Me First

Mistake #12I just don’t know where to start

You know you need to invest your time smarter, but you have 1000 excuses as to why today is not the best day to start. Today you are too busy, too tired, too unmotivated. Whatever.

There is never going to be a best day to start investing your time smarter. But you do need to pick a day. I know you are ‘busy’ (see mistake #2), so assuming you allow yourself two weeks to read Me First and to complete all the exercises, you can confidently circle a Monday at 9 am three weeks from today and lock this deadline into your calendar: ‘From today I invest my time the smart way.’

If you don’t commit and lock in a deadline, then you will be defeated by the economic theory called Parkinson’s Law, which essentially provides that: A task expands to fill the time made available for it. You know how Parkinson’s Law works: if you have a month to complete a report, it will take you a month to complete the report. If you have three days to complete a report, it will take you three days to complete the report. If your eight year old has two weeks to build the paper mache volcano and forgets to tell you, it will take you and your eight year old two hours to build the volcano the night before it is due (and it will certainly look like it was built the night before). That’s Parkinson’s Law. You know this to be true.

Solution

If you’re not sure where to start, embrace Parkinson’s Law and set a deadline in your calendar to change your mindset from one of ...