We were in a meeting at a company manufacturing thermal equipment. And the owner was explaining to his employee, how the thermal tube works.
He said, “we want to control the wastage of heat. What we do is find the drains and cover them up to lock the heat and pressure inside. That’s the key to my business. I don’t need to know everything about business. I only look for drains and once I’ve stopped all of them, the business will go up!”
As you can tell that thing just stuck with me. And it does make sense, right?
What are drains?
We obviously waste so much of our time, energy, focus ad attention on things which do not matter or will not give us any positive returns.
We listen to songs, we watch mindless TV for endless time. We spend time with friends, either chatting online or traveling aimlessly with friends who are as dead broke as you are.
Or we try to spend “quality” time with loved ones. We try to maintain work-life balance. Or we think we are being productive and waste hours and hours reading a book, replying to emails or just researching on bullshit things.
What we are doing is letting our drainage open and robbing ourselves off of a productive time, productive energy and productive work which will give us successful returns.
So what’s the problem?
Everybody knows what they need to do in order to succeed at their profession or in their life. Everyone knows what they want and who they want to become. But no one wants do the actual work to make that happen.
People call it “procrastination”.
I call it “lack of discipline”.
In today’s world, although we have ease of doing any work, we have lost our hardness. We have lost our “eye of the tiger”, the ability to look difficulty in the fvcking eye and attacking it with vigor.
We have forgotten the value of sweat in this air-conditioned world.
We although live in a fast-paced world, don’t know the importance of speedy implementations.
We are being really bad at managing our productivity these days. Because we have lost the importance of speed and being decisive.
Taking decision at the right time, is managing our time wastage. Implementing quickly is about stopping the wastage of our focus and energy. And doing the most important work first, is controlling the wastage of attention.
The trick I got about being decisive is from Jason Capital, Honest Dating Coach. He said, he would ask himself a question:
“Jason, what kind of fvcking man are you?
Are you a decisive male, like the top 1%?
Or are you an indecisive male like the weak, flacid 99%?”
I’m sure it will get your ass to work immediately. Mission accomplished! Drains controlled!
Another one is from Dan Peña, the 50 Billion Dollar Man. It goes like this:
Make two lists.
First list will be all be of your goals. State all your goals, personal as well as professional, all of them. So now you know what you need to accomplish.
The second list will be weekly. And in that you’ll write the names of all people you spent your time with that week. Either online, on call, on text or in person.
Immediately, you’ll get to know what and how much and where you waste your time and energy. And, hopefully after seeing the second list, you’ll take action to stop those drains.
And I know that you know that you know what you need to do in order to stop them.
