“Oh my gosh! What’s happening?” she thought as she typed frantically, as fast as her thumbs would allow.
She hit the send button and finally stood up to see what the ruckus was all about.
Julie had just missed her son’s first home run. She was crushed.
And so was he.
“If I can just get this one more promotion, we’ll be set …”
When I was a junior in college, I was introduced to “Dr. Say.” Now retired, he’d spent his career as an agent with a law enforcement bureau. He did occasional contract work for them now. A mutual friend told him that I was interested in going to work for the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), and he agreed to meet with me to tell me about how to prepare for the application process, as well as the job ahead.
I was relieved to learn that my research about the application process had been quite accurate. (Keep in mind, this was in the days before the internet.) I knew what qualifications — both academic and physical — I needed to meet, and I was fully prepared to work toward them.
When we started talking about the job itself, I couldn’t contain my excitement. He shared a few examples of cases and the work involved. I was in heaven! This was exactly the kind of adrenaline-filled life I wanted to live. Move over, Adam-12, S.W.A.T., Cagney and Lacey, and Miami Vice. My lifelong dream of being an undercover cop or agent was on the verge of coming true! It was going to be my turn to bust criminals.
But then we started talking about life outside of the job. More accurately, we started talking about the lack of life. He told me to look around his condo. There were no pictures of people. There was very little decor. In my haste to pick his brain, I had neglected to realize that I was not in a happy environment.
Dr. Say asked me, “Do you know why I’m an old man sitting alone in a condo with no sounds, no life?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“It’s because I chose work over my family. I was afraid to say no or request an alternate assignment. I was too fearful to try to get a different job. My wife and kids made their choice, too. They left me because I was never there for them.”
I was stunned and speechless. To the casual observer, he’d lived an exciting life helping capture criminals. But behind the scenes, life was far from perfect.
Dr. Say did earn every promotion he sought and every raise he wanted. He worked his tail off to have a stellar career and make a better life for his family. The painful irony of it is that the price he paid was the very thing he cherished, his family.
What he shared with me had such a profound impact that he literally changed my life forever. At that time I had no plans to get married, but I knew that I wanted to have a personal life and happiness. To this day, I still think of him and how his decisions about time had affected his life.
This next example I’d like to share with you is directed toward entrepreneurs, but given the experiences shared with me by all the dedicated, hardworking, driven employees I’ve worked with, I know that everyone will relate.
When you go into business, you do so because you have a passion or a calling. You have figured out the love of your life — not the person, but that thing you love to do, that thing that makes you happy to wake up every morning. And you discover a way to make money doing it. Or maybe you didn’t have a passion, but you or someone you know came up with a grand plan — a surefire way to make a ton of money. In Tricia’s case, it was the former.
When Tricia started her eco-friendly soap business, she didn’t worry about productivity or staying organized day in and day out. She was primarily concerned about hustling after clients and generating enough revenue by the end of the month to pay the rent, pay the utilities, buy groceries, and maybe have a few bucks left to splurge on something fun. She quite often had thumb-twiddling time while she was waiting for the phone to ring, hoping the next caller would be her cash-cow client.
As Tricia learned the ropes and figured out what tasks she needed to complete in order to build her business and be more successful, she started to increase her contact base. Her reach was growing. People had heard about her. Customers started rolling in. Money finally arrived. She had tasted success and wanted more. She thought she’d figured out what she needed to do: I need to double up on what I’ve done to get here! She went into overdrive with networking, marketing, customer service, picking up even more clients, and making even more money.
Tricia, like the typical entrepreneur, never started the business saying, “These are the systems I’ll put in place in order to stay organized.” Or “These are the processes I’ll use in order to be productive and maximize my time throughout the day.” After all, how can you already have systems when you start out if you’re not sure what you’re supposed to be doing, and you don’t even have clients?
Her schedule got so insanely busy that she didn’t know which way was up. The line between her business life and personal life got so blurred that she didn’t remember when it had actually existed. Her day became so full of phone calls, emails, meetings, and to-do lists that on some days, she woke up and didn’t even know where to begin.
Tricia went into business to have the freedom to do what she wanted to do, the way she wanted to do it. She no longer worked for The Boss. She could set her own schedule. She could decide her days off. She was no longer chained to someone else’s desk.
But she’d lost every freedom she’d dreamed of and wanted. She was chained to her desk (and phone and computer). She never took a day off. She didn’t spend more time with her friends or family. In fact, during the fleeting moments she was with them, they gave her guilt trips for not being around. She had become The Boss, that entity she had been trying to escape in the first place. She was burned out from constantly working and wondered why she’d gotten into this crazy soap business in the first place. Her passion, relationships, and entire mental state had bitten the dust.
If you relate to any of the three examples above, this book is for you! Each of them shows the price paid when our work and personal lives fall out of balance. I’m not suggesting that being a stellar employee or owning a business can be a piece of cake and that you can skip work on a whim multiple times per week. That’s why the subtitle of this book contains the words “Working Smarter, Not Longer” instead of the more commonly used phrase “Working Smarter, Not Harder.” We’re go-getters, and we do work hard, so it’s a lie to promise you that you’ll never have to. However, what I am saying is that intentional work, combined with planning and efficient processes — along with some dashes of fun! — will yield you the same or more accomplishments and revenue in less time, which will give you the time for the freedom and balance you desire — working smarter, not longer.
Why limit Happy to an hour?
— Attributed to W. C. Fields
Hopefully, by this point you realize that you need productivity and order in your day so that your blood pressure and stress levels don’t cause a stroke or heart attack or divorce or breakdown. I use the word hopefully because some of my consulting and coaching clients — like Tricia — seek me out after they have crashed and burned. They now need to pick up the pieces and put themselves and their lives back together. I am so thankful that they are turning things around, but my dream is to help more go-getting professionals create the time they need to live a fulfilling life before something tragic happens.
And I don’t want you to miss special moments in life, like the terrible experience Julie had when she didn’t get to see her son’s first home run.