Licking Your Elbow

OK, I will remain open to the remote possibility that among the people who read this blog, one of you may be able to lick your elbow. Some people can do strange things. However, for the most part, I suspect none of you can lick your elbow. I'm not talking about barely licking the side of your elbow. I'm talking about bending your arm as much as you can and solidly licking the lower (pointy-end) of your humerus where it connects with your ulna and radius (the part of the elbow your spouse uses to jab you when your behave inappropriately or make a weird comment in front of others). 

How many of you just stopped reading and tried to lick your elbow? 

Here's what I predict. Most of you reading this blog just tried to lick your elbow. And most of you couldn't do it. Whatever...I'll take a chance and predict that none of you could do it!  I further suspect that you will try to lick your elbow a few more times and then give up. You will accept the reality that you can't lick your elbow, and then move on and use your time and energy on things that you can do. 

I brought up elbow-licking because trying to do this is similar to what many of the people I talk to try to do over-and-over-and-over-and-over every day. The number one complaint I hear among clients and potential clients is: "There is not enough time in the day to get everything done." Let's briefly analyze this comment:

• The amount of time in a day is relatively fixed. It only varies one or two seconds a year on the rare occasions when scientists adjust the atomic clocks used to maintain our time standard in order to keep them in sync with the Earth's rotation around the sun. These adjustments are called leap seconds and are typically made on June 30 or December 31. This one-second adjustment has only occurred 23 times since they started doing it in 1972 (the only two-second adjustment was in 1972). There will, by the way, be a one second adjustment on December 31, 2008 so get ready for it. The bottom line...you can usually count on having 31,536,000 seconds to get everything done each year. That, as they say in algebra, is a given or known factor. Hold that thought for a moment. 
• The other significant factor related to this comment is "everything" - as in the "everything" that you need to get done. 

OK, now we default to the principle so clearly articulated in the Serenity Prayer. You know, the part about "accepting the things we cannot change, changing the things we can, and having the wisdom to know the difference." For all practical purposes, we cannot change time. It is not a variable that we can influence. It is not really a variable at all unless the "things we need to do each day" involve quantum activity (those of you working on the new Large Hadron Collider can skip this blog). So that leaves only one strategy for solving this problem...work on the "things we need to do" factor. In other words, figure out ways to adjust your daily workload. 

Once you accept this reality (and, in effect, quit trying to lick your elbow), you can do two things: 

1. Eliminate some items on your "to-do" list (fairly solid evidence suggests that about 80 percent of the items on your list do not matter anyhow). This is the effectiveness strategy: Are you doing the right things or can you delegate some things to others?  
2. Learn how to do the things on your list in less time. This is the efficiency strategy: Doing things right. Do you need to upgrade your skills related to recurring tasks?  

Do the right things and do things right! I'll admit, this is all textbook, Juran, Deming, Six-Sigma, Management 101 stuff that has been around forever. These are relatively simple ideas that worked in the past and work now...if you finally decide to take action on them. When I hear someone consistently saying that "they don't have enough time to get everything done" it makes me think of the Peanuts character Charlie Brown and his futile efforts to kick the football while Lucy holds it. She always jerks it away right before he kicks it. Charlie keeps on-and-on-and-on trying to do the same thing that never works. Lucy jerks the football away at the last minute every time. It's like trying to lick your elbow. It's like trying to overload your day, over-and-over-and-over, and thinking it will work. 

The moral of all of this rhetoric (it's political campaign season, so I am even more wordy than usual right now): If you find that you are consistently overloaded, stop what you are doing and remember that your best strategy is to accept that you can't create more time in a day and focus on what you can do to solve your problem. Attack the workload side of the equation by eliminating things, delegating things or upgrading your skills related to doing the things on your list. 

Or, I've got a new book coming out titled Being Productive, Getting More Done with Less Effort that suggests 24 specific ideas for enhancing your productivity. You can stop what you are doing, contact me and order a copy of my book in advance (available December 2008, price $15.95 plus shipping). Or, you can stop what you are doing and try to lick your elbow. Do whatever makes the most sense to you.

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Chris Crouch, president of DME Training and Consulting, has spent years researching and studying both the mental and physical aspects of being productive.

Comments

[Chris]

I'm glad I remained open to the possibility that some of my blog readers would be able to do that. You appear to be truly unique.

[kacie]

I can lick my elbow..for real