My son Callum passed his driving test last week (Hooray); first time, one minor; delighted, but a few days after, he started to get a flat tyre in the car, and so off I trooped down to the nearest garage about 2 miles away for the semi-flat tyre to pump it up.
I arrived at the garage just marginally after a police patrol car had turned up and parked at the air point where I would pump my tyres up.
The police got out in a Simpsons style and went into the Waitrose coffee place that's associated with the Shell garage and then proceeded to stay there for about half an hour, eating stuff and drinking coffee and just generally being the stereotype of what policemen are out of the Simpsons.
And so I found myself sitting at the garage, needing to do something, needing to fill the time, because there's no point in me driving back to the house only to come back again a bit later, and also the tyre is pretty flat.
In circumstances like this, I have the opportunity to do some work on my phone, answer emails if I want, make lists, look at my Asana planner, look at the tasks I have or haven't done today, and feed into that type of work.
What I actually did was dictate six blogs on Slack using their audio function, which were transferred immediately to Millie, who'll be able to do those today or tomorrow, and I'm done for the week.
There are extraordinary amounts of tools now to make us more effective and efficient, and we use many such fantastic tools at the Clinic which make us better, make us more money, and generally make us happier people because some of the menial tasks are taken away, automating things to allow us to become more human.
The world is dazzling with this type of technological advance, and without it these days, I don't think I would be able to get my blog done; I certainly wouldn't be able to get it done with the format that I have with all the other work that I do, and all the other responsibilities that I have.
But there is one question that this all brings; it's always the question that comes with the efficiency drive - What will you do with the time?
If you decide to use that time to do more work to make more money, that's all good; you can spend some of that money to become more efficient, so you're able to spend more money to create more time to do more work but at some point that becomes a race to the bottom.
Creating the time to do the same amount of work in less space gives you the extraordinary opportunity to do something else. I used that half an hour at the garage so I could go home and not do that half an hour later on.
Blog Post Number - 4180