#59. Do you do enough work that matters?

I occasionally read the blog of a nerdy computer science scientist. It’s called Study Hacks and the

author writes about ways of ‘decoding’ success. Yes decoding.

While many of his blog posts
remain a mystery to me I always give them a quick look because every so
often there’s a gem in there.

Two weeks ago I stumbled on this one.

The blog post that caught my attention was titled “You probably (really) work way less than you assume”

In
it the computer scientist showed how he had done a little experiment
and found that he was spending very few hours, far fewer than he
thought, doing work that matters.

That rang a bell for me. I’m a busy person always doing something but am I spending enough of my week doing work that matters?

I
started keeping a diary jotting down the number of complete hours (I
didn’t worry about smaller blocks of time) spent doing really useful
stuff.

My
experiment was hampered somewhat by a particularly awful dose of flu,
but even using that as an excuse my “work that matters” time was
woefully short of what I had thought it would be.

Of
course there’s nothing like shining a spotlight on your unflattering
areas to make you do something about it. And that’s what keeping the
‘work that matters’ diary did for me.

The
lack of ‘work that matters’ hours was enough to jolt me back into
making time for the  ‘hard work’. I’ve set myself a target number of
‘work that matters’ hours a week and am back getting the right sort of
work done.

If you want to get more “work that matters” done try this:

1. Decide
   what sort of work is “work that matters”. I think of it as the type of
   stuff that improves your business rather than stuff that just gets
   business done. It’s the work that’s hard on your brain or your self to
   do but feels so good when you do it.
2. Write
   down the number of hours you think you spend on work that matters’ in a
   week. Pop this number in a sealed envelope and hide it until the end of
   the experiment.
3. For at least a week, but preferably four weeks, keep a note of all the hours you spend on ‘work that matters”
4. At the end of the period add up the number of ‘work that matters’ hours per week.
5. Compare your actual ‘work that matters hours’ with what you had estimated in your sealed envelope.

Did
you overestimate the number of hours you spend on ‘work that matters?”
Are you surprised by how little ‘work that matters’ that you actually
do?

Imagine
how much more successful your business would be if you just spent an
extra two hours on ‘work that matters’ a week. Now 2 hours isn’t so hard
to find. Is it?

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