Time Slippage

Ok, so I’ll throw this generally wild and totally narcissistic statement out there:

I’m pretty good at working.

Kinda my job after all.

Sam Ovens (Founder of Skool, the platform Hormozi is now co-owning - big entrepreneur) once said this about why he stopped creating content on YouTube:

I feel like I have to live up in private what I preach in public.

Read that again.

He’s a big proposer of working hard and focusing on exactly one thing - and so he stopped content creation and focused ALL his energy on building Skool (which, judging by its success, has paid off big time already).

I also try to live and implement (or have already implemented) what I share with you over here.

And as this newsletter is mostly about performance and productivity, imma keep trying to be a beacon of working well.

Anyway - this isn’t an email about Skool, Sam Ovens or even work directly.

As I said above, I’m pretty good at execution - once I block time, prepare the day, and eliminate all distractions. And get into Flow, but that’s a different topic.

You could say my working minutes are pretty efficiently spent.

Out of a 3-hour work session, I’m pretty confident that 90%+ of that is pretty much spent actually doing the work compared to the alternative (which we’ll get to in a second).

Yes, I’ll admit sometimes I slip into banging my head against the wall because I’m stuck on a certain step. Wrote an email about that recently. Well, happens.

My point is - during work, I’m usually very time-efficient.

In the end, time is our most valuable asset, which we can never gain back (revolutionary idea I know) - so it’s not idiotic to propose that using every second we have to its maximum efficiency is a bad idea.

Pretty much the opposite is true:

It’s logical to make “spending every second you have usefully, consciously, productively (= efficiently)” one of your most important goals.

And yes, this includes any moment that you spend memorably and with intention, not just brutally hard work sessions - every moment you genuinely enjoy.

Time spent inefficiently though consists of different types of behaviors.

The time you spend overthinking, dwelling on past memories, the seconds and minutes you spend in slight fear or anxiety, or simply waiting endlessly for something to happen - a (dickhead) friend not showing up on time, for example.

Even in a work session, you might drift off for a second, thinking about something unrelated to your task. Until you snap back to it.

Well here’s the issue:

Most time spent inefficiently, as I’ve realized quite a while back, happens not during work sessions, but in what I call a shifting process.

When you shift from doing a task to going for a walk.

NOT the walk itself - the act of walking and letting your mind wander is time spent efficiently (in my opinion).

The shifting process is the moment between “work ends” and “walk starts.”

There are a ton of shifting processes going on in our day-to-day lives - every time you end an activity and start a new one, a shifting process occurs.

Cool. So what happens during this so-called shifting process?

While you can easily spend your time efficiently during an activity, it’s hard to maximize the quality of your time when waiting for something, preparing and finishing up tasks, even commuting from one place to another.

Because in these shifting moments, something dramatically unproductive happens:

Time Slippage

Time slippage is when your seconds, minutes, and sometimes even hours go down the drain, without you even noticing.

Completely wasted moments.

Scrolling out of boredom. Checking your phone out of reflex. Jumping in between tabs or actions because your mind switched off for 60 seconds.

Time slippage is the reason we’re never really at 100% - but rather waste our time (and energy, btw) on these little micro-moments that essentially add up to nothing.

There are positives and negatives to this.

Negatives include a lot of accumulated time wasted, every single day.

Positives include… yeah.

Time wasting is never a good idea.

I try to stop time slippage as best as I can, both during work and all the other “big activities” I have in my day, as well as in the shifting processes that occur all the time.

Less useless actions, better systems.

Less mindless moments, more presence.

Less time wasted, higher quality of my day-to-day life.

Just by becoming aware of time slippage, you’ll catch yourself more easily drifting off and spending time wastefully. Stay on the watch.

So I hope this email helped you out with a little perspective shit.

If it did... could you do me a tiny favor?

Reply to this email with the biggest productivity/performance problem you’re currently struggling with.

Can’t get work done? Feeling overworked and burned out? Low energy levels?

Doesn’t matter what it is.

Hit reply and let me know - I’m building a shit ton of free resources at the moment and want to make them as valuable to you as I possibly can.

Which I can do a LOT better if you let me know what problems I can solve for you :)

Thank you and see you soon,

Henri