Time Management
“Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity.” —Charles Dickens (“Barnaby Rudge”)
The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq indices had another down week. The S&P 500 fell about 0.3%, and the Nasdaq experienced its first 2-week losing streak of the year as it fell 1.9%. Conversely, the Dow saw a positive return during the week as it rose 0.6%.
In a post this past week on the Neckar Substack, Frederik Gieschen analyzed lessons from Warren Buffett through the lens of Buffett’s biographer, Alice Schroeder. While their relationship didn’t survive the book’s publishing, Schroeder was given unprecedented access to Buffett’s life and files—and is thus an excellent resource for helping one understand how The Oracle of Omaha goes about his days.
One of the interesting tidbits from Schroeder’s comments about Buffett was regarding how he manages his time:
Warren is a master of time management. He knows how to ease people off the phone without making them feel dismissed. He is great at saying no and I learned a lot about saying no tactfully. That's an important time management technique.
Also, he manages his energy, reading when it's optimal, talking on the phone when he's got the right energy for that and so forth. It's fairly compartmentalized and he does not multitask through his day. That was a useful lesson.
There’s an older, popular article titled “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time.” And there’s a lot of merit to the ideas in that article.
But Buffett seems good at melding the two ideas to produce some of the highest and most effective outputs in business history.
Instead of taking long breaks to restore his energy, he structures his day to have high energy when he needs high focus, and does other things when sustained focus is less important.
He’s also incredibly gifted, or well-practiced, at distilling information and his surroundings into a couple of key points—and then ignoring the rest so that he doesn’t expend the brain space and mental energy remembering unimportant details. As Schroeder described it:
I have seen him make his famous 5-minute decisions on the phone. Five minutes is the outside amount of time it takes him to make a decision. If the person can be succinct and convey the salient points in 60 seconds he’ll say, “Yes” or “No” in 60 seconds.
The time is determined by how long it takes the person to convey the salient points, not how long it takes him to think about it. It’s virtually instant once he has grasped the 2 or 3 variables or points that are important to him.
…
He retains a sort of DVD of events in his head. If there is new information the old version gets overwritten. It’s gone.
Let’s say he is at a party. There will be 2 things he remembers. He will remember that Carol Loomis wore a yellow dress and that somebody else told him a certain joke. That is all he will remember. It’s as if the rest disappears.
The next time you feel like you have a lower level of energy, ask yourself: What task do I need to do to be productive that requires less focus?
And the next time you’re feeling high energy, maybe it’s a good time to ask yourself: What’s the most important thing I should be working on right now?
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