Am I Doing Ok?

I had a friend step into my office today and ask that question, "Am I doing ok?" An unintentional comment was said by a staff member that stung. Understandably, it lead to the question, "Am I doing ok?" My resonding answer was "By all means, yes!" ... then I added the "but..."

He's in a very unique line of work that people don't necessarily understand all the hours it takes to perform his job, nor do they understand all the "side jobs" he gets asked to do "real quick that will only take a second." Nothing only takes a second, nor a minute.

So, my advice to him was to journal/log what he does each day ... not second by second, but the chunks that take awhile. I warned him though that most people give up on the process rather quickly because it's incredibly revealing...

1. They realize they really are wasting a lot of time
2. They realize there is a lot of stuff they should be delegating and empowering others to do.
3. They can only account for about 6 of the 8 hours.

All of that is hard to swallow. I challenged him to fight though it. We'll see what happens.