Over the past few years more and more restaurants have been including calorie & nutritional information on their menus. Sometimes that info is helpful, but sometimes it’s just plain wrong.
Like at IHOP.
Does anyone go to IHOP to count calories?! I don’t. Even when perhaps I should, I don’t. But here’s what I learned from their menu recently:
Their insanely delicious Strawberry Stuffed French Toast? 1420-1850 calories! Can’t order that….
Let’s move on to their Scrambles (eggs & hash browns, plus cheese and veggies)….1500 calories! Yikes!
That is information that I simply do not want. I don’t want to know that my breakfast alone will account for an entire day’s worth of calories! Why? Because then I’d have to make my decisions differently.
Which made me wonder, what if I could hand my clients an equivalent to this menu? But instead of calories, what if I could reveal what some of our activities cost us in lost time? And energy? For example:
Dumping a project on assistant without clear direction, had to rework it - 42 minutes
Got pulled into non income-generating tasks by not planning for the day - 33 minutes
Searching for that electronic document from last month’s meeting - 16 minutes
Reading through irrelevant email forwards throughout the day – 24 minutes
Skipped lunch and hit a wall about 2:30, drifted into internet lala land – 19 minutes
Allowed Talks-Too-Much-Tom ramble on and on about the World Series game – 15 minutes
Waited until late day to begin new project & felt drained, taking a lot longer than it would have otherwise - 55 minutes
These seemingly little distractions add up to over 3.5 hours WASTED away! In other words, managing these potential time sucks, could help us GAIN an extra two or more hours of time, every day! It may help you to identify the “calories” of the distractions in your workday. And how about writing them down, in a place where you will see them every day, allowing that awareness to help steer you in the right direction?
It’s worth a try. Especially considering that I was convinced to order two scrambled eggs and a side of fruit instead of that Strawberry Stuffed French toast. That, my friends, is no small feat!
