The most premium resource for an organisation ought to be time. For individual associates, time gets more and more premium as they keep growing in their career. Success comes in this journey with ones ability to make progressively more efficient use of it.
From a purely mechanistic point of view, there is a fixed amount of time for everyone. However, there are ones who do only x while others accomplish 2x in a given time. And time becomes relative! Everyone has experienced time expanding when involved in (or with) something (or someone) that interests them. It simply drags when involved in certain other endeavours. Time, in that sense, is not just relative, but relative because it is an experience.
Further, when one is energetic, the drag, even for things that do not interest, reduces. Time experience, and thus time, expands!
Creating Energy and Creating Time, thus, go hand in hand. We haven’t been able to use many of the beautiful studies that have addressed this explicitly and implicitly.
The most recent study that addressed the energy part of it was Q4 Select’s Interests Assessment (and framework) as a part of their Motivational Suite. The greatest contribution of this study is finding the huge energy resource, the vast tolerance zones and the mammoth energy drains.
When utilised to create awareness and attention, it can transform energy like an ocean turbine! The deeply hidden, inexhaustible and yet tappable. Of course, only if you’re smart enough to make the investment in it.
The other study, as full and potent, is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (Far from the difficulty of pronouncing the author’s name, the theory is axiomatically simple, I promise! His books are altogether another matter which we shall talk about some other time!!)
Among other things, Flow says that when you are involved in something which has optimal level of toughness for your skill levels, time tends to freeze. (To put this complexly, when high challenge meets high skill level for you, energy is in infinite supply, inertia is zero and so you experience as if you are flowing effortlessly on a magic carpet! Zero being in the denominator, the outcome of time experience becomes infinite, not getting depleted or consumed, in infinite supply)
The big potential from the book that no one has yet explored fully is that you can not only create excellence with its help, but also great amount of energy and time efficiency by using it for WHAT you do and HOW you do it. And then, use the surplus for whatever you choose to divert it for.
Avoid revising or reading on Flow, before you complete the following exercise to get the most of it.The next 10 minutes with a pencil and paper can add upto a hundred fruitful hours to your next year:
At your work and in your life, do you experience the Flow state? (Do you have experiences for minutes or hours which you did not realise have gone past? Do you feel the conviction that you were delivering your “Peak-Performance” during that period AND instead of feeling tired you feel charged?
If YES, what are those activities?
If NO, when did you last experience it? For what?
If NO, do you experience constant anxiety or worry a lot? Can you modulate what you are doing by doing less of it? 20% less or even 50% less for sometime? Less in Intensity (lower level), less in duration and less in frequency?
If NO, do you experience constant boredom or being perpetually in control? Can you modulate what you are doing by doing more of it? 20% more or even 50% more for sometime? More in Intensity (higher level), more in duration and more in frequency?
Try this for 3 days and you will see yourself achieving Flow states, and an abundance of energy and time. Very soon, and much sooner than you fear, you shall more than overcome the loss in your performance and delivery due to the time that you invested in this practice.
This is still step 1. You can keep taking it up to ever new heights.
Combining the other insights of Neuroscience and Psycho-linguistics, the performance possibilities can simply explode. Let us know of your interest in a more rigorous Inventorying and/or Coaching around Creating Energy, Creating time with FLOW.
(Next: an even more exciting approach to Time)
