From the Introduction
ARE YOU TOO BUSY TO READ THIS BOOK?
Do you feel you’re too busy to read this book? If so, the irony is not lost on me. Although if that’s true, may I suggest you need this book more than ever? I acknowledge your time is stretched thin right now, but please indulge me and let me review some simple math to illustrate how reading this book will pay off.
The average adult reads about three hundred words a minute. I know you’re anything but average, but let’s play this out. This book is approximately eighty thousand words, which means it will likely take you a little more than four hours to read it from cover to cover. This equals approximately 17 percent of one day. Yet the strategies outlined here can help you reclaim this amount of time, or more, each day for the rest of your career. You can’t save time, as we’ll discuss later, but you can redirect your time and achieve a bigger payoff.
Your career is an endurance event, a marathon. While you may feel like you are always sprinting, you want to consider the long game; you want to set yourself up so that you can excel over the course of a long journey. Ultramarathoners plan to stop in rest stations, despite competing in events where every minute counts. Similarly, race-car drivers pause for pit stops in the middle of lightning-fast races so they can refuel and re-tire. Expert chefs take the time to sharpen their tools before a big culinary event. Professionals in every industry invest in their continuing education throughout their career. As all of these examples show, elite performers value the power of continuing to invest in themselves.
Think of this book as your re-tooling. You are about to discover strategies that will help you spend more time on what you love — in every aspect of your life. These tools will help you feel less stretched, more accomplished, and even happier. This book will help you become a Workday Warrior.
WHAT IS A WORKDAY WARRIOR?
What exactly is a Workday Warrior? The term likely conjures up an image of someone involved in an intense battle to get through yet another gruelling day. You can probably relate to this. You may feel like it takes all your blood, sweat, and tears to survive the barrage of work that’s regularly fired at you.
But I see things differently. True warriors excel in challenging careers in a manner that could be considered almost superhuman. At the same time, they balance rich and dynamic personal lives. Yes, they work hard. But they also leverage tools and strategies to make results come easier. Indeed, they seem to be relaxed and even enjoying the thrill of meeting the challenges they face. Watching them in action is captivating.
Workday Warriors have the same demands placed on them as everyone else. Yet they manage them with much more finesse. They run their days instead of letting their days run them. They work smarter, not harder. This doesn’t mean they skimp on quality. On the contrary, they are the ones scaling the biggest hurdles and making the most impressive impact. They are the ones getting promoted and enjoying the financial rewards and personal satisfaction.
Workday Warriors aren’t fictional characters. They are walking among us, in our midst. You likely work with a handful of Workday Warriors. I do, and many of those I met earlier in my career served as my inspiration to become a Workday Warrior myself.
The ways of a Workday Warrior don’t need to be kept secret, known only to an elite few. Rather, they are extremely learnable and well within your reach. You can be a Workday Warrior too. You, too, can adopt their winning strategies and radically transform your work and your life for the better. This book will show you how.
IS IT REALLY POSSIBLE TO MAKE WORK EASIER?
Many people (and this may include you) have searched for a streamlined approach to how they work, which isn’t necessarily easy to find. But I assure you, an easier way does exist. We can level up. We can win the battle against time. We can overcome overwhelm and all the stress associated with too much work. We can change how we work and get more done without working more. In fact, we can often work less.
But no one can simply cross their fingers and hope they’ll stumble upon a way to better manage their time. Believe me, I’ve tried. Early in my career, I found myself running faster and faster on the proverbial hamster wheel. I kept throwing time at my growing list. In turn, I regularly neglected sleep, exercise, friends, and more. But doing so only provided short-term fixes. I was still struggling with the underlying problem: my work habits hadn’t scaled with my career. Despite my efforts, I couldn’t find enough time. Little did I know I could use a better, and easier, approach.
IS IT REALLY POSSIBLE TO MAKE TIME?
I often hear people say they have to find time for this, or make time for that. I’ve said the same thing many times over. It really is an enticing concept. But is it really possible to make time? Or to find time?
The simple answer is no. It’s not possible to make or alter time. As of when this book went to press, time machines still didn’t exist. We can’t create, save, or borrow time. We have the
same twenty-four hours a day that everyone else has. More specifically, we all have a finite 1,440 minutes a day and 168 hours a week, or, roughly, four thousand weeks in the life of the average person living today, as highlighted by Oliver Burkeman, bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks.
So, we can’t find time. We also can’t make time. But we can protect time. And once we do, our calendar opens up in ways you may never have imagined. I’m excited to show you how to make this happen.
But before we get there, we need to address the top three underlying barriers that sabotage our time.
Top three time barriers
After almost two decades working with busy people, I’ve discovered that they share three common time challenges. I’d like to share these now and ask you if you can relate to them.
• Time-limiting barrier #1: Too many priorities: When we try to do too much at once, we spread ourselves thin, which often leads to longer work hours and marginal results.
• Time-limiting barrier #2: Too much flexibility: When we don’t protect time and establish necessary boundaries, we are forced to adopt a reactive mode — we always feel pulled and always feel “on.”
• Time-limiting barrier #3: Too much complication: It doesn’t matter how productive we are, many days can still feel too complicated, leaving us with no breathing space for the inevitable unknowns that land on our desk and set us even further behind. If we want to continue growing, we need to find opportunities to simplify.
Overcoming these barriers doesn’t require more willpower, more discipline, more stamina, or new magical powers that allow us to fabricate more time. Nor do we need to push harder and make more sacrifices. The ironic truth is that at a certain point working harder and longer rarely leads to better long-term results. Short-term sprints can help us meet a pressing deadline. But if we’re always racing, burnout ensues and our pace inevitably slows. The quality of our work drops, we struggle to meet deadlines, and we feel frustrated.
You may have been searching for more time for years. Or perhaps you know you could be making better use of your time. Or maybe you’re tired of constantly pushing yourself well past your limits. If you are busy — too busy — you are due for a fresh, practical approach to overcome modern-day time scarcity. It’s time for you to become a Workday Warrior.