Last week…

I realised I basically was running out of ways to say “always put in extra time and effort when you can, it will reward you”, now if that is too concise you can read the full blog here. As a result I thought I’d drag it out to a whole new post about not putting in the time and effort, after all your time is valuable.

How much time do you have?

Really, how much? I use to think I had lots of time, then I realised that I don’t have any time really, the only thing that changed was I got in a relationship and it was more important to be doing other things than sitting at work late into the night or watching tv all the time.

I then started to realise that something had to give, I could keep working or I could retain a relationship, I chose the relationship. I then realised that I actually had more time than I originally thought, I was just wasting hours each week, I like watching tv like the rest of us, but I did this amazing thing that I believe Women take for granted, I started to multi task, only ever giving half of my attention anything, but quite frankly, it’s tv…

So, again, how much time do you have? probably more than you realise.

where to spend your time and effort

So as hopefully we all came to the same conclusion, you can probably find time to do some things, certainly you can find time to do important things. As with last week I was touching on using your time smartly then but to invest the time and effort into improving your career, well what happens if you chose to take that drive and energy and apply it internally? So rather than just looking at your career, look at making time to spend on doing things you want to.

This year I decided that I would do a few things, one, maintain a blog, which I hadn’t done for a long time and to make things worse I thought writing two articles a week was a good idea, based purely on the fact that someones articles I read on the register writes two a week. So In addition to the blogging I took on number two, create an open source project, I had always wanted to do one / contribute to one and I didn’t ever want to ruin a proper project so just did my own.

If there’s something you’ve always wanted to do then why don’t you do it ? You don’t have to slave away at work if there’s no benefit to it, especially if you could spend that time doing something else. I’m not saying these projects will progress rapidly but you will be able to progress them now and then. What more do you want?

So other than being distracted…

The projects can still benefit you career wise, if nothing else it’s a talking point to discuss with people and show that you do put in the time and effort into projects, work related or not.

Let us not forget that a lot of businesses start off as a project for fun and enjoyment and not purely a business venture, Google was a research project called BackRub Facebook was pretty much created to prove a point that it could be done quicker and simpler by Mark than allowing harvard to take 2 or 3 years over it ( Here ). I could go on, but in short the best companies around are created out of a need / desire to do something different and outside of the norm, all squeezed into those little chunks of time that you currently don’t have.

Summary

You have the time, you just need to put the effort in.