Could you spend £86,400 a day, every day?

If you were to be given £86,400 to spend every day with the caveat that any money not spent would be taken away, what would you do? 86,400 is the number of seconds in a day. Any time not productively used cannot be reclaimed and like the unspent money is lost.

So, how do you occupy your working time, can you convincingly determine how much time is spent on productive activities and how much on non-productive tasks. Do you actively prioritise how you spend your time (I am sure you do so with your money!)

Have you ever considered logging what you do during working hours and then analysing how much is actually spent on gainful work? If you were to do this I am pretty confident you will be surprised just how much is time is wasted.

We are regularly challenged from many directions to better manage our time and there are numerous tools available to help us do so. But there is one simple free tool that we can all apply and yet we all (well, almost of all of us!) manage to avoid using it and that is discipline. The ability to apply the discipline to do what we should be doing rather than what we prefer to do, a common human frailty.

So, when you start work tomorrow morning what are you going to do to make the best use of your time? 86,400 seconds and counting down!