By Randy Karnes, President/CEO, CU*Answers

If you’re on my email lists, you’ve probably seen the onslaught of communications I’m capable of sending out and wondered, ‘How am I going to find the time to read all of this?’ So, when I was asked the question, ‘How do you manage the volumes of important and less important emails to and from the network?’ I decided to get philosophical on the topic of time management.

This topic is the most common worry of teammates on the way to the next step in their careers. ‘How do I keep up with my mounting responsibilities while also becoming even more informed?’ It might be the No. 1 challenge we face daily in the business world today: Sensory overload and the constant conflicts in priorities fighting for our attention.

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Time management isn’t just a business problem. We see it as a business problem because it is, but it is consistent throughout our everyday lives as we balance our work, home, family, and interests. The amount of noise we face while managing our daily lives can be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because we are more aware of everything today, or at least we know we have the option to be aware. The intensity of so many wonders and horrors for the active person today is inspiring (the grand designs of nature, people, science, etc.), but it has the potential to create devastating stress (the pain from connecting with negative events everywhere and all the time) as negative awareness can warp the senses. Our business lives are no different.

As business leaders, we can be affected in two ways. Inspired for the potential of designs, hopes, remarkable efforts, and sincere valuable goals that can make us want to do everything at once with a euphoric endless energy. Or devastated by the sense that all great efforts might not be rewarded, are challenged by things off the path, can’t be done in the time available, in addition to all the down sides of human nature that distract us.

The only thing worse for small firms than the ludicrous efforts made for maximizing efficiencies beyond effectiveness is the sense that they must overpay for disasters avoided.

How do you react when you’re being bombarded with overhyped inspiration and overhyped devastating challenges? The first thing for every business leader to find is a sense of calm, and joy in the fact that life is a long journey; challenges actually create the work and sense of winning for the reward in effort, not just success. Being in the game is the goal more than anything else. In essence when we have purpose, life is good. Filter out everything that is not in line with that sense of purpose.

More practically, time management is about what you don’t pay attention to than what you do.

Effectiveness vs. Efficiency

Recently I started reading a book that caught my eye, "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck," by Mark Manson. One review in particular gave me hope for the book (Full disclosure: most of the books I buy have cool titles, but little in the way of content. Buyer beware!):

Resilience, happiness and freedom come from knowing what to care about—and most importantly, what not to care about. This is a masterful, philosophical and practical book that will give readers the wisdom to be able to do just that.

—Ryan Holiday

For this very reason, I stress the concept of being effective over being efficient. Only effective people or organizations stay in the game and have the chance at dealing with their demons in search of maximized efficiencies. Maximized efficiencies look for marginal improvements once you reach effectiveness, and overpaying for marginal, in-the eye-of-beholder improvements not on your path, will encourage you to leave an effective path. Once off the path you are no longer in the game enjoying the journey and calm.

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The only thing worse for small firms than the ludicrous efforts made for maximizing efficiencies beyond effectiveness is the sense that they must overpay for disasters avoided. And today everywhere around us are people earning and controlling us by the sense of their value to disasters yet realized. If you eliminate this noise, calm becomes much more available to us all, fearing the journey a little less, and find it far more believable that the game is winnable. Scale goes both ways, and if you balance the effective approach to your priorities you can scale down the noise.

Or at least be blissfully unaware as you don’t always have to give a…