Will it make the boat go faster?

When I worked at Ernst & Young I used to attend training days and seminar with various speakers. One was Will Hunt Davis. I didn't know who he was and unless you're obsessed with rowing, I'm sure you won't either. But he gave a talk which has stuck with me ever since and the essence of his talk was asking himself this:

Will it make the boat go faster?

He talked about being a rower at Oxford and training to get into the Team GB. Every morning they would get up to train early. He talked about the sheer physical and mental pain of pushing yourself so hard in rowing, which, if you've ever tried to do that on a rowing machine, you will know, it makes your muscles scream with lactic acid pain.

But he said that whenever he was doing something he asked himself the question. If the answer was yes, he would do it or do more of it, train, eat well, sleep. If the answer was no, he wouldn't do it, stay up late, drink, party.

And this has stuck with me. At work its so easy to be distracted by tasks or the next thing. But ultimately, you only have so many hours in the day, so you need to use them in the best way possible. To do that, you need to know exactly what your goal is, then, when you have multiple tasks competing for your time, ask yourself, "will it make the boat go faster?"

I have found this useful at times to help gain clarity of my thoughts.

Just make sure you know what your boat is and which direction its pointed in.

At work, your boat may appear to be a task, or a project, and you can ask yourself "will this task help meet this project goal?" but sometimes the boat is actually your health or paying your bills, or your self esteem, and sometimes speaking out to try and help a project may not be the right thing to do. Sometimes you have to think about which boat is more important.

So whenever you do something, or choose not to do something, ask yourself:

"Will is make the boat go faster?"