Get your priorities in life straight. I know a lot of very busy people who do very little.
Many confuse being busy with getting work done; these are not the same. This especially goes for meetings. More often than not, meetings are a waste of time that could have been better spent actually working. Avoid them if at all possible. If you don’t need to be on one, decline it (or at least ask if your attendance is necessary). I’ve seen calendars packed full of these things, to which I usually ask the poor soul caught in meeting hell, “when do you actually do work?” Even if your calendar isn’t packed solid, meetings sit as boulders in your day that knock you out of your flow state. If you’re running a meeting, do everyone a favour and make it as short as possible (or better yet, cancel it if it’s not necessary).
By-ends and silver Demas both agree;
One calls, the other runs, that he may be
A sharer in his lucre; so these do
Take up in this world, and no further go.– John Bunyan
Now onto more important things: your time is precious and it belongs to you. Guard it with your life, because it is your life. Understand your priorities and say no to anything that does not align to them. When it is time to work, do your work. When it is not time to work, go home, and be with your family. This is what is most precious. No one on their death bed wishes they could have more time to work and make money.
This story is part of an ongoing series diving into the origins of each of rules outlined in Octavo (My eight-fold principles of life and work). Click here to see the full set of rules and to download and print your own copy of the rules and Zine.
Octavo (8vo) is both a format and a philosophy; it is a sheet of paper folded into 8 equal sections to form a book, and it is a philosophy folded into eight principles to form the architecture of how we work and live. Keep these principles posted wherever your work is done and refer to them often. Keep the zine in your back pocket at all times and refer to it when tempted to stray. Both the principles and the zine are provided here for free and can be printed from any monochrome printer that accepts legal-sized paper. Distribute as you see fit to your friends, family, and colleagues (but do not modify).