Donna McGeorge - The 1 Day Refund

Prior to the pandemic, she would take her three‐year‐old son to day care. Mornings were chaotic for everyone. A far from relaxed breakfast, often eaten on the run, was followed by a half‐crazed drive for the drop‐off and the daily heartbreak of her son crying and clinging to her legs.

When lockdown hit and she had to work from home, Kim had time to walk her son to day care because she no longer had to commute. The tears and clinging stopped immediately. The dawdling morning walk allowed for a slower and calmer transition.

Kim had been refunded her commute time. The two hours a day gifted to her by COVID‐19 restrictions were hers to use however she wished. She could simply have continued the upsetting morning routine, but she decided instead to spend the time wisely, and the return on that investment was huge.

If you were affected by lockdown, or had to work from home, how did you spend the commute time that was refunded to you?

Let's pause for a moment and do the maths. A commute of around one hour each way was common. Two hours' travel a day translated into ten hours a week that weren't spent in a car or on public transport. That's a whole extra day saved! Even if you caught the train and worked for part of the commute, the time saved was still yours to spend as you chose.

If I had asked you in 2019 what you would do with an extra day every week, how would you have answered?

You might have said you'd spend more time with your kids, read more, meal plan for the week, take up a hobby, study remotely or learn to navigate the new world in which many people work from home. Or maybe you would have said you'd simply catch up on sleep.

I don't think any of you would have said you would fill the saved time with more email and work‐based projects.

Unfortunately, however, many of us perpetuated our already hectic lifestyles. Instead of recognising the time refund as a gift, we simply absorbed it back into our busy, out‐of‐control, overwhelmed lives. This meant many of us were more exhausted than when we commuted.

This book will help you take back time, get a refund if you will, build a time margin into your world so you are not operating constantly at 100 per cent-plus capacity, and rack up some room to move, breathe and think!

How good does that sound!?

People constantly tell me they are tired, exhausted and overwhelmed. They can't keep up with the pressures of modern‐day living.

It's like we are always ‘on' and have no idea how to hit the off switch — we don't even know there is one!

In Australia we work 3.2 billion hours a year in unpaid overtime, we have 134 million days of accrued annual leave, and 3.8 million of us don't take lunch breaks. And 7.4 million Australians don't get enough sleep.

We seem to have become ‘rest resistant'. We are addicted to being busy and it's preventing us from getting the rest we need to perform at our best.

Wellbeing and productivity adviser Thea O'Connor reminds us, ‘The simple fact is, if you don't give your brain a break you'll start to work more slowly and you'll make more errors.'

One of the things I learned in 2020 was that I didn't have to be ‘on' all the time. I could actually organise my life so I started my first meeting at a time that suited me and I delivered sessions and workshops at a time that suited me.

I'm not sure why it took a pandemic for me to make that connection, but here I am. I spent a year protecting approximately 15 per cent of every day for time to think. I took time to reflect on what my customers needed rather than on what I was currently selling them. I spent time reading lots of articles online about what others were saying, and I began to craft my own story about what I had to offer. It led me to initiatives I had never thought of before. An Instagram account called ‘Daily dose of Donna' provided simple tips and pick‐me‐ups for people in lockdown. I gained a heap of followers very quickly, and from those tips I began to develop programs that led me to a dozen new clients.

I believe that's why my practice was able not just to survive when others were folding or struggling, but to grow in a number of different directions. The investment of time saved gave me the ability to take advantage of opportunities.

For Kim and her son, that means never going back to the way things were before the pandemic. She considers the time she spends with him on the walk to the day‐care centre sacrosanct and immovable.

That's my wish for everyone reading this book. I hope that by the time you've finished reading it you'll have implemented some simple strategies that will give you both the capacity and the space to think, breathe, work and enjoy your life even more.

Are you ready to see how?

This book mirrors the way I run my webinars, workshops, corporate programs and hands‐on sessions. It is practical and easy to read and navigate, so you can quickly implement real yet simple changes in the way you work.

It isn't a hefty tome that you'll have trouble carrying around, or that you'll leave on your bedside table to gather coffee‐cup stains. Rather, it offers quick tips, real‐life stories, lots of no‐nonsense advice, questions to encourage you to reflect on how you're working now and how you could improve, and exercises to help you implement the changes you want to make.

My suggestion for working through this book is to keep it simple and achievable. Start small and work your way up to the bigger concepts. Read the book and choose one or two things that resonate strongly with you, and start to action those immediately. (You will thank me for this when you see how simple it really is.)

Part I is all about why we need to take back time and how we collect our 1‐Day Refund on the week. We will learn why 85 per cent is the limit we should be working towards (not 100 per cent or, dare I say, 120 per cent). We should all have a 15 per cent buffer in our lives for capacity and space.

Part II introduces strategies to help you spend your time saved wisely and to award yourself a daily refund. This will give you the capacity and space required to take advantage of opportunities to think and make great decisions, and to respond positively and proactively to changing conditions.

As you read, you will find I can be a little irreverent at times — because life and work are way too important to be taken too seriously. And reading a book should be a pleasure, not a pain!

So please read, implement, experiment and have fun being more productive!

Resources and energy are needed for growth; this applies to pretty much any area of our world where we want to grow or get better. It is true for communities, for individuals and for the natural environment.

And I'm not just referring to physical growth. I'm also talking about emotional and intellectual growth.

In science, this is referred to as a finite-time singularity. In a nutshell, unbounded growth demands either infinite resources and energy or a major paradigm shift. Without either, collapse is inevitable.

So tell me, how much longer can you go on before you exhaust your resources and energy, or you undertake a paradigm shift?

I'm not even asking for a major shift. Simply think about where you can refund yourself only 15 per cent of your time and resources across a range of aspects of your life to create some space that will allow you to be the truly adaptive organism you have evolved to be. Following a few simple principles will gain you one full extra day in your week.

But you don't have to believe me! There are a number of real-world examples where a 15 per cent buffer or margin is considered optimal operating capacity.