Women in Finance Winter Event: Mastering Time, Your Most Valuable Asset.

The wind was howling and the mercury had dropped for our latest Women in Finance event. Undeterred we entered into a storm of a topic: Time Management. The temperature in the room was quickly raised by our speaker, the talented and unconventional Abigail Barnes, who challenged us to define the way we view time and the way the we manage it as an asset.

The Time Trap

However individual we all are, there is one thing that we all have in common. Time. From your family members to the colleagues you sit opposite to in your weekly meetings, your boss, Richard Branson, time is one of the only consistent factors in life and we all share in its generosity. 

But how you choose to manage the time given to you not only has the power to impact your career, it also dictates how happy you will be in your life on a day-to-day basis. Feelings of guilt overwhelm, and shame are the direct result of a poorly managed relationship with time. Compounded by a culture of comparison with others, it can be easy to get unintentionally stuck in a rut and leave yourself open to feeling unfulfilled when looking at how you utilise the 24 hours available to you every day.

Create Your New Formula

Learning to successfully master your time is ultimately down to establishing and embracing a new way of thinking and adapting your lifestyle to fit that new thought process. Abigail Barnes, an award-winning entrepreneur and qualified business coach introduced us to her ‘888’ formula to challenge our guests to see how they could maximise their personal productivity.

The 888 formula, splits the 24-hour day into three 8-hour parts: sleep, work, and leisure. To achieve a healthy and productive lifestyle, sleep is vital. Misunderstanding the value of an 8-hour snooze means that you place a significant strain on your mental abilities and your physical health is at increased risk. Studies have proven that seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness, which matches up with the 7 hours’ sleep we are made to believe is the standard requirement for ourselves, has impacted behavioral changes equivalent to drinking two glasses of wine. Skimping on sleep is a slippery slope to compromising your personal productivity, ability to maintain a healthy lifestyle and possible success at work.

With your other two-time allocations of 8 hours with one going towards work and the remaining 8 for leisure, Abigail recognises that this is not instantly possible for all of us. She encourages us to to understand that making such a drastic lifestyle change must be an organic process that you do in your own time.

- Challenge yourself to set a list of lifestyle goals you want to achieve.

- Make a personal commitment to manage your time more effectively.

- Open up your ability to be more flexible.

However you are currently spending your time, reassess your priorities and reallocate your time where you can, based on your personal and professional responsibilities, dependents, hobbies and interests. The only way out of the time trap is to change your relationship with time itself. Become the master of Time, not its’ slave.

Empower with Integrity

Understanding and managing your time better is something that most people would benefit from. If you want to empower your team, friends and family to become better managers of their time, leading by example is an excellent way to empower those around you to do the same.

Experimentation and constant adaption are the keys to becoming the master of your time and handle whatever gets thrown your way. As we closed the evening, there were some keenly divided opinions and some excellent counterarguments made which made for a great debate, but we all left with Abigail’s final words still resonating and serving as an important reminder for all leaders; “people respect what they see you do”.