Our family schedule has been quite hectic lately.  Two weeks ago, our new addition to the family arrived, Baby Gabriel.  Along with changing diapers, baby bottles, doctor's appointments, and sleepless nights, we're also smack in the middle of youth soccer & football season.  With two kids in youth sports, you can imagine just how crazy our schedule gets.

This season, Brandon, my 6th grader, plays on two soccer teams, a basketball team and also does Taekwondo.  Laura, my 4th grader, plays on her school soccer team and is also on a youth cheerleading squad. 

When you add the games & practices to the birthday parties & play dates, it makes for a very busy family schedule.  Sometimes my wife and I feel like a shuttling service hauling our kids from one event to the next.

I've seen the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell around on bestsellers list for quite some time and this past week, I finally got around to reading it.  I was thoroughly impressed. It is an excellent read and highly recommended for anyone interested in success, which should be everyone including you since you're reading this blog.  What really intrigued me though was the 10,000-Hour Rule.  Although I have come across other similar management principles, putting it into a 10,000 Hour Rule makes a lot of sense.  It quantifies it into an achievable goal that is achievable with dedication and hard work.

Many people start their careers with the goal that in 7 to 10 years, they will eventually become an expert in their field.  And as a result, be succesful in their career.  In Law, it may be making Partner.  In other fields, it may be becoming a Manager or an Executive.  But putting growth in terms of number of years of experience can be quite misleading.  I have worked with engineers with only a few years of experience but were much more competent and capable than others with a dozen years. Unfortunately, too many people buy into the idea of growth in terms of numbers of years of experience.  After about 7 years when they find that they are not moving up the corporate ladder, they decide to jump boats feeling like they've been snubbed.

You can easily fall into the trap of just coasting along at work and letting meaningless tasks dictate your schedule.  The years will pass by but the meaningless work that you spend much of your time doing will not help you develop the necessary skills to grow your career.  To become an expert in your field, you need to intentionally develop a specific area in terms of hours.

Have you noticed that BIG tasks tend to hang around in your To Do list for much longer than they should?  Not because they're particularly hard to get done but because they usually require several steps to complete and demand more. As a result we unconsciously put these off and they end up sitting in our To Do list and hang over our head for weeks.  Sometimes we never get around to doing them.

On the other hand, small tasks are very quick to come off our To Do list. We get to these quickly because they require only a small amount of time.  Finding an open timeslot for these tasks is easy so we finish them quickly to get that good feeling of completing an item from our constantly growing To Do list.

The challenge is that when we add tasks to our To Do list, we don't naturally create simple tasks.  We remember that something needs to get done and quickly jot it down before we forget such as "Book summer vacation" or "Write research paper."  Not much thought is put into how many steps are required to complete the task.  A task may initially sound simple but may actually be masking several smaller tasks.  For example, before writing the research paper, several steps may need to be done: (1) Identify a research topic, (2) Do literature research, and (3) write multiple drafts.

for that is the stuff life is made of. 

- Benjamin Franklin

While doom and gloom fills the daily headlines, one thing is certain.  In tough times, you need to be more productive and efficient with your limited resources. 

Improving productivity requires effective use of your time – more focus on the important activities.  Improving efficiency requires better tools for managing your resources.

At Quasitime, our goal is to help you and your organizations be more effective by providing tools to help you be more intentional with how you spend your time and resources.