How are you managing your 24 hours in a day?

Is your lifestile balanced? That is the question you should answer after reading this article. I really think that there is not just one correct option, but I do think that some our nowadays lifestyles are wrong. Deeply wrong.

I have been thinking lately about how we manage our time, one of the most scarce resources we have to deal with in our daily life. I dont have the correct answer to the question, but I think I have some thoughts that need to be heard. Let´s take a look at the 24 hours we have to spend in a day, and we will discover some interesting facts…

What I am going to expose is a personal point of view of the minimal requirements for what I consider that is a balanced life. In my opinion, that concept should mix passive activities with active ones, using as many parts of our body as we can. Isn´t it the best way to achieve the balance?

Ok, let´s start with the passive hours. I will call passive hours the time we are not actually producing anything. That does not mean we are being unproductive, it just mean that we are not generating outcomes.

8 hour sleep. That´s considered the time you need to renew the energy of your body. I use to say that it is your battery charger, if you don´t fill it 100% you will not have the appropriate energy to face up the active tasks you need to accomplish in order to feel balanced. So please, take the rest when you have to.

1 hour sport.  It is hard, I know. But it is necessary. The time you invest on doing any sport is necessary to be tired when you have to go to sleep. Pick the one you like the most, or the one you can share with others ( That always help). But I am convinced that any day without sport is an unbalanced day.

2-3 hour feeding. The time you dedicate to the act of feeding should not be below 3 hours. In the mediterranean culture, we have 4 to 5 meal times along the day (And I would suggest that 5 is the perfect number) and we have to think about them as the “break” times. Production is not a permanent task, we have peaks where we feel we give our best, but others we feel we could not accomplish any task we have to do. So please, use that time to grab some food, charge the battery again, and keep yourself active. Being relaxed while you are eating will give you time to enjoy the food, helping your digestive system to impove it´s performance, and, if you manage it with care, giving you time to stop thinking about work.

I would like to add here the time dedicated to spiritual needs. The soul also needs to be fed…

1 hour learning. This hour is the one that keeps you up to date. That can be learning any language, studying something related to your work (or not related to your work at all), but please do not forget this hour or you will get stucked before you think. The time to know what is happening in your environment is needed to be competitive and move forward. Imagine you stopped learning in the 90s, then you wouldnt know how to use the internet, and that would make you less and less competitive.

3 hour of social life. This is the time we use to call or “free time” with friends, family, couple… We have so many people we love in our lives, please enjoy the time you share with them. Have fun! Sometimes our worries at work are transferred to our private life, and that is the worst attitude we should take. To feel self confident, willing to achieve your goals and happy to go to work you need their support. And more important than that, they also need your support for their lives. Do not give your back to them. Your happinness is at stake.

And then we arrive to the Active hours, that is, the time we spend in our lifes producing something. Generating wealth.

8 hour work. It is the standard, and I am not really sure that it is perfect. I always mantain that motivation comes first, and then comes the productive outcome. Sometimes I feel that I could be working all the night, the entire weekend or the whole evening. And I do it. There is something about inspiration and work. Why dont we let ourselves work when we are more productives? Why should we still work from 9 to 5? Are we all more productives during that period of time?

The 21st century business is the one that keeps the workers productive when they are productive. Forcing them to work in uncomfortable atmospheres, stressing situations or tight rules is, in the end, damaging the balance of the people at work. If someone feels that his or her well being is not being appreciated, their perception of the employer will be negative and the performance at work will be lower. On the contrary, enterprises taking care of the employees generate an affective relationship that will make the worker much more productive even when the company has bad results. And it is because it is not yet  the company, it is their company. And It also applies for civil servants, non profits…

This article is far from trying to tell anyone how we should live. It is just a modest approach to what I think it is needed to reach a balanced lifestyle, and I am sure that if I ask you about your approach will be different but with common points. What I just wanted to tell you is that you HAVE TO ASK YOURSELF about how you would like to live to achieve your balance. If you dont ask, you won´t get the answer.

Take a look to this video of Tim Ferris, the author of the book “4 Hour workweek” and you will understand that we should start thinking differently about work. Enjoy!

Managers, motivation and inspiration

It´s been a long time since I reached the conclusion that motivation is everything. Managers should not be people with power to fire but with power to inspire. Why do I say that? Well, teams are a really difficult issue to deal with (For me, the most difficult and challenging one) and the task of managing  people should be in charge of managers with the ability to motivate them, to inspire individuals to believe in what they are doing.

The job of the manager consists on creating a smiling face image each morning when his team wake up. My work rocks! is what the team has to believe, and the first person that has to beleive it is the manager. When you think that, everything that you do for the common purpose worths it, and then you become the most productive guy of the whole earth. Happy people creates successful companies, and the work of a good manager is to make people feel comfortable and happy in their workplace.

Motivate is difficult to achieve, but the excellence is being able to inspire. There is no work as demanding as that. Inspire people is give them an example of behavior every single day, every morning, in every decision. The values you want to see in your colleages are the values that you have to show, and that is the way you have to act. Every detail is a must, every reaction has to be clear and secure. You have to become the “Example man”, and your challenge is to create as many “Example men” as you can in your team,  so the day you have to go, the guy in charge will be, at least, as good as the guy that is gone.

No Screw ups, no learning. As simple as that.

Recently I have been thinking about how much time I have spent preparing myself to produce resuts, preparing myself to act. I have observed that the number of people that keep studying after university keeps growing, why? Sometimes I think that it is because when these guys that have been studying for 20 years have to start doing and not talking, and they don´t know what to do. Experience is what you get making mistakes. As Tom Peters says, no big screw-ups, no big learning.

A shared culture – Creative Commons

Today I am sharing with you this video about the creative commons licenses. It is not an easy question the intelectual property of the contents and the multiple ways it can be considered on the internet. Nowadays, we live in an interconected culture where sharing is not only important but necessary. Take a few minutes to think about it.

Getting to know the Long Tail concept, by Chris Anderson

I have to say that I starting to become really interested in the new economic concepts that rule the network economy that we have reached in the 21st century. One of the most amazing concepts I have learnt during the last months is the “Long tail”. Introduced in 2006 by Chris Anderson, The “Long tail” give us the advice that in every industry, in all markets, there are always some “Hits” (The famous movies, the most played songs, the most glamorous top models…) BUT there are also always many more “Non hits” that become a big market when you put all of them together. The key is that for years, we have always focussed on the “Head” of that long tail, because we only had few TV channels, radios, magazines…but now everything is different. Now we dont see so much TV, we hear the music on Spotify, jumping from one artist to another, just following comments and ratings…and it really doesn´t matter what MTV says about it. We now see on the internet contents that maybe are not as popular as the greatest hits, contents that would not be available for us 15 years ago. And if we sum all that unusual contents they have a higher demmand than the few greatest hits. And that changes everything.

Think about some of the brighest business of the last 10 years: Amazon is the long tail of books, where obviously you can find the “best sellers”, but where you usually find the specific books that are not usually in your local bookstore. Itunes is the long tail of music, where you can download any track between Bob Marley to the starting group of Colorado that you love, because your friends are the performers. Google is the long tail of advertising, Ebay is the long tail of second hand objects, Social Networks are the long tail of media…Everything on the internet is scattering, and businesses that find the appropriate long tail, are the ones that are making money out of it.