underperformance, poor fit, bad behaviour as well as potentially having to repeat the process.

As a lover of food, there are recipes that lend themselves to half baked attempts. When making a casserole, you have time to reintroduce ingredients you forget because the long and slow process makes up for your mistakes.

On the other hand, food that lend themselves to precision will not be so forgiving. If you take your eyes off cream or egg whites during the whipping process, all it takes is a split second before the only alternative becomes to start all over again.

I once dabbled into sewing and one of the most frustrating tasks is having to undo stitches with a picker while making sure you don’t damage the fabric. It’s one of those projects that I would much rather get right the first time.

As I write this, past DIY incidents come rushing to mind. You create more work for yourself if you don’t prepare before painting a room as you have more clean-up to do afterwards.

When facing key tasks or project, do you have time to do it right the first time or would you prefer to find time to re-do the task.

If you’re running a business, would you put in the hard work to offer your customers excellent service or would you find time to resolve issues, recover broken customer relationships and find new ones to replace the ones you’re losing?

It’s much cheaper to keep your existing customers happy than to find new ones who will be loyal to your brand.

Every time you have to re-do a task, you pay the price for poor quality which means you lose the previous time spent on the task and you also take time away from another value adding activity.

As adults, we are really busy people and we can be too busy to rest, connect and be fully present.

As you start a new week, keep an eye out for actions that are counter-productive. Check yourself if you find you’re not giving your full attention to conversations or activities.

Avoid touching the same email more than once – try to respond to any emails you open. Break your big jobs into smaller tasks and complete each task you start. Becoming more purposeful in life and work will require we make changes to the way we live and work.

Thanks for reading and sharing my post.