How long since the last post …. finding the time.

I’ve discovered one thing over the last year. Writing a blog is difficult! Or rather, consistently writing a blog is difficult. It’s not that I can’t find things to write about … or that I don’t enjoy writing … it’s just nearly impossible to find the time!  In the words of my last post “I regret often that I have spoken; never that I have been silent” … not this time!

But more than that it’s increasingly difficult to find the time for lots of things. Mark Evans is on a similar topic here … “So Much to Do, Not Enough Time!“.

Of course I have a time (or should that be life!) consuming job and other organisations I’m involved in, but lots of people have much busier lives than I and yet seem to accomplish more. I’ve read lots of books over the last year about time management, prioritisation etc but the implementation of theory isn’t always easy. What I’d like to know is how the people who run countries or large companies manage to do what needs to be done!? We’re often disenchanted with our politicians & leaders but my goodness these guys must be on top of their task management game in order to do what they do.

We’re increasingly juggling a world where there are just too many things trying to steal our attention: bombarding us with information, and demanding our time by email, SMS, phone, mobile, facebook, twitter etc. Manager Tools dealt specifically with the topic of Email in a podcast a few years ago and identified email as a major cause of interruption in the workplace.

All of this makes it increasingly difficult to actually concentrate on doing useful stuff – the desire to multitask is enormous and it’s so easy to flit between things during the day and end the day having accomplished little. I often find myself having to take a mental grip and focus on one thing at a time.

With a new baby in the house (3 days!) it’s perhaps more on my mind that a 70+ hour work week + my non-work activities just isn’t sustainable. The answer I know in theory is to do less “average stuff” and concentrate on the really “important stuff” – defining what is the important stuff – that’s the difficult bit!