What is your time tempo? Are you impatient when people who use the express lane have one item over the limit? Do you leave for a destination with just enough time to arrive? Then maybe your time tempo is faster than many people who are in your life. We live in a world with different time zones, but what we dont realize is that the tempo of time is different around the world. Culture shapes the way we approach time and spend time. Our inner clocks dance to the tempo that we are raised with. According to a study done by Professor Robert Levine with the University of Fresno in California, Japan has one of the fastest pace of life, while Indonesia is more relaxed. This placed the United States and England in the middle of the beat.

Time crunches can increase our adrenaline and induce a sense of urgency that will either speed up your tempo or destroy your ability to find the beat or make the deadline. Some people work well under pressure, while others fold. The problem is that when people work at a high state of alert their body begins to use its reserve adrenaline and they run the risk of not having a supply when they really need it. If your life is demanding make time to relax and let the adrenaline rush subside. Tips to decrease the rush and restore your body to normalcy include eating balanced meals and getting solid sleep that leaves you relaxed and refreshed. When we get rest and eat well, along with exercise, our body is able to function better, thus we are more productive and more positive in our day.

We all know that the problem with time is that it is perishable. The short supply of hours in a day is irreplaceable. If we agree this is true then why do we waste it? Most people spend 80 to 90 percent of their time doing things, which produce little or no results, while 10 to20 percent of the items we should be doing would have a higher pay off. How much more successful could we be if we used our time more wisely and applied ourselves fully to the 10 or 20 percent of the items that have high pay off. This means delegation is the key to getting our time tempo to a beat that will let us live longer and be healthier. Are you spending time doing things that could be delegated out to someone else? When we try to do it all, we lose ourselves, wear out our bodies, and begin a downward spiral to burnout.

Managing through delegation is a time saving device provided we know how to delegate and what to delegate. Delegating is the art of giving meaningful tasks that need to be done and are important to people that are capable of doing them. Appropriating time at different levels is a challenge: supervisors spend 70 percent of their time doing and 30 percent delegating. Middle Management is on a 50:50 scale. Top management should spend 70 percent of their time managing through delegation and 30 percent on the tasks that are vital to the future of the company and will have high pay off for the success of the business. Chief Executives should work with the 10:90 rule or the 20-80 rule (depending on your source). As a person who is self-employed I have to weight the 10:90 rule and spend more of my time doing those things that provide a higher pay off in terms of business, while other items I do better to delegate these out.

Interesting Time Facts :

Managers should spend 70 percent of their time listening and only 30 percent of their time talking.

On average, a person speaks between 120 to 160 words per minute. (Unfortunately, what many people say isnt being said for its importance, but because people like to hear themselves talk). Therefore, in the course of a day, the average person would speak enough to fill a fifty-page book. Over the course of a year, that same person would fill over 130 books, each containing over 400 pages. Since few people like to read books that are long, it is likely that few people are listening to what this person is saying.