If you had an extra 40 hours every single month, imagine you got done everything that
you need to get done right now and you had an extra 40 hours a month left over, what
would you do with that time?
Please just yell out some answers.
I’d love to hear it.
Sleep.
Exercise.
Spend time with family.
Write a book.
More work.
Learn to dance.
Fantastic.
Alright, now the reason why I start with that question is because I’m going to show you
how to get a big chunk of that back.
Now typically in a seminar like this, I’ll be able to get you about 10 to 20 hours extra
per month.
I’m packing about a two-day workshop into this time as much as I possibly can.
So if I can still get you 20 hours a month, would that be valuable to you?
Great.
So keep that goal in mind.
That is your motivation for following through and taking action on the principals that I’m
going to teach you.
Now the three groups of people, first of all…
Now some of you may do this exercise and think, “Well, Dave, that doesn’t really apply
to me in the real world.”
Let me tell you what does apply to you in the real world.
This is how it happens to you.
You’ll be sitting at your computer typing away, right, and someone either calls or walks
in the door and they say, “I’m sorry.
I’ve got just a quick question.”
Right?
I call it the, “Dreaded Double Q.” The quick question.
So let’s say that I stopped typing my email, and I’m not even going to really try to
multitask on them, I’m just going to stop and answer the question.
They ask me the question.
I give them the answer.
The answer’s 42.
Thank you very much.
See you later.
Now what do I need to do?
Right.
Where was I?
What was I thinking about?
What was I writing?
Okay, I’ve got to find the keys again.
Or, if you’re off the charts ADHD like me, you’ll completely forget you have an email
on the screen, pick up another piece of paper, start working that, and two hours later there’s
still an unfinished email on the screen.
Right?
Sound familiar to you?
Whenever you switch, in your day, the amount of time it takes to complete things increases.
There was a study by UC-Irvine found that the average person took, on average, 11 interruptions
in an hour.
If you couple that with a study by Microsoft, with their programmers, now granted, programmers
take a lot longer because there’s so much mental effort, but they found that it took
15 minutes, on average, to recover from those interruptions.
If you do the math, pretty soon you’re wondering, where are we getting anything done in the
day?
This is where that feeling comes when you’re tired, you put your feet up on the couch,
and your significant other says, “Hi.
What did you do today?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well you were working.”
“Yeah, I was working.
I was really busy all day.
I’m not quite sure what I did.”
That’s where that feeling comes from.
Alright, cost number two, the quality of the work.
Take a look…
Imagine this, you start your day, you go to breakfast, you look at your significant other
and you say, “Hi Honey.
You’re unimportant.
What are you going to do today?”
Or someone calls your place of business and you say, “Thank you for calling X, Y, Z
Company where you’re unimportant.
How can I help you?”
Now we would never do that, right?
But we do that, right?
Whenever you multitask on a human being, you’re communicating to them that they’re unimportant,
that they’re less important than anything else that you could possibly be doing.
So really there is a fourth effect of multitasking, and the fourth effect is that the quality
of our relationships decreases.