On Saturday, I hosted a conference for a major client. It was a great event full of strong insights and learnings. One slide captured my focus more than any other. The business owner put up a picture he had taken when on a short break in Portugal.
It was taken in a cafe. Carved into a wooden ornament was the title of this article:
‘O valor do tempo’ in Portugese
‘The value of time’ in English
That one short sentence on one slide has really accelerated my thinking on a subject that has been prominent in my ‘Mozart time’ since I returned to Australia from a 7 month trip travelling, seeing family/friends, enjoying some great experiences and working with some wonderful new and established clients in the UK.
How do we value time? (Do we value time or do we just do without questioning the impact on time but also the ability to live a high quality life and pass the rocking chair test?)
For those new to Mozart time, please refer to this article:
There is so much I want to do with my life across each of the 4 major areas in which I set my goals. These are:
my health/well-being goals (these are foundational and I believe necessary to living a long and active life),
Fun, family and passion projects (these are largely captured by my bucket-list which I intend to publish on substack)
Contribution goals (I want to make a bigger difference and help more people across the planet than ever before through my content, my pro-bono mentoring and some ‘force4good’ international projects I am working on)
Business and financial goals (I came back to Australia passionate and determined to scale my business at speed over the next 4 years. I am always impatient with myself and yet patient about my business).
I set up my goals via what I call my goal stack - it builds from the bottom up. I do not want to chase financial and business success to the detriment of the other areas.
So, how and why does this link to ‘O valor do tempo?’
To achieve everything I want to achieve in life, I need to reinvent how I am doing what I am doing across these 4 areas. I believe I am time efficient but am I time effective? By this I mean am I ruthlessly prioritising the high value actions in each of these four areas as opposed to being consumed by too many lower value actions. I may be doing them efficiently but should I be doing them at all?
If I am to successfully scale my life, smash through my bucketlist, make a substantially bigger contribution to the world and have lots of fun and discretionary time on the way, I need to move from a strong to a ruthless prioritiser. I need to work out what things I absolutely need to do, what I should be working with others to do, where I can utilise technology more powerfully than I do today and what I need to stop.
I have now started a process to work through how I scale my business. I am asking myself the following questions:
What is the work that only I can do? (e.g. my writing, content design and delivery)
Where are my superpowers? What makes me unique? How do I amplify these skills and activities? How do I do more of what I love, that fits with a market opportunity and makes a difference to others?
What do I love doing, that is also high value and absolutely fits in my goal stack?
How do I prioritise that? and
Do the work when my energy is high and focus is at its best?
Who do I need to partner/collaborate with to bring my mastery to more people and allow me to focus on what I do best?
e.g. ownership of my social media strategy, PR, podcast opportunities, getting articles published, booking speaking gigs, editing and formatting my books, developing my slides etc
What do I love doing, that is low(er) value and therefore I need to:
Question why I am doing it.
Work out if I stop it? (There must be some!!)
Find someone else to do it
Do it differently, at a different time and in a different way?
What do I do because it is what I have always done (without questioning the impact on my time relative to the value of the activity?).
Similar questions to the above apart from I stop doing it!
I am sure there are more and better questions (please add them in the comments).
I am on the search for success, fulfillment and happiness. I want to achieve so much over the next 20 years and I know I am at an inflection point. I can either carry on doing things in much the same way as I have been for the last 5 years or I can reinvent my world to reflect ‘O valor do tempo’ and explode my life and business in expotential ways.
What about you? Do you truly value your time, or are you caught up doing the do? When do you reflect, step up and step out of the day to day frenzy to rethink how you set up your own goal stack and then make sure you do the things that impact it most?
Create the Mozart time to start the process of evaluating time. Life is short, make it count.