When you are leading a very busy life, it is often difficult to fit in everything you want to do. Brett Davidson of FP Advance turns traditional advice on its head as he suggests that by putting the fun in first you will see your work/life balance transformed
Play before work
We all know that you should do the work first and play later. Right? Well, I’m going to suggest you do exactly the opposite. As an adviser, you spend a large portion of time talking to clients about life not being a dress rehearsal. Are you listening to your own advice? The time to do all the things you want to do is now.
Most of us have friends or family who have suffered from a dramatic change in their state of health. These events always come as a shock and remind all of us to make sure we live our lives as fully as possible, while we are able. No one is immune from the randomness of serious illness.
A different approach
When you plan your weeks, your months, and your year, try putting all the fun stuff in first:
- Your visits to the gym
- Any days off or holidays
- Time with the family and the kids
- A long lunch with your spouse or partner
- Going surfing or skiing, or anything else that you love
Then you can use whatever’s left for work time. I know that might sound radical; it’s meant to. It seems counter intuitive. So, why does it work?
As Wikipedia tells us, Parkinson’s law is the adage that ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’, and is also the title of a book which made it well-known. This concept was originally proposed by twentieth-century British scholar, C. Northcote Parkinson. On this basis it might make sense to limit the hours you spend at work, lest they overtake your life.
I’m not being facetious here. Most of us originally had dreams of working hard so that we could achieve some level of financial security and then, enjoy life. However, after you’ve been at it for 20-plus years, it’s really easy to forget that, and to believe that the daily grind is now your life.
Consider this example
Imagine you are informed that you have some form of dreaded disease, and your Doctor tells you that if you don’t halve your working hours you’ll die in the near future.
In that situation it’s a pretty easy decision to halve your working hours. So now you’re working about 20 hours or so per week.
How much of your current income do you think you might earn?
It’s not going to be 50% is it. It’s more likely to be 80%, or even 90%.
That’s got to make you think; “What the heck am I doing with the other 50% of my time?”
How much less time at work do you think you could do? If you had a great team around you I reckon it would be an awful lot less. However, even without that in place you could make changes that would give you some time back without dramatically reducing your income.
It’s easier than you think
Why not start by shaving off just one hour per day? Or two hours? Or taking Fridays off? Any of these ideas would provide you with some more quality of life.
What’s the worst that can happen? You undoubtedly will try a few ways that it doesn’t work, but any of the challenges that arise simply give you a steer on what to work on next to achieve your goal.
What are the payoffs?
Benefit 1: It’s the fun stuff that fills you up. Then you’ve got something to give; to your clients, your business, your team, your family and friends.
My personal experience of doing the fun things first is that you are better at your day job. You have refilled the creative well by taking some time to do things that you love. This has a positive effect on all areas of your life.
Benefit 2: Less time for work forces you to prioritise. If you allow 10 hours per day for work, you’ll fill it. If you allow 3 hours per day for work, you’ll only do the stuff that matters.
If you’re not so good at prioritisation and delegation then shave a lot more time off your work day. It will force you to choose.
Benefit 3: This is a powerful way to improve your delegation skills. I speak with clients all the time about ‘only doing what only you can do’. Yet they still struggle to let go of the inconsequential and focus on the high-value stuff.
Go for it
A radical change of approach works far better when you’re trying to shake up the way you’ve always done things. This is why I recommend the fun-first method. Small incremental changes often mean you just end up reverting to what you’ve always done.
Let’s say you get it wrong and you go just a little bit too far with the play; meaning the work doesn’t get done. What do you do? You adjust.
You can always scale the fun back a bit to find the right balance. However, doing it the other way around, where you try to scale back your work hours, is much harder as you might already know from experience.
It takes courage to do this. Don’t let fear keep you stuck. Try this for three weeks and see how it makes you feel.
About Brett Davidson
Brett is the Founder of FP Advance, the boutique consulting firm that helps financial planning professionals to advise better and live better.
He is recognised as one of the leading consultants to financial advisers in the UK. You can follow Brett online and via social media:
Website: www.fpadvance.com
Twitter: @brettdavidson
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsonbrett
Facebook: www.facebook.com/FPAdvanceLtd
