Is Your Sense of ‘Urgency’ Really Just Anxiety?
A question that helps me see when I’m the one making myself needlessly busy
The old marketing adage that 50% of your money is wasted, you just don’t know which half, is doubly true about time. I know this because I used to flush half my time and energy down the toilet every day in the name of stressed-out entrepreneurship.
I thought this was just the price of admission for getting to build a company from scratch, raise tens of millions of dollars in venture capital, hire hundreds of employees and serve hundreds of thousands of customers. I worked ninety-hour weeks, and whenever I was worried about the future, I just stayed all night playing out more and more scenarios on ever sprawling Excel spreadsheets. I didn’t drink water because I didn’t have time to run to the bathroom between back-to-back meetings.
Or that’s what I told myself, anyway.
But now that I look back, I am beyond certain that at least half of my effort was wasted. And even though I couldn’t see which half it was when I was in the thick of it, I have a strong hunch about it now. The answer was never in the next Excel model. Or the slap dash marketing promotion.
To make wiser investments of myself, I now I ask myself this simple question: “What I…
