change, to improve upon change, and then to move on to the next situation. As you
continue to do this, you will have such a wonderful feeling of self-control and self-
determination that your whole life will be bright and positive, and so will your results.
Managing Your Time
By: Brian Tracy
Perhaps the greatest single problem that people have today is “time poverty.”
Working people have too much to do and too little time for their personal lives. Most
people feel overwhelmed with responsibilities and activities, and the harder they
work, the further behind they feel. This sense of being on a never-ending treadmill
can cause you to fall into the reactive/responsive mode of living. Instead of clearly
deciding what you want to do, you continually react to what is happening around
you. Pretty soon you lose all sense of control. You feel that your life is running you,
rather than you running your life.
On a regular basis, you have to stand back and take stock of yourself and what
you’re doing. You have to stop the clock and do some serious thinking about who
you are and where you are going. You have to evaluate your activities in the light of
what is really important to you. You must master your time rather than becoming a
slave to the constant flow of events and demands on your time. And you must
organize your life to achieve balance, harmony, and inner peace.
Taking action without thinking is the cause of every failure. Your ability to think
is the most valuable trait that you possess. If you improve the quality of your
thinking, you improve the quality of your life.sometimes immediately.
Time is your most precious resource. It is the most valuable thing you have. It
is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved. It can only be reallocated
from activities of lower value to activities of higher value. All work requires time.
And time is absolutely essential for the important relationships in your life. The very
act of taking a moment to think about your time before you spend it will begin to
improve your personal time management immediately.
I used to think that time management was only a business tool, like a calculator
or a cellular telephone. It was something that you used so that you could get more
done in a shorter period of time and eventually be paid more money. Then I learned
that time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core skill upon
which everything else in life depends.
In your work or business life, there are so many demands on your time from
other people that very little of your time is yours to use as you choose. However, at
home and in your personal life you can exert a tremendous amount of control over
how you use your time. And it is in this area that I want to focus.
Personal time management begins with you. It begins with your thinking through
what is really important to you in life. And it only makes sense if you organize it
around specific things that you want to accomplish. You need to set goals in three
major areas of your life. First, you need family and personal goals. These are the
reasons why you get up in the morning, why you work hard and upgrade your skills,
why you worry about money and sometimes feel frustrated by the demands on your
time.
What are your personal and family goals, both tangible and intangible? A tangible
family goal could be a bigger house, a better car, a larger television set, a vacation,
or anything else that costs money. An intangible goal would be to build a higher
quality relationship with your spouse and children, to spend more time with your
family going for walks or reading books. Achieving these family and personal goals
are the real essence of time management, and its major purpose.
The second area of goals are your business and career goals. These are the
“how” goals, the means by which you achieve your personal, “why” goals. How can
you achieve the level of income that will enable you to fulfill your family goals? How
can you develop the skills and abilities to stay ahead of the curve in your career?
Business and career goals are absolutely essential, especially when balanced with
family and personal goals.
The third type of goals are your personal development goals. Remember, you
can’t achieve much more on the outside than what you have achieved on the inside.
Your outer life will be a reflection of your inner life. If you wish to achieve worthwhile
things in your personal and your career life, you must become a worthwhile person
in your own self-development. You must build yourself if you want to build your life.
Perhaps the greatest secret of success is that you can become anything you really
want to become to achieve any goal that you really want to achieve. But in order to
do it, you must go to work on yourself and never stop.
Once you have a list of your personal and family goals, your business and career
goals, and your self-development goals, you can then organize the list by priority.
This brings us to the difference between priorities and posteriorities. In order to get
your personal time under control, you must decide very clearly upon your priorities.
You must decide on the most important things that you could possible be doing to
give yourself the same amount of happiness, satisfaction, and joy in life. But at the
same time, you must establish posteriorities as well. Just as priorities are things
that you do more of and sooner, posteriorities are things that you do less of and
later.
The fact is, your calendar is full. You have no spare time. Your time is extremely
valuable. Therefore, for you to do anything new, you will have to stop doing
something old. In order to get into something, you will have to get out of something
else. In order to pick something up, you will have to put something down. Before
you make any new commitment of your time, you must firmly decide what activities
you are going to discontinue in your personal life.
If you want to spend more time with your family, for example, you must decide
what activities you currently engage in that are preventing you from doing so.
A principle of time management says that hard time pushes out soft time. This
means that hard time, such as working, will push out soft time, such as the time you
spend with your family. If you don’t get your work done at the office because you
don’t use your time well, you almost invariably have to rob that time from your
family. As a result, because your family is important to you, you find yourself in a
values conflict. You feel stressed and irritable. You feel a tremendous amount of
pressure. You know in your heart that you should be spending more time with the
important people in your life, but because you didn’t get your work done, you have
to fulfill those responsibilities before you can spend time with your spouse and
children.
Think of it this way. Every minute you waste during the waking day is time that
your family will ultimately be deprived of. So concentrate on working when you are
at work so that you can concentrate on your family when you are at home.
There are three key questions that you can ask yourself continually to keep your
personal life in balance. The first question is, “What is really important to me?”
Whenever you find yourself with too much to do and too little time, stop and ask
yourself, “What is it that is really important for me to do in this situation?” Then,
make sure that what you are doing is the answer to that question.
The second question is, “What are my highest value activities?” In your personal
life, this means, “What are the things that I do that give me the greatest pleasure
and satisfaction? Of all the things that I could be doing at any one time, what are
the things that I could do to add the greatest value to my life?”
And the final question for you to ask over and over again is, “What is the most
valuable use of my time right now?” Since you can only do one thing at a time, you
must constantly organize you life so that you are doing one thing, the most
important thing, at every moment.
Personal time management enables you to choose what to do first, what to do
second, and what not to do at all. It enables you to organize every aspect of your
life so that you can get the greatest joy, happiness, and satisfaction out of
everything you do.
Setting Priorities
By: Brian Tracy
In 1970, sociologist Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University wrote a book
entitled The Unheavenly City. He described one of the most profound studies on
success and priority setting ever conducted.
Banfield’s goal was to find out how and why some people became financially
independent during the course of their working lifetimes. He started off convinced
that the answer to this question would be found in factors such as family
background, education, intelligence, influential contacts, or some other concrete
factor. What he finally discovered was that the major reason for success in life was a
particular attitude of mind.
Banfield called this attitude “long time perspective.” He said that men and women
who were the most successful in life and the most likely to move up economically
were those who took the future into consideration with every decision they made in
the present. He found that the longer the period of time a person took into
consideration while planning and acting, the more likely it was that he would achieve
greatly during his career.
For example, one of the reasons your family doctor is among the most respected
people in America is because he or she invested many years of hard work and study
to finally earn the right to practice medicine. After university courses, internship,
residency and practical training, a doctor may be more than 30 years old before he
or she is capable of earning a good living. But from that point onward, these men
and women are some of the most respected and most successful professional people
in the United States. They had long time perspectives.
The essential key to success in setting priorities is having a long time perspective.
You can tell how important something is today by measuring its potential future
impact on your life.
For example, if you come home from work at night and choose to play with your
children or spend time with your spouse, rather than watch TV or read the paper,
you have a long time perspective. You know that investing time in the health and
happiness of your children and your spouse is a very valuable, high-priority use of
time.
If you take additional courses in the evening to upgrade your skills and make
yourself more valuable to your employer, you’re acting with a long time perspective.
Learning something practical and useful can have a long-term effect on your career.
The key word, then, to keep in mind when you’re setting priorities is sacrifice.
Setting priorities usually requires sacrificing present enjoyment for future enjoyment.
It requires giving up a short-term pleasure in the present in order to enjoy a far
greater and more substantial pleasure in the future.
Economists say that the inability to delay gratification—that is, the natural
tendency of individuals to spend everything they earn plus a little bit more, and the
mind-set of doing what is fun, easy and enjoyable—is the primary cause of economic
and personal failure in life. On the other hand, disciplining yourself to do what you
know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem
and personal satisfaction.
So setting priorities begins with your deciding what you want most in life and then
organizing your time and activities so that everything you do is the most valuable
use of your time in achieving those objectives.
With your larger, long-term priorities in order, you can much more easily decide
upon your short-term priorities.
You can say that the process of setting short-term priorities begins with a pad of
paper and a pen. Whenever you feel overwhelmed by too many things to do and too
little time in which to do them, sit down, take a deep breath, and list all those tasks
you need to accomplish. Although there is never enough time to do everything, there
is always enough time to do the most important things, and to stay with them until
they are done right.
Peter Drucker once said, “Efficiency is doing things right, but effectiveness is doing
the right things.” And this requires thought.
Once you have listed your tasks, ask yourself this question: “If I were to be called
out of town for a month, and I could finish only one thing on this list, which one
thing would it be?” Think it through, and circle that one item on your list. Then ask
yourself: “If I could do only one more thing before I was called out of town for a
month, what would it be?” This then becomes the second thing you circle on your
list.
Perform this exercise five or six times until you have sorted out the highest
priorities on your list. Then number each according to its importance. With these
priorities, you are now ready to begin working effectively toward the achievement of
your major goals.
Another popular method for setting priorities on your list, once you have
determined your major goals or objectives, is the A-B-C-D-E method. You place
one of those letters in the margin before each of the tasks on your list.
“A” stands for “very important; must do; severe negative consequences if not
completed.”
“B” stands for “important; should do; but not as important as my ‘A’ tasks, and
only minor negative consequences if not completed.”
“C” stands for “nice to do; but not as important as ‘A’ or ‘B,’ and no negative
consequences for not completing.”
“D” stands for “delegate, or assign to someone else who can do the task in my
place.”
“E” stands for “eliminate, whenever possible.”
When you use the A-B-C-D-E method, you can very easily sort out what is
important and unimportant. This then will focus your time and attention on those
items on your list that are most essential for you to do.
