Page 55 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com

23 TACKLE THOSE TIME THIEVES

Where lots of other writers dwell dreamily on the possibilities of
‘Tomorrow’, our Benjamin was a resolute ‘Today’ man: ‘One today is
worth two tomorrows.’ Make the most of your today.

Welcome to today. It might be raining, you might have a tough one ahead,
but whatever the case this is the only time you’re going to see this day.
You’ll never get it back. So why let someone steal it from you?

DEFINING IDEA…
You cannot step twice into the same river.
~ HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS

There are lots of time thieves out there: institutional thieves that make you
wait or jump through hoops, corporate thieves that treat you as one of
millions and rank your time accordingly, and individual thieves who either
steal your time to add to theirs or else purloin and waste it because they
don’t know any better. Learn to spot them and snatch a bit of your time
back for yourself.

Institutions, be they public or corporate, are the hardest to battle.
Statisticians tell us that we spend around forty-five minutes of every day
waiting for something. PDAs, mobile phones and the dreaded BlackBerry
maybe known as digital leashes for their role in tying people to their jobs,
but there’s no question that they come into their own when it comes to
reclaiming dead time. The exec calmly ordering emails while waiting in line
would be an enviable sight if it wasn’t for the fact that you know they’ll
still be doing emails late at night. You don’t need technology to thwart time
thieves, though. Just be prepared. Read those briefing notes, take notes of
your own, just make sure you’re never ever sitting/standing there with
nothing to do but wait.

Individual time thieves are both more insidious and easier to deal with.

Insidious, because you may not even notice that they’re stealing your life,