Much time and attention is given to the idea of time management these days. Everyone wants to know how they can fit more into their already-packed schedules. But there is no such thing as time management: Time is a static force that never changes. You can never make more of it. Really, the only thing you can do is to prioritize your activities to accomplish the things that really matter most.
You might think that this is merely a difference in semantics but it’s an important distinction. Time management is about arranging what you do to fit as neatly as possible into the time you have available. Prioritizing is about focusing only on the tasks that really matter and cutting the rest down—or eliminating them altogether.
Another word often used is budgeting. Many of us use budgets to rearrange what we’re already doing with our finances, rather than prioritizing what is important and eliminating what isn’t. The exercise I gave you earlier about cutting down your expenses is a good example. You’ll notice, in that entire chapter, I didn’t use the word ‘budget’ once. This is because we were prioritizing what you must do in order to reach your goal. Budgeting is simply rearranging. I think that people use terms like ‘time management’ and ‘budgeting’ to convince themselves that they’re accomplishing something, when really, they’re just shuffling around the same old jazz!
Prioritizing involves making choices and decisions about every activity in which you engage to see if it adds value to your life or not. Let’s try a little experiment. Look at your life right now and think of the activities that you are currently involved in and about what you want to accomplish with your life. I’m sure that you can probably carve out an hour or two here and there each week to work toward your goals. It may not be much, but it’s something.
Now imagine that you went to the doctor and he told you that you had exactly one year to live. How does that change your priorities? Would you piddle around trying to accomplish your dreams in only a few hours per week? Would you work extra hours to try and get a promotion at work that would never benefit you? Would you save for a retirement that wasn’t going to happen? Would you plan to take a vacation for two weeks next June and hope you made it? Would you sit in front of the TV tonight?
When you think your time is unlimited, it’s easy to waste it. However, when that perception is altered and artificially shortened, time becomes very precious indeed. My point is that time is always precious. Whether you live to be forty or up into your nineties, there is still only a limited amount—and it will never seem like enough. This is why prioritizing is so crucial. You don’t want your life to rush past in a blur of busyness that never accomplishes anything.
In order to begin the process of prioritizing, you must learn to look at every activity in your life in relation to time. Often people don’t even think about money in relation to time, but they are intimately interconnected.
Many of us are enamored with the concept of a ‘deal.’ We want to get the best price for anything and everything. We convince ourselves that we must do so in order to make our money stretch as far as possible. What we don’t realize is what this mindset costs in relation to the time it takes. For example, have you ever driven across town to save an extra ten cents on gas? Phoned the bank and waited on hold for over 10 minutes to protest a $2 fee you don’t recognize? Searched online for hours for the best price for a flight? You might argue that these activities are what any responsible person would do; but let’s look at them in relation to time.
Your vehicle holds 20 gallons of gas, and you drive across town to save $.10 per gallon. This takes you thirty minutes. You saved $2.00. Now if someone were to call you and offer to pay you $4 per hour for your time you would be insulted. But that’s what you just demonstrated your time to be worth.
If you call the bank to save $2 and wait 10 minutes, then you are worth $12 per hour. If you search three hours online to save $30 on airfare, then you are worth $10 per hour. But wait, there’s more to it than that. Not only are you devaluing your time to a ridiculously small amount, you are also experiencing what is known as “opportunity cost.” This cost is the price you pay in lost time for being unable to fully implement ideas that earn passive income—or to put off implementing them because you think you don’t have “time.”
For example, let’s assume you have a great idea for a website that produces income by providing readers timely newsletters and articles on parenting. You want to get the idea up and running, but you don’t think you have ‘time’ because you’re too busy. So you wait. A year goes by, then two. Finally you get things underway, and the website grows over the next year to produce $5000 per month in subscription and advertising revenue.
It’s easy to look back and see what all those busy activities actually cost. Things like hanging out with coworkers, chatting on the phone, watching television, texting your friends, surfing the internet, and volunteering for committees. You felt busy—too busy in fact to insert a new business into your life—but what did all that busyness get you in relation to what it cost by delaying this idea? When you increase effectiveness and delegate or eliminate the wasted busyness, you increase your cash flow and have something to show for your efforts.
All these activities that ‘save money’ are really highlighting a mindset of lack and limitation. By focusing on the miniscule savings they produce you are missing the abundance that could be yours by concentrating on producing income. Remember, money is like flowing water. Why rush into the middle of the stream, just to grab a thimbleful?
Another great time waster: the old ‘what if’ game. You worry about the mights and maybes. You rerun past events through your mind repeatedly, wasting the present. There’s a Mark Twain quote that I like: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles but most of them never happened.” The same is true for you if you engage in a great deal of emotional drama about things that are unknown or have already happened. You create troubles in your mind that have nothing to do with reality and waste precious time.
It is easy to assume that if a task takes a great deal of time that it is important. One of my favorite examples of this is email. How much time do you spend sorting, reading and answering email? If you are like me, you think of this as a virtual pit of time and energy. But many people are very attached to their electronic inbox. They spend hours composing email and constantly check for new messages.
If you were unable to check your email for seven days, would the world come to an end? NO. The same is true of voicemail. Think of when you were away or on vacation for a week and couldn’t respond immediately. Did civilization come to a screeching halt? Did you really miss anything that was of vital importance? Probably not. Very few things are truly important or urgent, yet we get so wrapped up in the idea of instant communication. We perceive them to be of vital importance and they just aren’t 99% of the time.
Technology has made our lives much easier in a number of ways. But the idea that anyone can contact you at any time, for anything, allows many people to waste your time with unimportant chatter. This is one of the reasons that the first person most business people hire is an assistant to deal with phone calls, email and correspondence. It is incredibly time-consuming and needs to be done, but is not near important enough to take you away from much more productive activities.
The best use of technology is in the automation of mundane tasks. This may show my age a bit, but I like to use the example of office automation. When I was a young man making my way in the world, offices had entire legions of secretaries—in fact, their need was so great that they had a battalion of young women on standby to fill in if someone was sick or missed a day. They called this a “Secretarial Pool.” The need for this manpower existed because the everyday tasks associated with communication and running a business were so time-consuming and labor-intensive that just one secretary wouldn’t do. There were no hand held tape recorders, so secretaries had to know shorthand in order to write down what you wanted to say and then type it up. They used typewriters that had no auto-correction or deletion possibilities. They made copies with sheets of carbon paper.
Just having a letter dictated, typed and revised could take hours. You know that with word processing as it exists today, it might take fifteen minutes. But the fact that it used to be much more time-consuming does not make it more valuable. I use this example to point out that though technology can create time wasters, it can also increase the quality and number of tasks you can accomplish. It is important to know the difference and recognize those technological advances that improve your productivity versus those that eat a large amount of time.
This brings up another subject that people frequently quiz me on. Do you need to learn the latest technology to have an edge in business? Yes and no. You don’t need to learn the latest time management software to decide what is important and what is not. However, increasing your ability to use spreadsheets and programs effectively can help you stay organized and accomplish tasks more efficiently. My advice is that if certain technological advances move you closer to your goals, use them. However, if you use all the latest gadgets and flashy technology, yet don’t actually do anything to move forward, then they are time wasters and nothing more. What you do is much more important than how it gets accomplished. Don’t allow anything to get in the way of your forward progress.
Almost anyone with a management or economics background has heard of the Pareto Principle. This principle was first suggested by Joseph Juran, who was a leader in management theory. He suggested that 80% of your results come from just 20% of your efforts. This concept is very useful when evaluating your daily activities. One task that I’ve suggested for those trying to prioritize their life is to keep a log of every single activity that you engage in during the day and find the 20% that is producing the vast majority of your results. Once you identify these important tasks, then take a look at all the others. This is the list you need to reduce or eliminate. Most people find that there are at least 10% of their activities that are wasting enormous amounts of time. These should be completely eliminated. The remaining tasks should be consolidated and reduced to a specific time frame or delegated to someone else.
It’s best to be extremely selective of where you put your energies and not allow yourself to be spread too thin. You’ll be able to focus on the tasks that help you reach your goals quickly and not delay your success. While you may feel as if you lack time, you must take responsibility and know that it is really just a lack of priorities.
Once you make your list of activities, you may be surprised how much time you spend on things that are unnecessary or accomplish nothing. Don’t be too hard on yourself. We are trained from childhood, now more so than ever, to fill every available minute with activity. We don’t like being bored. Our mind needs stimulation. The problem arises when we aren’t actively thinking about, or choosing, positive stimulation. We are, unfortunately, masters of inventing distraction.
Think about the environment that exists in the corporate world. There are a lot of demands that you have to meet whether you’re interested in that activity or not—or produce anything of real value. You end up doing large amounts of “busy work” to justify your position. Have you ever been called to a meeting to discuss the best time to have a meeting? This type of ridiculous redundancy is a daily occurrence, as is the acceptance of a cubicle environment that does its best to dull the senses and remove any scrap of creativity.
There are constant studies released that reveal the amount of time wasted by employees surfing the internet or chatting by the water cooler. The bottom line is that a company can purchase your time, but they can’t make you productive. After being immersed in this environment it is no wonder that people don’t adequately understand the value of their time.
The ability to effectively prioritize the activities of each day means you have to value your time. It’s a basic self-esteem issue. If you see your life as valuable and meaningful, then you will value your time as well. If you find yourself wasting a lot of time, you probably don’t have a strong enough reason to manage your activities in the best possible way. If your life has no meaningful purpose or direction, then it’s not likely that there will be a compelling reason to change. You might get motivated on occasion but your motivation to improve just won’t last.
Time management programs can present an irresistible lure. They coax you with the promise of greater productivity, more free time, faster income generation and higher self-esteem. And indeed, some of those benefits may indeed be realized in the short term. But there’s always the risk that you’ll find you’re investing more and more time in micromanagement activities like getting organized, creating objectives and learning the latest software. Actually doing the tasks that your program is designed to manage becomes almost an afterthought. Instead of helping you increase productivity, your new program becomes another aspect of “busywork”—a means to disguise low productivity.
This is a common problem for people who haven’t yet identified a purpose for their lives—which is why I discussed finding a purpose first. A fancy program provides the illusion of productivity, but when you strip it down to its raw and unfiltered source, you find it’s devoid of real purpose. There’s nothing there. When you sum up all the tasks, they amount to nothing but busywork and trivial activities. Whether or not a person actually gets anything done is of little consequence in the grand scheme of life. They add to nothing and are completely forgettable. You must find your purpose first or any attempt to prioritize activities will be in vain—without purpose, you have no clear direction.
Once you understand your purpose, you can begin to create actions that align with it. But realize that prioritizing your activities requires you to decide what to do and then do it. Most tips and advice that you hear on time management focus on getting things done. But if you haven’t decided on the best course of action, then engaging in a bunch of activities just makes you feel busy. It doesn’t accomplish anything.
You may have experienced this frustration. You feel like you know your purpose but continually spin your wheels trying to accomplish it. This could be because of a disconnect between your conscious and unconscious mind. Your conscious mind feels your new ideas and purpose are correct, but your sub-conscious hasn’t accepted it yet.
This happens frequently. Someone might come to one of my seminars and decide they want to change. But instead of working on changing their ingrained beliefs, they start with a whole slew of activity. They know something isn’t working, but instead of resolving this conflict, they try to avoid thinking about it. They go through at least one—and sometimes many—unhealthy cycles of hiding the truth from themselves. They feel frustrated with their inability to move forward with a purpose that their sub-conscious doesn’t fully agree with; and yet, they feel they have no choice but to follow it.
To illustrate this, let’s use the example of having a job. We’re taught from the cradle that we should grow up and get a job. You go to school, perhaps even college and then you get a job. You may know that this is not the path for you and that your path lies in entrepreneurship. But because of this belief, you set the idea aside and tune it out to follow the expected path. You go to work each day, but don’t really like it. You’d rather not go to work if you could afford to do so. You dream of freedom.
When you look at the results that people who followed the accepted get-a-job approach have achieved, you will notice very few of them seem happy and fulfilled with their lives. At work, they may pretend everything is fine but privately they feel miserable and trapped. Every year it gets harder. Personally I don’t think most jobs are very healthy, considering the fact that they tend to stifle and crush the human spirit. I’m sure there are exceptions, but those aren’t the norm. Deep down it is as if each of us knows that we can achieve a better result including abundant income generation, fabulous career opportunities and a fulfilling family life, without the confines and demands of traditional employment.
Virtually every time management system teaches that you must prioritize your projects to make sure you’re working on what’s truly important; don’t get caught up in minor things, it says. However, very few explain precisely how. How do you decide which task is really the most important at any given time? Is it the one that’s most urgent, the one that will earn you the most money, the one that will produce the greatest long-term happiness, the one that will please your family the most? If you don’t use an intelligent method of prioritization, you’ll lack consistency and bounce from one task to another with no rhyme or reason.
The main objective is to make the greatest amount of progress toward your goals with the least amount of effort. There are many examples of methods you can use to achieve this and they all have a few things in common:
1. Purpose—In order to effectively prioritize, you must know your purpose or objective. If we go back and think about your purpose in relation to climbing a mountain, it is important to focus on getting to the top of the mountain. This does not mean you go around it or focus on camping at the base of the slope. You focus on reaching the peak and compare all your tasks to that one objective. The ones that move you the farthest and fastest toward that purpose go at the top of your list.
2. Time—As we’ve already discussed, time is your scarcest resource. You cannot ever create more of it. So when you evaluate your list, first consider the time it will take to complete each task in relation to the amount of forward progress that you will make. Those tasks that propel you forward in the least amount of time, with the greatest reward are ranked higher. It is also important to take into consideration if that time is flexible. Can you perform the task by utilizing short amounts of time that can be rearranged at will, or is it a set amount of time that must be performed in a set location?
3. Other resources—You should also evaluate the amount of other resources that a task takes to rank it even more specifically. These resources would include things such as money, family time, use of social network and physical energy.
For some, a grid with the tasks in a column on the left hand side, ranked in ascending order by time, can help. Put your resources in columns across the top. You can then rank each task against the resource with a numeric value, 1 to 5. The tasks that take the least amount of time and have the lowest score in relation to other resources are the ones you should focus on first.
For example, let’s assume that you have released a great deal of weight recently and that you feel your purpose is to help others reduce their weight and live healthier lives. You might come up with some tasks like these:
1. Develop a website with articles about weight loss where users can chat, support each other, and sign up for my newsletter.
2. Start a blog about my personal experiences and struggles.
3. Speak to groups about weight loss.
4. Create a program for weight loss I can trademark as my own.
5. Write a book.
The first thing you would do is rank them according to the amount of time they take. So you might reorder the list to look something like this:
1. Start a blog about my personal experiences and struggles.
2. Speak to groups about weight loss.
3. Develop a website with articles about weight loss where users can chat, support each other, and sign up for my newsletter.
4. Create a program for weight loss that I can trademark as my own.
5. Write a book.
Your chart might look something like this:
| Money | Family Time | Social Network | Physical Energy | Total | New Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blog | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 1 |
| Speaking | 1 | 4 | 2 | 4 | 11 | 5 |
| Website | 4 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 10 | 3 |
| Program | 2 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 8 | 2 |
| Book | 5 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 10 | 4 |
This exercise tells you that the first item on your particular list should be to start a blog. It takes very little time and no money. It takes nothing away from your family time, and very little physical energy. The only thing extra effort will be to send out email to your current group of contacts to let them know you have a blog, so they can start reading it and giving you feedback.
When you use those criteria, it’s interesting to note that speaking moved from second to last. While you may be speaking at a function for only 30 minutes to an hour, it is more difficult to fit this into your life. It takes time away from your family, and it also takes a great deal of energy to prepare to talk in front of a group.
The website and book came in at the same ranking. In this case, to rank them, you would default back to the amount of time each one takes. When looking at the category of money, you have to overcome the urge to shuffle your tasks by which one is the cheapest. In this instance, it takes more money to produce a website or a book than to speak to groups. But you have to remember that you can always make more money—but you can never make more time. Therefore it is very important to sort by time first.
One frequent comment that many people make is to think that because it takes more TOTAL time to produce a book, then it should always outweigh the area of speaking. Remember when I said that time was not just a function of the amount of time that a project takes but also a function of flexibility? You can write a book using short 30-minute or one-hour time slots at any given point in a day. You can also rearrange those time slots if something else is more important on that day. Speaking must happen at a prescribed time and place, where and when that particular audience has agreed to meet. It has no such flexibility and can’t be moved or arranged to fit your current schedule. This lack of flexibility is reflected in the chart by the amount of time it takes from your family, and the amount of physical energy you must expend.
Many people find the grid system a little overwhelming. You don’t have to do something this detailed. You can simply create a list at the end of each day to accomplish the next day and keep these factors generally in mind. This allows you to focus on the absolutely essential tasks at the beginning of the day. If something doesn’t get done, it will be those at the end of the list that aren’t as critical. It doesn’t have to be difficult or complicated. The important concept to understand is to have a clear way to rank what you do, and then set about accomplishing those tasks in their order of importance.
I’ve always thought it very sad indeed that our schools don’t teach decision making as a skill. The ability to trust your instincts and make quick and accurate decisions is something that can be learned. The more you practice, the better you become at it. Decisions are all about choice and evaluation. We have many options as to how to complete our various tasks in life and we need to make choices. This is relatively simple and can be evaluated using the prioritization strategy we just talked about. We can determine the best option based on the given criteria.
But other decisions can be harder to evaluate. Sometimes we face tough choices that involve one or more unknowns. We can’t know in advance what the consequences of each alternative will be. Often we can waste precious time trying to guess. This results in a great deal of lost time and, even worse, stagnation. This is especially true of what we perceive to be big decisions like quitting a job, starting a business or moving to a new city for better opportunities. But there is no way to know all the determining factors before leaping into the unknown.
Often, when presented with this, people experience an extended type of mental paralysis. The fear of the unknown leads them to put off any decision and procrastinate. Every decision involves a choice between maintaining the status quo—your existing beliefs—and making a change. Because we can’t guarantee a particular change will work out for the better, by default, many of us stay put.
Once you are able to develop a wealthy mindset and set aside the chatter in the form of ‘what ifs’ from your existing beliefs, decisions should be quick—even big ones. Decisions are actually a direct reflection of who you are and what your purpose is. Each one confirms the beliefs you have about yourself and the direction you are traveling.
Sometimes we procrastinate on projects because we don’t know where to begin. A goal like “write a book” might seem straightforward enough when first set, but when it’s time to act, the goal becomes a huge pit of unknowns. Procrastination soon follows. One way to get beyond this is to focus on the step right in front of you. Once that step is complete you move on to the next step. For example, if you were writing a book about dieting, the first step would be to create a very simple outline that listed the content of each chapter. Once that is done, the next step would be to take the title of chapter 1 and list fifteen ideas that explain that chapter. The next step would be to list those ideas in logical order; then spend five minutes writing on each of the fifteen items.
By focusing on each step rather than the project as a whole, each portion comes together in a logical fashion and the overwhelming feelings associated with the idea of “writing a book” are removed! And in case you were wondering, this is exactly how the book you are reading right now was put together.
By breaking big concepts and decisions into little concepts and choices, it allows you to focus and make progress rather than procrastinate because it seems too big for you to accomplish. One solution that some people find effective is to break a large project down into a list of small steps, planning it all the way from beginning to end. These small steps are very basic action items—so small, in fact, that you’d be hard pressed to break them down any further without it being ridiculous.
An example of a small step is to make a 5-minute phone call concerning one aspect of the particular project, or to send an email to one of your contacts to answer a specific question. It is typically a task that can be completed in less than 30 minutes, and ideally in less than 10 minutes. Again, these are very small, well-defined actions.
You may be thinking that it isn’t always possible to break a large project down into small steps before you start. But often, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If you want to know how to write a book, you can find books with step-by-step instructions on how to do that. They don’t break it down all the way to the level of these small steps, but they do come close and give you wonderful guidance to get started.
There are indeed situations where there’s simply too much uncertainty to plan a project from beginning to end with any level of specificity. A good example is website development, which often works best with an interactive process. In such situations, you can still use small steps to plan out as far as you can reasonably see. Then when you reach a certain milestone, update your plan for the next stretch ahead.
When embarking on a big project, plan it out using small steps from start to finish. These lists can be several pages long and they may take some effort to create. Once the list is complete, though, it makes the implementation go much more smoothly. It also makes it possible to create accurate estimates of when a project will be complete. Remember how important it is to be able to see the finish line?
These lists can be really useful for projects that will follow a similar trajectory. If you’re creating workout DVDs to complement your diet program, you’ll probably make an entire series of them rather than just one. In this case, you would use the same process to finish every DVD in the series. By taking the extra time to create the list in the first place, you actually save more time in the long run. Making the next DVDs in the series will go very smoothly. You’re able to focus on getting the project done without worrying that you might miss a vital step.
How do you decide when it’s necessary to break a larger task down into many small steps? This decision should be based on the task’s complexity. If the task seems clear, and it isn’t so overwhelming as to create procrastination, then you can just put it on your daily to-do list and not break it down further. However, if it’s new, unfamiliar or complicated, it may be in your best interest to break it down so you will have a clear idea of where to start. This will allow you to flow smoothly from action to action without having to stop and think about what to do next.
You may use some of these techniques or you may find ones that work better for you. It really doesn’t matter as long as you have some way of prioritizing your tasks and evaluating your choices. After a while, you may become so accustomed to tackling large tasks that you can put something like “write a book” on your list without listing the steps. A proper plan with the right level of subdivision—depending on how far along the path you are—can be very motivating.
The first step in the whole process is to visualize your intention without having any idea as to how it will manifest. But once you do have a clear purpose, you must act. When those first few steps present themselves, it’s your turn to cooperate with the manifestation process and prove to yourself that you’re really serious. Otherwise, those action steps will just keep staring you in the face until you get off your behind and get to work.
When you create a task list for a project, you separate planning from doing. This helps the action phase go more smoothly, and it’s easier to slide into a productive flow. You know that if you follow your plan, you’re going to get a result. It may not be perfect but it will get done.
However, this is not an excuse for planning incessantly and never acting. The whole point of prioritizing and evaluating is to act—and act you must!
Chapter 5 REVIEW
• Time is your only nonrenewable resource.
• Focus on the tasks that matter and reduce or eliminate the rest.
• Prioritize by looking at each activity in relation to time.
• Increase effectiveness by decreasing wasted busyness.
• Use technology to improve productivity, not waste time.
• Lack of time is really lack of priorities.
• You must have a set system to prioritize tasks and evaluate choices.
• Action is key.