Seeing time as money—equating minutes with dollars—is probably not in the best interest of your health or your client's able representation. Your brain knows that. Do you?
From today's New York Times (in an article titled "Time Out of Mind"):
. . . Even the cleverest use of time-management techniques is powerless to augment the sum of minutes in our life . . . , so we squeeze as much as we can into each one.
Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.
Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. . . . The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.
The billable hour becomes like an automatic metronome in our brains, setting an habitual cadence that influences us even when we are not at work. Know that rhythm? You can change the beat of the drum to which you march. The first step is self-awareness. Carefully watch how you relate to time today. More next week on setting a new tone—which you control.
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