How much of our time is Grey?

Can we get any time back?

Time is something we all wish we had more of, right? Whether it’s juggling work, family, hobbies, or personal projects, it often feels like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. So, of course we were really interested to attend this seminar yesterday morning: “Get A Day Back in Your Calendar”. Who wouldn’t want that?! 

Alongside regularly looking for ways to optimise our time, we’ve also noticed that, when we do manage to ‘nail it’, we achieve our goals so much more effortlessly. If Paul Holbrook, yesterday’s speaker, were able to give us a ‘magic pill’ to achieve this, then we are totally here for it! 

Paul shared the irony that we usually don’t invest in sitting down to consider how we spend our time. And, if we do, we rarely think about it in a structured way. Paul outlined that the way we spend our time can be split into different colours, as follows: 

Red = DOING 

  • Doing things that sit at the core of our business, or our team 
  • Delivering a service or a product 
  • Writing proposals and creating presentations for clients or suppliers 
  • Reading, writing, and responding to useful emails 

Amber = MANAGING 

  • Reviewing work – our own, or our colleagues 
  • Checking that things are happening as planned, checking on progress 
  • Touching base with clients, colleagues, suppliers 
  • Keeping on top of risks and managing them appropriately 

Green = LEADING 

  • Thinking about vision, purpose, and strategy 
  • Considering how to improve our business, our team, our product 
  • Learning – from competitors, from professionals, from colleagues 
  • Holding one-to-ones, succession planning, and coaching 

Grey = FLOATING 

  • Attending unnecessary meetings 
  • Doing work that we are not sure about, or how it contributes to the overall goal 
  • Reading emails that are not relevant to us 

Blue = LIVING 

  • Looking after our mental, physical, emotional wellbeing 
  • Sleeping 
  • Exercising, relaxing, engaging in our hobbies 
  • Family time 

After decades working with hundreds of organisations and individuals in this space, Paul’s research delivers a shocking fact:  

On average, each individual spends 23% of their time in the GREY ZONE 

A simple calculation tells us that 23% of a 5-day working week is just over a day. That’s one whole day spent on tasks that are not adding any value to our personal or professional lives! So, by making some small changes and being more aware of the colour of the tasks in our schedule (and, importantly, pushing back on grey tasks) we could quickly find ourselves with more time for the all-important red, amber, green, and blue tasks. 

We are taking steps to change things up, and we encourage you to do the same. If this is the ‘magic pill’, then a more organised schedule will result in tasks being completed more regularly, and goals being achieved more effectively. If you would like to follow Paul for more insights, you will find his LinkedIn profile here

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