Time Management Cure
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Time Management Cure
Guide to Destroy Procrastination, Build Highly Productivity Daily Habits, Boost Self Discipline.
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Blueprint to Achieve Goals, Fast Focus, and Getting Things Done with Less Stress.
Brian Hall
Copyright 2019 by Brian Hall - All rights reserved.
This eBook is provided with the sole purpose of providing relevant information on a specific topic for which every reasonable effort has been made to ensure that it is both accurate and reasonable. Nevertheless, by purchasing this eBook you consent to the fact that the author, as well as the publisher, are in no way experts on the topics contained herein, regardless of any claims as such that may be made within. As such, any suggestions or recommendations that are made within are done so purely for entertainment value. It is recommended that you always consult a professional prior to undertaking any of the advice or techniques discussed within.
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Furthermore, the information that can be found within the pages described forthwith shall be considered both accurate and truthful when it comes to the recounting of facts. As such, any use, correct or incorrect, of the provided information will render the Publisher free of responsibility as to the actions taken outside of their direct purview. Regardless, there are zero scenarios where the original author or the Publisher can be deemed liable in any fashion for any damages or hardships that may result from any of the information discussed herein.
Additionally, the information in the following pages is intended only for informational purposes and should thus be thought of as universal. As befitting its nature, it is presented without assurance regarding its prolonged validity or interim quality. Trademarks that are mentioned are done without written consent and can in no way be considered an endorsement from the trademark holder.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: The fundamentals of Time Management
Chapter Two: Stating your purpose
Chapter Three: Using the E-3C system to plan your future
Chapter Four: Avoiding clutter in your workspace
Chapter Five: Making the most of the morning
Chapter Six: Knowing when to delegate
Chapter Seven: Improving Focus and Beating Procrastination
Chapter Nine: How speed reading can improve your life
Chapter Ten: The Importance of Breaks
Chapter Eleven: Time Management and Discipline
Chapter Twelve: Urgency vs. Importance
Chapter Thirteen: Time Producing vs. Time Consuming
Chapter Fourteen: The Importance of Punctuality
Chapter Fifteen: Managing Social Life
Chapter Sixteen: Health and Wellbeing
Chapter Seventeen: The 80/20 rule
Chapter Eighteen: Techniques for Increasing Productivity
Chapter Nineteen: Habits Effective of Time Management
Chapter Twenty: Time management hacks
Chapter Twenty-One: Avoiding Time Killers
Chapter Twenty-Two: Common Mistakes
Chapter Twenty-Three: The power of flexibility
Chapter Twenty-Five: Five best time management hacks
Conclusion
Introduction
You have already taken the first step toward improving your overall time management skills and improving your productivity.
This book is intended for anyone who is interested in learning more about how to improve their time management skills so that they can become ultra-productive and highly effective. The concepts, tips and strategies presented in this book are application to virtually any field.
As such, it is ideal for professionals, students, business owners, essentially anyone who has to manage their time throughout the course of their days and weeks. The information contained in this book is meant to provide a practical approach to time management while understanding the rationale behind each of the techniques and strategies described.
Also, each chapter provides an action plan which you can use to begin planning your daily tasks. At the end of the day, you will be able use this action plan as a template for your own planning. Keep in mind that this is all about helping you develop your own style, that is, develop the skills that will serve you best.
After all, being able to develop skills which are relevant to you is what will make this exercise useful and relevant to you. Ultimately, the saying, “time is money” is absolutely true. But not for the reasons you think. Time is the most valuable asset that we all possess since we cannot get it back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for good. That is why we need to make the most of each minute or each day. It’s safe to say we can’t afford to waste time on meaningless tasks.
So, let’s take a deeper look and find out how you can turbocharge your time management skills. Let’s find out how we can beat procrastination and get down to serious business.
Chapter One: The fundamentals of Time Management
Time management is the organization of how we spend our time. We are constantly working within certain windows of time, whether we plan them out our not, so time management is used to better the use of these windows. When mention is made of windows of time here, allotments such as years, months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes are referred to. We are only given so much time on earth—hence, managing this short amount of time provides great benefits in the way of getting the most out of our lives. We can only work within the limitations of our own personal systems in life, so improving these systems comes foremost in improving our lives. Time management is an essential part of improving these systems.
Managing time properly not only allows us to get more done with our days, but it also keeps us from doing things that would have otherwise wasted our time. It at once allows us to meet our goals and also avoid any pitfalls that we would have fallen into otherwise. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “A man is what he thinks about every day.” The same concept applies to time management. There is a compounding interest over time that comes with what we are spending our time doing—if our habits are bad ones, then we will get bad results compounded with themselves. However, if our habits are good ones, then we get good results compounded with themselves. We are largely creatures of habit, so if we are not employing good habits in our everyday lives, then we are not likely to do well over time.
Habits do, however, take much time to develop. Naturally, we are prone to err in life, so habit formation consists largely of the curtailing of bad habits as well as the formation of good ones. This process of weeding out bad habits from the good is never-ending, and it should always be kept on top of—or else, we will inevitably start to fall into worse and worse habits as time goes on. As far as the main habits that we stick to daily throughout our lives are concerned, it only takes around a month to develop and adapt to a cornerstone habit. These main ones that we need for our daily functioning are obviously the most important ones we have, so the most thought should be put into these ones. We should always allocate the most time to the things that sustain us and make us happy. If we stay disciplined in the way of devoting our time to these things, over time, the rewards that we reap for doing so will accru
e by great measures.
Men and women do handle the time that they are given in different ways. Here, stereotypes are to be avoided as much as possible.
Men generally take one of two contrasting stances when dealing with arduous tasks: either they put them off indefinitely, or they complete them before doing anything else. In this way they tend to appropriate their energies well, either completing the difficult task when they still have the energy to do so or conserving their energy until a later, more convenient time.
Women, on the other hand, tend to work on projects continually, paying little to no attention to how difficult or easy the task may be. A difficult task for a woman might be completed at the same time that others are, allowing for flexibility and for working across multiple issues at once. In this way, a woman’s energy is dispersed throughout a longer period of time, usually spent multitasking consistently. Whether one of these methods is superior to the other is up for the reader to decide, but it should be mentioned that tasks take about as much time and energy to complete either way.
Men are generally a more routine-oriented than women are. If this is not the case between a man and a woman, then it is almost sure to be true that a man will give up much less territory when negotiating. By this, it is meant that men do not like to go astray from their routines too much. They are typically less keen on interruptions and making adjustments. Women are typically a bit more open to adjusting their own schedules whenever the situation demands it. Both of these methods work well on their own accords, so habits that establish that perfect mix of rigidity and flexibility tend to survive better over the course of time.
Even though men and women tend to look at time from varying perspectives the fact of the matter is that time is the great equalizer among humans. We all have 24 hours in a day, and no one can buy more time. Once it’s up, it’s gone forever.
Consequently, there is a great need to make more efficient use of time. Yet, most people believe that time can be “killed” meaning that they have “all the time in the world”. When you realize that you don’t have all the time in the world, then you become cognizant of the fact that you need to make the best possible use of the time you do have.
Since we don’t know how much time we actually have left, we truly need to embrace the idea of living each day as if it were out last one. This leads you to shift your mindset from engaging in unproductive tasks to those which help you achieve your personal goals, those of your community and the ones which provide you with pleasure and happiness.
Ultimately, it is your decision to make the most of the time you have left on this Earth, whether it is a few days, or a few decades.
Action plan for this chapter
Things to keep in mind:
Time is the most valuable resource we possess as humans
Time’s value lies in its scarcity
Men and women view time from different perspectives
Things to try out:
Make a list of the things which you would like to achieve from now till your last day on Earth
List all of the activities which you are sure you can live without
Reflect on your attitude toward time, for example, do you really believe you have all the time in the world?
Chapter Two: Stating your purpose
The first and most important thing to do in managing our time is to have an end goal or purpose. There are two main types of purposes that we can pursue, defined by their relationships to our external reality: intrinsic purposes (which are conceptualized to serve the individual, regardless of what the pursuance of which will cause in the outside world), and external purposes (which we create in relation to our external realities—usually in altruistic efforts to help or serve others and occasionally in other efforts to serve other more universal purposes).
We should naturally allocate more time to our own intrinsic purposes than to others, at least when we want to get ahead in life. One of the biggest issues surrounding time management for people is the proclivity to be too agreeable with others and let them and their interests take up too much of our own time and energy. Once we have made up our minds to work toward our own purposes, we then have to define what those purposes actually are—and here, another issue presents itself: what are our actual purposes? We have to define them first and then divide this overarching class of all possible problems into its smaller, more manageable components. When we try to take on all of the many problems that we have at once, we are essentially cutting the heads off of a hydra, just waiting for them to grow back. Sometimes, getting to the roots of our problems is only done by dividing these problems and focusing on what we can fix immediately. In this way, we are much less likely to overwhelm ourselves.
Our own personal goals say a lot about our character. When starting to pursue a goal we should always ask ourselves why it is that we are going after what we are, and whether or not this goal being met will lead us to happiness and wellbeing in the future. Our state of mind when formulating purposes alters these purposes just as much as our character does. We cannot rightly come up with goals when we are feeling down, as we are usually ruminating or not thinking of the future when we feel negative. A positive state of mind, on the other hand, can make us look toward the future in a much different light, one that is often more helpful when considering that we are around 30% more intelligent overall when in a positive state of mind. Excess positivity does, however, tend to lead to naiveté, so we will always do well to keep our optimism obedient to reality. Our own perceptions shape our reality more than any other factors within our lives. If these perceptions err to one side of the temperamental spectrum too heavily, then we are bound to be pulled back into reality, our rose-colored glasses torn off our eyes and trampled under the foot of realism. What more, these perceptions (along with our actions) are the only things in our life that we have complete control over, so managing these perceptions is always more important than trying to influence our external reality. This concept applies to time management, as well as all other aspects of living.
People who keep their personal goals in their heads are 10X more successful in life than those who have none, to begin with. This statistic applies to every facet of waking life. Those who write down their goals see even greater returns though, being around 30X more successful than those with none. The act of writing down a goal alone increases the odds of meeting the goal by 42%.
The first thing that the act of writing a goal down does is to make the goal visible to its creator. These goals, whatever they may be, become tangible objects in a way rather than just being thoughts floating around in the head. This action of writing them down also helps in that it cements these goals more heavily into our neurology than they would otherwise be.
We should also take the opportunity to really feel the accomplishment of a goal before we start on it. We can always benefit from writing down vividly what steps we would take to meet a goal and how it would feel about meeting it finally. Doing so will give us a clearer mental image of what meeting the goal will entail and also motivate us to move forward by its depiction of the rewards to be found. Reflecting on where we would be after meeting the goal does allow us to connect the dots between the two places clearly and concisely.
Again, we should take the time to understand our motivations better. Writing these motivations down is the best method of mitigating their faults and analyzing why they are the way that they are. We should interrogate our goals in this sense: making sure that they are working in our own best interests and keeping them from going astray.
Once we have these goals written down in their more advanced and edited forms, we should then start to put them into action. If we have given ourselves the knowledge and direction needed to move forward, we can start taking premeditated steps toward what we want out of life. Momentum begets momentum, so without taking the initial steps toward meeting our goals we can never make any progress toward doing any of the things we want to do. It is after we have started that we ca
n continue onto greater things.
Sharing our goals holds us accountable for meeting them. All too many people fear to share their goals for this very reason, which is especially disappointing considering the fact that it is these people who would benefit the most out of having others expecting them to succeed, seeing how cognizant they are of other people’s perceptions of them.
Action plan for this chapter
Things to keep in mind:
Defining your purpose is an essential aspect to effective time management
Effective goal setting will help you clearly articulate your purpose
By sharing your goals, you end up holding yourself accountable for them
Things to try out:
Reflect on what your purpose in life is, that is, what you really want to be remember for
Write down three major, but realistic, goals that you would like to achieve within the next year
Find a “buddy” who can keep you accountable for your goals. They can help you stay focused especially when you aren’t.
Chapter Three: Using the E-3C system to plan your future
The E-3C system is a mode of personal operation most fitting for leaders who want to become more effective and efficient, though this mode can prove useful for non-leaders as well. Here, the “E” stands for energy, and the three C’s stand for capture, calendar, and concentrate.
Firstly, we have energy. We cannot increase the time that we have. While we can do certain things to give ourselves better odds of having more time overall, the number of hours that we have within a certain day remains fixed. What we can do, however, is increase our energy production, improving our focus and attention in its way. It is only with extra energy that we can produce extra results in working toward our goals. With these truisms inferred about energy, the only question that remains is that of how we increase our overall energy. The most effective means of doing this are getting enough sleep, eating healthy and energizing foods, exercising consistently, and pulsing and pausing throughout our days in order to maintain our ability to perform. These actions will have positive impacts on our physiological functioning throughout our days, which serves as the physical basis for all that we do.