|
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.
Brian Tracy is a leading authority on personal and
business success. As Chairman and CEO of
Brian Tracy International, he is the best-selling author of 17 books
and over 300 audio and video learning programs.
Join Brian's Free Email Newsletters. Copyright © 2001 Brian Tracy
International. All Rights Reserved. Webmasters:
Add This Article To Your Site
Home |