Dreaming of Having 33 Hours a Day - Can I ever get out of boring emails and do what I want to do?

How long will the days of being pressed for time last? Because I wear three or four hats, the tasks I have to do are always piling up in front of me. There is no intermission to that flow. As I try to be responsible, time runs out in the blink of an eye, and my days end with little to do that I want to do. This, too, is an empty feeling.

There are a number of reasons why I lose my time. It is not because I do not delegate work to my employees. On the contrary, I am proud to say that there are very few managers in the world who delegate work to their employees as much as I do. I intervene when there is work that only I can do, and when my employees are unable to produce results because they are not able to manage the work well on their own, and either no one around them is willing to help or it is too late for them to get the help they need. The problem is clearly the latter. In other words, I frequently encounter situations day after day where I am made to feel that I must intervene.

Some call this an employee training issue. That is certainly true to a point. However, there may be other fundamental issues. We believe that one of the factors is the boring email that I call ‘potato mail’. What does potato mean here? They are high in calories, hearty, and sometimes look delicious, but it is not a staple food that cannot be a main dish. Sometimes, the word ‘potato (imo in Japanese)’ is used to describe something one rank lower. According to a slang dictionary, since the late 1970s, young people have been saying ‘imoi’, which means boorish, tacky, or unsophisticated. So there was a time when the term ‘imo-nechan (potato girl)’ was popular. Perhaps it is because I remember this term, but I have to admit that I am often astonished at the number of ‘imo’ mails I have to read.

A typical boring email is crappy and it doesn’t make any sense in the first place. I end up wasting my precious time on just feeling “What are you trying to say?” Furthermore, grammatical errors are also found in this kind of emails, making it difficult to read. Nowadays, it seems that there are fewer and fewer people who can quickly write a decent sentence. As a result, there are a lot of boring emails scattered all over the place.

“If that’s the case, why don’t you just read those emails?” - I can hear you say so. That may be true. It may be the height of folly for me, the chairman of the board, to read through every single one of my employees’ reports. However, there are often times when the contents of the email are not boring, but rather, contents that the company needs to take seriously and deal with. The screams of employees are one example. No one listens to their voices. The employee shouts out the boring mail underground, like a potato buried underground. It is wrong that no one digs it up. If no one reads the email, the important message written by the employee will be ignored, and I fear it will be a loss to the company. That’s why I look over my employees’ reports. Until I know that someone else will take care of it, I make it a daily routine to read through the reports, even if it takes a long time. So I lose time for myself.

It is inevitable that I sound like a whiner when I write this much. However, I believe that it is my destiny to accept this ordeal and that it is my responsibility after all. Establishing a company is like having a child of your own. Once you have given birth to a child, you are responsible as a parent. A decent parent would educate his or her child until the child stands on his or her own and supports the child financially until then. Therefore, my job as chairman of the board is to keep them company until they are all on their own, doing their jobs properly and producing decent results without the chairman’s intervention. Until that goal is achieved, it is my mission to face the real issues and problems and deal with them on a daily basis without running away. You might even say that it is my destiny. I always feel such a fateful responsibility. As a result, I find myself working seven days a week until late every day, and then suddenly realize that I have no time for myself. How can I describe this situation other than ‘feeling emptiness’?

What I need now is for my time span of 9 hours to be extended on a daily basis. Looking back over the past three years, it is obvious to me. I have made a list of things I have wanted to do, but could not. Not necessarily in the order of importance, but here is the list of what I want to do in my life.

1. Practicing guitar
2. Composing on the piano
3. Programming to play instruments
4. Joining ice hockey club for its evening practice
5. Dating with a pretty girlfriend (dream with no possibility)
6. Reading 200+ history books
7. Writing one article a day

I have also considered the time that falls under these categories. I should be practicing guitar for an hour a day. I haven’t done it for about 45 years now. The skin on my fingertips is soft for a long time. I’m upset that I’ll be away from music, but time is passing too quickly. I’d appreciate it if I can have 30 minutes a day for number 2 and 3 on the list. In the first place, I haven’t composed songs since 1994, 30 years ago now. I have to go to ice hockey practice three times a week, but I can’t go to any of them. Each practice session takes up more than 4 hours including 1.5 hours of practice and driving back and forth. Going three times a week means approximately 14 hours, which is worth nearly two hours of waste a day in a week. Regarding number 5, unfortunately, I have no one to date with, so it is not possible. Dating takes time and money. Not having time for that is merely my excuse, and sadly, the dream goes away empty. I think I have to spend at least one hour a day reading books. The books I have to read are now piling up on my desk. Furthermore, I have to spend three hours a day on writing because it eats up a lot of time.

Then what happens? In order to achieve these things I want to do, I would need about 9 hours every day. In other words, unless I break the status quo, I need 33 hours a day to make it happen, but reality is harsh. As mentioned earlier, while being involved in the company’s business and supervising employees, I would get delayed and lose myself in digging for potatoes. Before I know it, the day is over for me in a blink of an eye, including the boring email processing. It is obvious that with this way of life, time is running short.

Is there the answer? The only answer is to extend the length of the day, and the problem is that the 24-hour day is too short. If I had 33 hours in a day, I would be able to do what I am supposed to do and what I want to do. Will God create this time zone of a new generation and another dimension? I know it is impossible, but I will pray for it.

In the meantime, time is flying by. If I had time to write such a boring article, I might as well be playing guitar for myself. However, I can’t say that it’s a waste of time, because there may be some employees who will be moved by this article and will change their minds about throwing away boring emails, and will naively think that they want to learn how to write better emails. There is a gleam of hope. I dream that the accumulation of these efforts will one day bear fruit and the potato emails will disappear, to be replaced by delicious grape emails. That alone will free me for a day or a few hours. There is still hope and I’d like to bet on it.