My 4-year old son Noah broke his arm Tuesday night around 8p.
Him and Kaia were playing airplane (she flies him on her feet) and his plane crashed.
He's okay now, but we spent a long night overnight in the hospital and he had surgery yesterday morning.
I had a conference call with the FWPI Personal Family Lawyers at 10a and a seminar I was presenting for 20 clients of a financial advisor at 12p.
I could NOT miss either of these two things.
But, I virtually did nothing else.
I responded to a few emails on my phone, but mostly to delegate things that needed to be done.
While I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone, it did teach me a VERY valuable lesson. A lesson I wouldn't have picked up on had I not just finished reading the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss ... a GREAT book I recommend you read right away.
Here's the lesson.
In Tim's book, he points out that most of us fill our time with meaningless crap (he says it much more eloquently than I can at the moment going on as little sleep as I am) to "avoid the important."
In fact, he uses the Pareto principal to suggest that we spend 20% of our efforts generating 80% of our desired outcome and 80% of our efforts working against our desired outcome.
I have lots of thoughts about why we avoid the important that are too big for this email, but what I learned from this experience with Noah is that if I really decided I wanted to make time for anything else I wanted to in my life, I could. All I had to do was prioritize it.
If anything, I performed better today (with limited time), made better decisions, and wasted much less time today than I have in a long, long time.
Why? Because my son was in the hospital and I could not/would not prioritize anything over spending time with him other than that that was truly essential.
What if you only did what was truly essential?
Here's a trick to figuring out what that is - before you do any task for 2 whole days, ask yourself IF you would do that task if your child was in the hospital. And, if the answer is yes, ask yourself HOW you would do it differently.
You'll be surprised at the answer.
Now go DO it!
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