Avoiding the crowd mindset

- Let's imagine for a moment that you're shopping at the grocery store. You see several checkout lines in front of you. A couple of the checkout lines are long, but another two are shorter. Which line do you get into? The value of using the shortest line at a grocery store is obvious, right? Yet so many people, when it comes to time, put themselves in the longest line, so to speak, because of the choices that they make in terms of prioritization. For example, in the US, April 15th is generally tax day.

It's the day when everyone needs to submit their tax report to the government to make a payment or to get their tax refund. Now occasionally, leadership at accounting firms ask me to help them be more productive. What they'll report to me is that the weeks leading up to April 15th are the craziest, busiest weeks of the the entire year. Why, because almost everyone waits until that last moment to get their taxes in. But when you do that, it means you're going to get less attention from your accountant.

It means it's going to take longer to get everything done. Why, because everyone is doing it at the same time. The time management principle here then is to figure out when everyone else is going to do something and then try to not do it at that time. By adopting this simple practice, you'll save incredible amounts of time. Think of some activity that you do on a repeated basis, whether it's at work or in your personal life.

Ask yourself, when is it that everyone else does this task? When is it that most people do it? Here's a personal example. My wife and I make it a point to go on a date every single week. However, we don't want to get caught up in the weekend evening crowds that grow when it comes to eating at a restaurant or going to a movie theater. So we begin our dates early on Saturday afternoon. This allows us to go at a time when it's easy to get tickets to any movie that we want to see and we beat the evening dinner rush so that we don't have to wait half an hour or more to get a seat.

It even makes it easier to find a babysitter. If you take a look at each day and each week, you'll notice times where everyone else is doing something, everyone else at work is submitting that report on the last day of the month, everyone else goes to get gas in your neighborhood at the same time at the end of rush hour. Instead, try to find a pattern of doing these things at a less busy, less popular time. If you make a habit of doing this consistently, in a variety of areas, you'll save yourself hours of time, year after year.