You are much more likely to achieve success (to get the outcome you want) if you take action. Passive non-action will take you to an outcome, but it probably won’t be the outcome you want.

Even more effective than taking action is taking deliberate, focused action with a specific outcome in mind. Deliberate action, focused on a goal, taken consistently over time, is a killer recipe for success.

Boundaries are the separation between you, and other people. Without boundaries, you won’t be able to take deliberate, focused action because you’ll be swayed in random directions by the competing opportunities and requests that come up along the way. Saying yes to deliberate, focused action toward your goal means saying no to countless interruptions, distractions, and people with agendas that don’t fit yours. Saying yes to one thing means so no to everything else, and that’s a lot of stuff, which means a lot of saying no. Without boundaries, which give you the ability to say no, you can’t have self-control.

Success requires deliberate, focused action. Deliberate, focused action requires self-control. Self-control requires boundaries.

Five weeks ago I was working on my Time Audit iPhone app, and I almost dropped the project. I said “It will probably never make enough money to pay for itself. App development is super-competitive. But it’s cool technology and I want to learn it, so I guess I’ll finish it.” And I did. Last week a government-funded research group came to me with interest in contracting a custom version of Time Audit that will be used in transportation safety research. Their research will probably end up saving lives, and Time Audit might have a little role in that. Time Audit is not a tree yet, it’s just a seedling, but it’s already clear that I had no ability to predict, let alone measure, the future potential at the seed stage.

Despite this difficulty in measuring, rational planning depends on estimates of the future potential of seeds. We have to decide which seeds to spend time and money nurturing, and which seeds to ignore. I don’t think this challenge can be reduced to simple answers. Here are two observations:

1) It’s not necessary to evaluate the future value of each seed accurately. It’s only necessary to correctly evaluate the relative potential of each seed you have to work with. Invest resources in the seed(s) you estimate have the most potential compared to the others.

2) In both of these cases, I felt resistance in me saying “I really should not do this project just because I’m energized about it.” I felt it was a little irresponsible to do an iffy project just for fun, but I did the project anyway. I couldn’t have been more wrong in thinking it was irresponsible to have fun starting that recording studio. So pay attention to your energy and interest level, even if the numbers are foggy at the seed stage.

A time audit is an exercise in tracking your time to see what you spend it on, and how that matches with your values. Almost everyone feels like there is not enough time to go around. With a time audit report in front of you, you can make informed decisions about what to do about that.

I did this exercise last year as part of the leadership coaching program I am a part of. I used a spreadsheet, but at the time I thought this would be a perfect candidate for an iPhone app. About a month ago I decided to make the app.

So here it is. My Time Audit iPhone App. It beats the spreadsheet hands down.

The apple farmers from my last post will not benefit by spending less on new apple trees. How about a wheat farmer who decides to save money on seed by planting only half his land this year? Being frugal with investments (things that produce additional value over time) is counter-productive.

I see three major postures:

• Frugality says underspend on everything. This is not much fun now, and not much fun later.
• Consumerism says underspend on investment, overspend on consumption. This is fun now and painful later.
• The long-term view says underspend on consumption, overspend on investment. This is not much fun now, and fantastically rewarding later.

Remember I’m not just talking about money. Tools, infrastructure, learning, savings, system improvements, personal growth, and healthy relationships are some investments worth overspending on. Don’t be frugal with those things.

I think most people in wealthy countries are acting primarily on consumerism. They feel a little bad about this, sensing that it can’t be right somehow, so they add a layer of frugality to the whole thing. Frugal consumerism is a confused strategy resulting in very low investment in the long term. The U.S. personal savings rate (the portion of household income that is saved or invested) is around 4% these days, and came close to zero before the recession.

I suspect at the deepest level misplaced frugality springs from survival instinct. It’s a defensive posture. Why invest in the long term if short-term survival is (or feels) uncertain? For a squirrel, it makes sense to prioritize running away from predators above storing up nuts for winter. For a business, it makes sense to prioritize avoiding bankruptcy above long-term expansion plans. There’s a time and place for defensive postures. Survival really does matter.

If you are struggling to survive in your money or time management, focus intensely and immediately on what you can do to make changes to your life to create some breathing room. You must get out of crisis mode so you can start making decisions with a longer-term view.

However, if you are not about to be eaten by whatever eats squirrels, be generous, not frugal with your investment spending.

Caveat: There will always be more investment opportunities (for time, money, and relationships) than you can afford to invest in. Be generous in allocating resources toward investment, but choosy about what and who you invest in. More on that next post.

Contrast these fictional apple lovers.

Charlie Consumer spends a few hours each year working for a local apple farmer. In return the farmer gives him a bushel of apples. The first year he spends a few hours and gets a bushel of apples. The fifth year he spends a few hours and gets a bushel of apples. The thirtieth year he spends a few hours and gets a bushel of apples.

Ivan Investor spends a few hours each year working for the same farmer. In return the farmer gives him a young sapling apple tree that costs the same as a bushel of apples. Each year Ivan Investor plants the young apple tree he earned. The first year he spends a few hours and gets no apples. The fifth year you he spends a few hours and gets a few bushels of apples. The thirtieth year he spends a few hours and gets hundreds of bushels of apples.

(If you protest that apple trees require ongoing labor and care, note how the farmer that Charlie and Ivan worked for paid for that labor. It wasn’t with his time.)

Ivan produced this huge momentum because he invested his time in something that generated additional value over time. In this case it was tangible physical value, but it could just as easily be human, relational, or spiritual value. Generating the spare time to invest in the first year is the hardest part. (If Ivan needed to eat those apples to survive, he never would could have afforded to plant the first tree.)

Manage well to create room today to invest part of your time in things that generate additional value over time.

You will trade every hour of your time for something.

Just like money, time can be:

• wasted (traded for something of no value),
• consumed (traded for something that must lose its value in order to provide a benefit),
• or invested (traded for something that generates additional value over time).

Wasting time is foolish, but not easy to avoid. I think most serious time waste comes from deeper issues like fear and addiction. It also comes from a lack of awareness of opportunities to invest time in something greater.

Consuming time is unavoidable. We have to spend a lot of time sleeping, for example. Almost all of us must also spend a lot of time to earn money to have a roof to sleep under. This trading time for survival and a paycheck may be a fair deal, but it doesn’t come close to realizing the potential of a lifetime. Still, there’s no need to chafe about consumption. To even have the opportunity to invest time in things of lasting value, you must meet your survival needs first. The goal here is to be efficient, diligent, and strategic enough to do more than survive, to have some time left over for investment after the necessary consumption is covered.

Time can be invested. It can be traded for things that generate additional value over time. By investing your time effectively you can accomplish far more than you could ever do in a lifetime of trading your time for consumables.

Some Ways to Invest Time

• Invest time to plan with deliberate ends in mind. A few minutes or hours of wise planning can save days or years of wasted time.
• Invest time to build and improve systems for automating tasks when possible and delegating them when they can’t be effectively automated.
• Invest time to build relationships with people. Not only do most things get done through relationships, but we need them to survive, to be healthy, and to be effective.
• Invest time to change yourself. Grow your character abilities, like courage and human connectedness. Improve your skills, like communication, organization, or specialized job skills. Go to school. Go to therapy. Hours spent developing yourself can multiply your effectiveness for the rest of your life, adding decades worth of valuable accomplishments to your life.
• Invest time to change other people. Especially people who are young and/or in a position to influence multiple other people. (But be cautioned that changing others directly isn’t possible, you can only provide resources to those who are already in a position to use them.)
• Invest time to create things that didn’t exist before. Invent something, like a tool or a system or a concept or a work of art that somewhere between dozens and billions of people can use. A cure for a major disease, a book that changes how we think about life, or a better way to make paper clips. Improvements count too. There is power in creating.
• Invest time to lead other people. Leadership is possibly the most powerful way of all to leverage your time. If you lead an initiative that causes each person in the US to spend an average of 1 minute on your cause, those minutes will amount to about 8 of your entire life’s worth of minutes. That is leverage, and that kind of leadership happens all the time.

To increase overall output, you must increase the constrained resource, or change how you are using it. Increasing non-constrained resources may appear productive, but it won’t increase overall output.

This applies to everything, not just factories.

• In business, if the constrained resource is capital, you must increase capital or change how you are using it.
• In farming, if the constrained resource is acres of land, you must increase acreage or change how you are using it.
• In leadership, if the constrained resource is your time for strategic and visionary planning, you must increase time spent on that, or change how you are using it.
• Personally, if the constrained resource is courage, your must increase your courage or change how you are using it.

Other personal constraints are initiative, hope, relationships, training, etc. This is about a lot more than machines and money.

With every goal you pursue, you must know what your constrained resource is and focus your management efforts to mitigate that constraint.

At an individual, personal level the ultimate constrained resource is time. We each get 24 hours per day with a maximum limit of about 100 years (on earth). This is mankind’s greatest limitation, and therefore our most valuable resource. There’s no way to add more, so to increase the output of your life, the only choice is to change how you use your time.

It’s worth being very deliberate about what you trade your time for. Just like money, it can be wasted, spent, or multiplied by investing it. More on this soon.

I am experiencing one of those dips up and close and personal right now. When I got my iPad I got pretty infatuated with it and I decided, that’s it, I gotta learn how to wrote apps for these things. So I bought a couple of books on learning the technology, and I spent the money to get a mac computer, required for the development process.

I dove into all the learning curves and had a fantastic, nerdy time figuring it all out. I decided to write a personal time tracking application as my learning project, with a belief that it would be useful and marketable as well. The coaching program I’m in assigns all new members to track everything they do with their time for a week and this app would make that task much easier. So I know at least a few people could use it.

I put the first test version of that app onto my own iPhone yesterday. Then the doubt set in. It’s cool. But is it really marketable? Will I ever sell enough copies to pay for the books I bought (let alone the mac I bought)? There are a few other apps on the app store that do similar things already. Can my approach to time analysis offer a significant advantage? Maybe I just got excited because I’m a nerd about technology stuff, and there’s no real payoff but fun and learning for me. Deep down, I’m probably most afraid of embarrassing myself by getting irrationally excited about something that doesn’t have any real potential.

There it is. The dip, with all its doubts. And the doubts may very well be right.

On the other hand, the app might be really useful to people who are looking to get a handle on their time. If people find it helpful, it might sell enough to make my nerdy learning project profitable, not just fun. I’ve felt the pressure of the dip on every endeavor I’ve tried before. Some of them failed, some of them succeeded in big ways. What to do, what to do.

My advice (to myself and anyone else feeling the agnst of the dip):

First, resist the fear of embarrassing failure as much as you can. It’s a strong instinct, but not actually dangerous.

Second:

• if there is any reasonable chance of a worthwhile result,
• and if the worst-case downside is an acceptable risk (i.e. it won’t bankrupt you if it fails)
• and if the project does not take you away from something else with clearly superior potential,
• then, pursue the project in the smallest-scale way that will get you to proof-of-concept.

I’ll let you know in a few weeks if I was brave enough (or maybe foolish enough) to follow my own advice.

Researchers who study intertemporal decision making (decisions involving a span of time) find that most people prefer the second case, with ascending rewards. Interestingly, this is not the purely rational choice. Receiving the extra ice cream earlier is slightly superior if the goal is maximum benefit, because there is some risk of interruption in the plan before Wednesday. For example, I could get hit by a bus, get sick, the ice cream supply could run out, etc.

One reason for our tendency to choose the ascending sequence is that we prefer to look forward to things getting better rather than dread things getting worse. (I know, dread is a strong word for ice cream, but I can’t think of a word that means mild dread. Word lovers, leave me a comment.)

But another reason for our irrational choice, one I didn’t guess, is that we tend to automatically and subconsciously extrapolate the trend into the future. We include in our mental calculation some assumption that we might get 4 scoops on Thursday in the ascending sequence, and 0 scoops on Thursday in the descending sequence.

I suppose this mental habit is often useful, since many trends do continue into the future. But this mental habit of making decisions based on the assumption that the observed trend will continue also leads to things like economy-destabilizing housing bubbles and bad business decisions. When data is available to rationally evaluate the probability that the trend will continue, be aware of the subconscious tendency to assume, and take a look at the data.