The Resilient Mind - How to Master The Art of Time Management - Brian Tracy

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

Brian Tracy is a Canadian-American motivational public speaker and self-development author. He is the author of over eighty books that have been translated into dozens of languages.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why is it that some people are more successful than others? Why is it that some people earn more money, they have better jobs, they get promoted more rapidly, they live longer, they have better health, they have happier relationships, and yet the great mass of men and women, by their own admission, live lives of quiet desperation. Now, no matter what fields you are in, no matter what field of endeavor, no matter what work, no matter what activity, there is one thing that all successful people have in common is that they are good time managers. And the reason they are good time managers is because they recognize that, that time management is life management, it is personal management. I have never seen an example in the hundreds, thousands of biographies and autobiographies I've studied of successful men and women where the individual has not been well organized and efficient and valued and use their times well. Successful people, winners use their time well, losers do not. The question is,

how badly do you want to learn how to manage your time well? How much effort are you willing to put into it because the key to time management is self-discipline. Probably the best way to put it is this, is time management is self-discipline in action and self-discipline is the key to success. So let's get started right now and with these 21 key ideas. The first idea, the most important of all, the core of time management, the axle around which the wheel of life turns is goals. What are your goals? What is it that you want to be or to have or to do? What is it that you want to accomplish in the next one, two, three, four, five years. The top three percent in every field have goals. The balance of the population have either very vague goals or no goals at all. So the

question you have to ask yourself is, who am I? Where am I going? What do I want to accomplish? And there are three major areas of goals that you have to think about. The first is your personal and your family goals. These are the reasons why you're alive. What do you want to accomplish for yourself and for your family? Write them down. define them clearly. The second set of goals that you have to ask is your business, your career, your financial, your material goals. What is it that you want to accomplish in the external world? Where do you want to make your contribution? The third type of goals you have to ask about are your self-development goals. And in my estimation, your ability and your willingness and your

tenaciousness in developing yourself is the key to accomplishing everything else. So here's three questions that you can ask. The first question is, what would you do? What would you set as a goal for yourself? What would you want to be or have if you just won a million dollars in the lottery? What would you do if you just won a million dollars? You've had all the time and money. You're completely free to decide to do anything you wanted. If you want a million dollars, what would you do differently?

Think about that, hold that in your mind. The second question is, what would you do if you just learned today that you only had six months to live? What if you only had six months to live? What would you stop doing? What would you do more of? Who would you spend time with? Now the answer to that question is very interesting because of what it tells you

is what you really value. What is really important to you? And what we have found is that self-esteem, satisfaction, happiness in life comes from getting your goals and your activities congruent with your values, with your priorities, with what you consider to be really important. Now here's the third question. The third question is, what one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail? If you knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that you could not fail, what one thing would you set as a goal for yourself? Because sometimes answering that question will tell you the one thing that you've been put on this earth to accomplish. One final point with regard to goals is that goals must be in writing. You must write them down. You must rewrite them. You must define them.

You must redefine them. The top 1% of successful people in every area have very clear, specific, written goals. And most of them carry their goals around with them. So let's go from goals as the core of success to point number two, which is organized plans of action. In an interesting study or a variety of studies that have been done, they've come to the conclusion that organized plans of action are the key to all success. In fact, action without planning is the cause of every failure. Action without planning is the cause of underachievement. Action without planning is the cause of frustration, time wastage, anxiety, stress, and

lack of success in life. So organized plans of action are critical. Now, what is an organized plan of action? An organized plan of action is where you take your goal, you take your objective, and you write out every single step that you're going to have to follow in order to accomplish that objective. You write it out and you list all those plans of action, all of those different activities, and you organize them together into a plan that you can then implement on a day-to-day basis. You decide which has to be done first and which has to be done last, which is more important, which is less important. In fact, the ability to set goals and to create plans for their accomplishment is the master

skill of success. If all you learned in life, all you learned in school was the ability to be a continuous goal setter and a continuous planner, day and night, planning, organizing, planning, writing, thinking about what you're trying to accomplish. You'll accomplish more in a year or two years than most people accomplish in 10 years or an entire lifetime. It has nothing whatever to do, by the way, with your intelligence. It hasn't anything to do with your education.

You know, half of the best educated people in the country are working for people who didn't finish high school or didn't finish college. I wrote an article for a major publication not long ago, which said that if you do not have clear goals for your life, you are condemned forever to work for those who do. You see, in life it's very simple. Either you are working toward the accomplishment of your goals or you're working toward the accomplishment of other people's goals. Very important. Now, the third point in excellent time management is analysis. Make a list. In fact, it's been discovered that if you make a list before you begin any task or job, you will immediately

improve your productivity by 25%. How do you make a list? Well, you make your list for the week the Sunday or the Saturday before, and you make your list for each day, the evening before, and you always work from a list. Now, why do you make it the evening before? The primary reason is if you make a list the evening before, the subconscious goes to work on your list while you're asleep. And during the night, the subconscious will solve problems and bring insights to you. You'll wake up in the morning with insights, ideas, intuitions, answers that will make your day more productive. Now, the second reason that you use a list is because if you don't have a list, it's like driving down the street in a car with no steering wheel. You just drift in every bump, every interruption, everything that happens sets you off in a different direction.

A list gives you a track to run on for the entire day. Another reason that you use a list is because with a list, you can analyze where you are. You can tell what is more important and what is less important. You can tell what is irrelevant, what can be delegated, what can be delayed, what can be put off. The most important reason for using a list, though, however, is this, is that when you use a list and you work down the list and you check things off, each time you check something off on a list, it gives you a feeling of accomplishment. It's been well said that happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal, that happiness is the step-by-step accomplishment of the tasks necessary to accomplish a worthy ideal.

And a successful life is based on a series of successful days, and a series of successful days is based on working on the list one step at a time. Okay, now the fourth principle for effective time management is to set priorities. It's interesting. there are many people who have goals vague or clear. There are many people who do make plans, but the biggest single problem in human life is setting priorities,

determining what is relevant and what is irrelevant. And in setting priorities, an Italian economist named Golfo Paredo in 1895 came up with a principle, which is called the Pareto Principle. We call it the 80-20 rule. It says that 80% of the value of what you do will be contained in 20% of the things that you do.

What does this mean? It means if you make a list of 10 things that you have to do today, you will find that two of those things are worth all of the others put together. Now, the difference between highly effective people, as Phil Paredo said, was that highly effective people work on the vital few versus the trivial many. The difference between the two is that ineffective people work on the trivial many. They work on things that are fun. They work on things that are easy. They work on little tasks, fun tasks, irrelevant tasks, but they keep putting off and delaying working on their major. tasks. So the key to success is always be asking this question, what is the most valuable use of my

time right now? What is the most valuable use of your time right now? I'm convinced that if all you did was organize your life and only work on the most valuable use of your time, that alone would be enough to make you an effective, efficient person. That alone would be enough to increase your productivity, your performance, your profitability, your rewards by 10, 20, 30, 40, even 50%. So always before you begin, ask yourself, is this the most important thing I could be doing? Is this my top priority task? Does this give me the highest payoff? Is this the most valuable use of my time? Now here is one simple test with regard to value. Ask yourself in approaching any task is what impact will the accomplishment of this task have on my future?

The futurity of decisions is the key to measuring the value. Most people spend as much as 80% of their time dealing with the problems and difficulties of the past, and only 20% dealing with the opportunities of the future. But successful people are always saying, what impact will this have on the future? Important tasks will always have an impact on the future. Unimportant tasks will only have an impact on the present and maybe even the past. past. So I say, what is the most valuable use of my time right now and what impact will this

have on tomorrow, the next day, and the future? It's one of the key ways to keep on track with regard to priorities. The fifth key idea in time management, which I am a fanatic on, is concentration, concentration, concentration. Many people come to me in my seminars and they said, well, I never learned how to concentrate, I can't concentrate, how do I learn to concentrate? Learning how to concentrate is absolutely essential to success. As a matter of fact, it is impossible for you to accomplish anything worthwhile in life without the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing at a time and stay with it until it's complete.

In fact, time and motion studies have shown that if you start a task and you put it down and you come back to it and pick it up and start it and put it down and come back to it and pick it up, that it will take you as much as 500% of the necessary time to do a task Then if you've picked it up and carried it through. Alec McKenzie, great time management expert, Alec McKenzie calls this single handling. Once you have made a list of what you have to do, organized your goals,

determined the highest and most valuable priority, then pick the most important thing and begin working on it and stay with it until it's finished. Now, people say, well, if I stay with this task until it's finished, I won't get anything else done. That doesn't matter. If it's the most valuable thing that you have to do, it's the most important thing that you could be working on.

Now, it's a wonderful thing. When you concentrate and work intensely on an important task, it gives you a feeling of energy and enthusiasm. When you complete an important task, your self-esteem goes up. You feel like a winner. You feel great about yourself. But if you work away on low-priority tasks, even if you complete them and do them well,

you don't get any bang for the buck. You don't get any excitement or thrill from doing something that's not important. As a matter of fact, most stress, anxiety, frustration in the world of work today It comes from working very hard on irrelevant tasks. Benjamin Trigo said, if it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right. And I think it was Drucker who said, the very worst thing in the world is to do very well what need not be done at all. So concentrate single-mindedly on one task at a time. Do first things first and do things one at a time.

Now here's a very simple system that you can use for the first five points that we've talked about, goals, plans, priorities, analysis, concentration. It is the ABC-D-E method. A is the things that you must do, top priority. B is the things that you should do. Second priority. C is the things, it would be nice to do if you've got all your A's and B is done. D stands for delegate, E stands for, eliminate.

So when you make a list, the first thing you do is you, A, B, C, what you must do, B, what you should do, C would be nice to do, and then delegate and eliminate the others. With goals, what you do is this. You make a list of all the things you'd like to accomplish in the next one to five years. And then you go down the list and write A-B-C.

what you'd love to do, what you'd like to do, what's not that important. Then you take your A-goals and you make A-1, A-2, A-3. In other words, your most important, second, most important, third-most-important. Then you take those A-goals, you transfer them to another sheet, and you make a list of all the things you're going to have to do to accomplish your goals. Then you A-B-C the list. And you say, what are the things you have to do? What are the things I should do?

What are things that would be nice to do to accomplish my goals? And then you put those into the goal list, and then you structure and schedule what you're going to do and implement. This is called the six-step method. Choose your goals, set priorities. Choose your activities, set priorities, schedule, and implement. If you just do that on a day-to-day basis, that alone can make you a great, great success in life.

The sixth key to time management is deadlines, deadlines and rewards. Now, psychologists have discovered that 85% of the reason that you or I do anything is because of what we expect to happen as a result. We call this consequences or logical consequences. 15% is because of what we've been told, but 85% is the consequences that we expect. So therefore, what you do is when you have an important task, the way that you motivate yourself to do the task,

is you structure a specific reward that you're going to get when it's finished. Let me give you an example. Sometimes people are very uneasy about making telephone calls, especially salespeople, so they put it off and they procrastinate. What we encourage them to do is give themselves a reward every time they make a phone call. Put a cup of coffee next to the phone. Every time you make a phone call, give yourself a sip of coffee. Take a cookie and break it up.

Give yourself a piece of cookie. In other words, train yourself the way you train a dog to have a positive consequence for everything that you do. So set deadlines. How do you set deadlines? First of all, when you set the goal, when you specify the task, set the deadline when it's going to be accomplished. always set the deadline with lots of room to spare and always try to finish before the deadline. Tell other people that you're going to finish by this deadline.

Promise others that you'll have your work done. It's a powerful way to act as what is called a forcing system. A forcing system is something that motivates you to stay at it. Because if you don't set a deadline and give yourself a forcing system, you fall into the trap of what is called Parkinson's Law. Now Parkinson's Law says that work expands to fill the time allotted for it. If you have two hours of work to do and eight hours of time, you will stretch that work over eight hours. Parkinson's law also says that work contracts to fill the time allotted for it.

If you have eight hours of work to do, and because of an emergency, you have to have it done in two hours, you will get it done in two hours. Highly effective people are always setting tight, stringent, disciplined deadlines on themselves, so they get more work done in a short period of time rather than less work done in a long time. period of time. Does this make sense? Very, very important. The next principle, number seven, is what is called the time log, which is writing down and keeping track of where your time is going. All effective people know where their time goes. Now let me tell you an interesting principle with regard to time management. It is this. Is the more important you are, the more successful you are, the more you can to measure out your time in minutes. The

The less successful you are, the more you tend to measure out your time in hours, days, days, and weeks. The average person thinks of terms of morning or afternoon. The above average person thinks of hours. The successful person thinks of half hours. The very successful person thinks in terms of minutes. They allocate their time carefully. Now, the only time way that you can do that is what?

Is you've got to keep track of what you're spending your time on. 60, 70, 80% of people are not aware of how they spend their time. They think they spend a lot of time in meetings. it turns out they spend a lot of time socializing. They think they spend a lot of time working on reports. It turns out they spend a lot of time on the telephone. They think they spent a lot of time doing important jobs. It turns out they spent a lot of time wasting time.

So keep a time log or just keep a sheet. And whenever you have a chance to look at your watch, write down what you're doing at the time. Or have somebody else watch what you're doing and feedback to you how you're spending your time. And then you have to ask is how I'm spending my time consistent with my major goals, my top priorities, my high payoff tasks.

and you'll find that it's not. And you'll also find that you feel frustrated and you feel stressed if you are not working your time on the things that you're supposed to do. So keep measuring your time, logging your time, analyzing your time, how am I spending my time? Am I spending my time on the things that are important to me? Am I spending my time on the things that give me a big payoff? And if you're not, keep adjusting and modifying your schedule.

A very interesting point with regard to the time log is that self-discipline is critically. You've got to discipline yourself and you've got to measure and analyze your time. every single day or you slip off it again. The next principle is the principle of procrastination. Overcoming procrastination is absolutely critical, but there's two kinds of procrastination. There's positive procrastination and negative procrastination. Positive procrastination is when you procrastinate on doing low-priority tasks. It is when you

procrastinate on doing things that do not contribute very much to your major goals. Negative procrastination is when you procrastinate on what is called your most important tasks. Now, there's An interesting point is that their tasks are either urgent, which means they have to be done now, or they are important, which means they don't have to be done now, but they have a very high impact on your future. We have a natural tendency to always do what is urgent rather than what is important. Important tasks are seldom urgent, and urgent tasks are seldom important. So you overcome procrastination with a very, very simple method. It was developed by W. Clement Stone when he was a young man.

He built a fortune of $500 million, and this is one of the central principles of his life. It's simply this. Every morning, when you get up, say over and over to yourself, do it now, do it now, do it now, I do it now, do it now. Whenever you have this tendency to procrastinate, program your subconscious mind with this automatic conditioned command. Do it now, do it now, do it now. The key to overcoming procrastination is to develop a sense of urgency. Be the kind of person who gets things done quickly.

Be the kind of person who launches fast on a task. One of the ways to launch fast on a task is to take the task and break it up, what is called salami slicing it. Slice a piece of salami. You don't try to eat a whole loaf of salami. You just eat it one slice at a time. Take your task and break it up into small pieces and do one piece at a time. Say over and over to yourself, do it now, do it now, do it now. Do you know that less than 2% of the population have a sense of urgency?

And that there is not an example of a successful person anywhere who does not have a sense of urgency, that if you just develop a sense of urgency when somebody gives you a task, that you get on it and do it fast, that alone will move you into the top ranks in a very short period of time. In a study done amongst 104 chief executive officers two years ago, they asked what would be the qualities that would put a person on the fast track in their career. Do you know the conclusion they came back to with two qualities? Number one, the ability to set priorities to choose what was relevant over what was irrelevant, and number two was the ability to get the job done fast.

If all you did was this, set priorities and get the job done fast, that alone would cause you to stand out from 80 to 90% of the people that you work with. Number nine, delegate. Delegate everything that you possibly can. Now, what does delegation mean? Delegation is very simple. What it means is this, is that whatever your hourly rate is, let us say your goal is to earn $50,000 a year.

If you work eight hours a day, that's $25 an hour. You got that? So you're a $25 an hour person. Now, the only way you can make $25 an hour is if you do $25 or more work. And the only way you can do $25 an hour or more work is if you take anything that can be done by anybody who earns less than you per hour, 20, 15, 10, 5, and so on, and delegate, outsource, have somebody else do it. The most valuable resource in the world today is productive time. And do not waste your productive time dropping off laundry, getting your car washed, mowing your lawn, cleaning your house, Do not waste your productive time doing things that you can hire people to do for five or ten dollars an hour

Use your productive time on on tasks that are more expensive of higher value Delegate everything that you possibly can in fact its general conclusion is this is that if you cannot delegate if you cannot get other people to do things of lower priority for you You cannot grow you cannot develop you cannot be successful You may be successful running a shoe shine stand but that's a about the limit of it. Delegation requires one key word. Clarity. The reason people don't delegate is because they've delegated and other people have dropped the ball. But the major reason why people don't fulfill the task that you've given to them is because of lack of clarity. So when you delegate here are the keys. First of all, think through what you want done. Write

it down. Second of all, pick the right person to do it. Don't give a major task to an incapable person. Third of all, make it crystal clear what you want done and when you want it done. And fourth of all, check, review, inspect, keep on top of it to make sure it is done on time. Never assume that anything will be done on time. I read something years ago. A great sign. It said that assumption lies at the root of all foul-ups. Never assume that anybody or anything will be done on time unless you check on it yourself. Okay, the next principle, number 10, is meetings. Meetings are an absolutely essential part of human life. We spend 75% of our time outside of our home and inside our home communicating with other people.

It's absolutely essential that we meet. Meetings are very, very productive uses of time, but 50 to 70% of meeting time is wasted. I read a statistic recently that says that the average person spends three to five years of their life in meetings. The average business person spends 25% of their day in meetings and is wasting more than half of that time. So here are some of the keys to using meetings as an effective business tool. Number one is have a purpose for a meeting. Make sure that it's crystal clear at the beginning what the purpose of the meeting is. If you are the person organizing the meeting, when you start the meeting, you say the purpose of this meeting is.

And if you are not, when you sit down, you ask the person who is chairing the meeting, what is the purpose of this meeting? You look upon a meeting as an investment. Take the time, the dollar value of the time of each of the people at the time, table and look upon it as an investment of that many dollars in time. Best way to save time in meetings is what? Is don't go at all. If you can possibly avoid a meeting, don't go to it. If there's no need for you to be there, get the report on what happened later. Second thing we do when you do go to meetings is make sure that there's an agenda. An agenda is like a list, it's a tractor run on. If the chairperson doesn't have a list, offer to put together a list

or an agenda for them, even if you just write it out and photocopy it, it's better than no list at all. Deal with the most important items first. When you have finished your contribution, ask if you can be excused, and start and stop the meeting on time. Now, what's the biggest time waster in meetings? In my estimation, it's two things. The meeting goes off track, and the conversation becomes irrelevant. Or second of all, people wait until the latecomer shows up. So here's the basic rule with meetings.

It's always assume that the late comer is not coming at all and start the meetings punctually. Start and stop the meetings at the specified time. I say the meeting will start at 8 and at 9 o'clock, wrap up the meeting. Fair? Okay, that's how you handle meetings, and there's a lot more to it than that, but your skill, your ability to work well in meetings is a critical part of good time management. Number 11 is interruptions. The biggest single time wasters in the world of work within the office are interruptions.

And the two major types of interruptions are telephone and walk-in visitors, people that just drop in to socialize and to talk to you. So how do you deal with these interruptions? Let's talk about the telephone first. The way that you deal with telephone interruptions is to remember this. When you were a child, the telephone was where you got phone calls from your boyfriend or your girlfriend. Today, we still are conditioned to have an irresistible urge to answer the phone. As a matter of fact, it's been demonstrated that you can get through to people on the phone

that you could never get too physically because people cannot resist answering a ringing phone. You have to discipline yourself to remember that if it's important enough, they'll phone back. So here's some of the things you do with telephone calls. First of all, have your calls held. Tell somebody you're going to be in a meeting, you're going to be working, and have all your calls held for two or three hours, and then phone back all at once.

Second of all, with regard to interrupt it, if you don't have somebody to hold your calls, do what I do when I work at home, I unplug the telephone. People say, well, what if it's important? If it's important, they'll call you back. Another thing that you can do if you can't stand unplugging the telephone is put on an answering machine and have the calls captured with an answering machine

and then call them back at your own leisure. But don't be a slave to the telephone. The next principle with regard to interruptions is people. People, most people are time-wasters. That's the basic rule. Most people are time-wasters. They waste your time. They waste their own time.

They waste other people's time. And you have to be alert to it. So when a person comes in and they want to talk, they drop in without notice. The very fastest way to get rid of a person is to stand up when they walk in. If you stand up and stay standing up, they won't sit down. And you can leave them out by saying, there's one more thing before you go, and then just say it and lead them to the door.

If necessary, and I've had to do this on occasion, a talkative person comes into my office, I get up, and I start toward the door and I say, I was just leaving, and I leave, and the person follows me out and goes on somewhere to bother somebody else, and then I go back into my office. If people call and say, have you got a minute? Say, no, not right now, could it wait until this afternoon? Do you know what they'll say? They'll say, sure.

In 90% of cases, they'll forget why they came in the first place. So control interruptions, the interruptions and the ringing telephone are two major sources of stress in the world of work. Now, another key management principle, and in management, in time management, in personal management, this is essential. It's what it's called key result areas. In other words, it is the key results that you have been hired to accomplish for your business. Even if you own your own business, you are still subject to key result areas. And the way that you find out your key result areas is you ask yourself, this question over and over again, why am I on the payroll? Why are you on the payroll? What

have you been hired to accomplish? Not due, not your tasks and activities, but what results are expected of you? You ask yourself this question, the accomplishment of what results is going to lead to my promotion? How am I going to earn more money? What results do I have to achieve in order to get a raise in salary? What results does not? my company expect of me? What contribution am I expected to make? And then you say, what are my key results? Another way of looking at it is to remember that every job has a series of functions. And there are secondary functions and primary functions, and they're what is called core functions. So you have to ask, what are the core functions of your job? What are the goals of your job?

And many people say to me, well, I'm not sure. Do you know what the major reason for stress in the American workplace is today is people don't know what's expected? I would say 80 or 90% of people out there do not know what's expected. They're not sure why they're on the payroll. And here's a very simple technique for it. Go to your boss with a list of everything that you do and ask your boss to organize it in order of priority. Say what's number one, what's number two, what's number three?

What's A, B, or C? Help him or her organize your list in order of priority and give it back to you. I promise you you you'll be surprised. But why is it that you absolutely have to know why you're on the payroll? It's simply this, is that you cannot perform excellently, You cannot do superior work. You cannot be promoted. You cannot get a raise unless you are doing and doing well the key things that your boss has hired you to do.

Have you got me on that? Or have I got you on that. Key result areas are critical. And you have to know every single day. In fact, you know something? One of the major sources of frustration in work is to be working very hard on something and being vaguely uneasy because you know it's probably not important. So keep clear channels of communication with your boss.

And if you supervise other people, have them bring to you a list of everything that they do, and you organize it in order of priority, and make it clear to every person what their contributions expected to be. The next one number 13 is batching tasks. It's interesting that there is what is called in the world of work a learning curve. A learning curve says this. It says when you do a job the first time, it takes you the most amount of time to do it because you're learning how.

The second time it takes less. The third time it takes less. The fourth time it takes less. In fact, learning curve theory says that you can decrease the amount of time by as much as 80% if you do the same job over and over again over a period of time. So batching your tasks is a major time management tool. What does it mean? It means that if you're going to make phone calls, make all your phone calls at once.

Have your calls held? Make them all at once. If you're going to do invoices, do all the invoices at once. If you're going to do correspondence, all the correspondence at once. If you're going to read and catch up, read everything at once. It's been found that if you do this on a regular basis, you'll get so much more done by doing it and concentrating on batches of tasks than if you did not.

So batch your task whenever you possibly can. Imagine what most people do is they do a little bit of telephone call, a little bit of correspondence, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and they have no learning curve at all. Each one takes the maximum amount of time. So batch your tasks, put groups of tasks together, at once and do them at once. Okay, the next principle is neatness. It's an interesting thing because you went into people all the time. I run to people in my office who say,

it's okay if my desk is messy, I know where everything is. Now you have to understand one thing, is intelligent people, people with good memories, can very often remember where everything is. But it just means that they are using their intelligence to combat the inefficiency of neatness. every single study that has been done says this, that if you will just clean up your work environment, so it is completely neat and everything is off of your desk or your workplace, except the one thing you're working on, that will increase your productivity by 20 to 40%. People have a difficult time understanding this, but I have tested it, I've worked with a messy desk, I've worked with a clean desk, and I tell you, I promise you you you will be astonished at the difference it makes.

Now, how do you clean it up? Well, it's very simple. It's a very simple way of cleaning off a desk. called the TRAF system. The TRAF system has four letters. T stands for toss. Remember that in time management, your waistbasket is your best friend. So toss it out, throw it away. R stands for refer, which means it's not relevant to you, so if you refer it to somebody else, A stands for action. And what you do is you take a file folder and you put it into an action folder, so it's out of the way. And F stands for file. File it away, do something with it. But before you file,

always ask this question, what would happen if I didn't have this document? What would happen if I never could find this again? And if it's not particularly serious, throw that away too. Once you've done that, T-R-A-F, you've tossed it, referred it, filed it, or put it in an action file. Once you've done that, then you start with your action file and you work through it. Neatness is important. Clean your desk, clean your workplace. Even in the kitchen, you'll find that if you take one thing out and use it and put it away

and take another thing out, you'll get far more done in a short period of time. Now, here's the rule. If you're not using it, put it away. If you're not using it, put it away. Even if you have to take the stuff off your desk and your credenza and put it on the floor, do it. Your briefcase is your workplace if you are on the road. If you're a salesperson, if you're moving around, make sure your briefcase is neat and orderly and has everything that you need and nothing more than you need. Neateness is critical to productivity.

Here's the final point. In a study that was done recently, 98% of senior executives said they would not promote a messy person, that they would not give a messy person greater responsibilities. That if you are messy, no matter how much you kid yourself, everybody around you concludes that you are inefficient, undependable, unreliable, and incompetent. And even if you do the job well, they think it's just an accident. So be neat. Stand back from your desk and look at it and say,

what kind of a person would work at a desk like this? Stand back and look at your car. Say what kind of a person drives a car like this? Look at your workplace. your briefcase, look at your home and say, what kind of a person lives here or works here, and you'll find that what will come to you is messy, inefficient, incompetent, disorganized, and so on. Neatness is critical to time management. Number 15 is what is called getting chunks of time.

Interesting studies. Over and over they have found that important work requires chunks of time to do. What is a chunk of time? A chunk of time is 60, 90 minutes, two hours. In fact, it's been found that most serious work cannot be done in less than 60 or 90 minutes. So when we look at the work styles of highly effective people, successful people, the ones who make the most money, the ones who graduate or are promoted the most rapidly, you find that they have developed a habit of cutting out blocks of time where they can work without interruption. Now, here's an example. There's several examples that you can use. One of the examples and one of the ways that I do it is that I get up early in the most. Sometimes I get up at 5 a.m. and I'll work for two or three solid hours.

You can get an entire day's work done in three uninterrupted hours. As a matter of fact, again, we have found that it's impossible for you to do creative work and administrative work at the same time. If you have creative work to do, reports to do, proposals, anything that requires a sustained period of time to put together, you cannot do it at the desk when the telephone is ringing and people are coming in. You cannot do administrative and creative work to do it. and creative work together. You have to break them apart. In the office, you do administrative work and you cut away chunks of time for the important stuff that affects your future.

One of the things that I do is I come into the office an hour early. I can clear off in one hour. I can do half a day's work. Another thing that you can do is stay at the office at lunchtime. Work at your desk at lunchtime sometimes is the very best time to work. And by the way, if you work from 12 to one and then go out for lunch, you'll find that you can get in anywhere, that you don't have any weight, that you can get it. get in and out and back to work quickly. A third is stay late. Sometimes just working from five to seven, you'll do an entire day's worth of work. By the way, with regard to travel, I travel a lot and more and more people travel by air,

one uninterrupted hour on an aircraft, if you're properly organized with all of your work in your briefcase, is worth three hours in your office. So if you're going to travel, be sure that you take the work necessary so that you can work, if you like a workhorse once you get on that plane. I always try to sit next to a window. If you sit next to a window, you can bury yourself in your work.

You have no interference, people not walking over you, but you can get an enormous amount of work done in a plane. As a matter of fact, much of this course that we're talking about today was done on airplanes. Number 16 is to use what we call transition time. Remember this is that you will always be paid in life for the value of your contribution. And if you want to earn more, you must learn more. And the most successful people are those who are continually taking in new information. continually learning more, continually taking every opportunity to keep current with their profession

and to advance their knowledge. In fact, the knowledge in every single field today is doubling every five to seven years, which means that whatever you're doing, in order to stay even, your knowledge has to double every five to seven years. Now, it's simple to do this. The basic rule is this. You should or you must spend an hour every day investing in your own mind, investing in yourself. You must take an hour every day and read and study and take notes. If you're doing less than an hour a day, you're falling behind. If you do two hours a day, you put yourself on the side of the angels. Now here's some of the ways that you can get this extra learning time, this extra working time, this extra personal growth time. First and most important of all is driving or traveling to and from work.

If you drive, the average driver today drives 12 to 25,000 miles a year. That's the equivalent of 500 to 1,000 hours a year. Of course, if you're on the Los Angeles freeways, it's about $1,500 to 2,000. That is the equivalent of 12 to 25, 40-hour work weeks. That's the equivalent of three to six months of work weeks. That's one to two university semesters. You know, the average person, of course, is not you, because the people who watch videotapes like this are usually the cream in any organization or any society.

The average person sits there and listens to the radio all the time. You can become one of the best educated people in your profession simply by listening to audio cassettes going to and from work or to and from errands. Now, another very important part of transition time is coffee breaks. You know, the average person takes two coffee breaks a day, 20 minutes each, 40 minutes a day. 40 minutes a day times five days a week is 200 minutes. 200 minutes times 50 weeks a year is 10,000 minutes. 10,000 minutes is 166 hours. 166 hours is over four full 40-hour weeks.

Now, what does that mean to you? It means that if you just decide that you're going to read on a particular subject at your coffee breaks for the next year, you will be an expert on that subject before the year is out. Just when you sit down with coffee, make sure that you have something to read, whether it's time management or goal setting or personal communications or your profession. If you wanted to be an outstanding salesperson, if you just read on your coffee breaks 20 minutes of the morning, 20 minutes on the afternoon, and applied what you learned, you could double your income in less than a year.

And most people sit there in their coffee breaks and they read the sports page and they don't realize that their life is passing them by. Well, another key element of transition time is lunchtimes. The average person takes an hour a day. An hour a day times 250 working days a year is 250 hours. 250 hours is six full weeks of time that you spend eating lunch. If you just read at your lunchtime and something that will help you grow in advance in your career, if you did nothing but coffee breaks in lunchtime, you become one of the best educated people in society. within three to five years. And you know what the average person does? They waste this time.

Another important part of transition time. By the way, if you read magazines, instead of carrying magazines, what you do is you read a magazine, tear out all the articles, put it in a file. And whenever you're traveling, keep that file with you. You're sitting waiting for something. You're waiting in a waiting room. You're taking a trip. You have appointments that are canceled. Just pull out your file and keep current. Remember, keep taking in more information. Use those, what are called gifts of time. These are gifts of time that are given to us by God, and we can do anything we want with them. But high-performing human beings,

use those gifts of time as though they were precious. And low-performing human beings do not. Which do you want to be? Okay, the next is what we call telephone. You know, the telephone is interesting. Telephone is an essential part of our lives, but as we said a little bit earlier, we are conditioned from our teenage years

to look upon the telephone as a social tool. It's something that we look forward to getting onto because we associate it with romance and fun and communications with people that are important to us. As adults, however, we have to change our thinking 180 degrees. We have to realize the telephone is a business tool. The telephone is a business tool. It's like a computer. It's like a typewriter.

It's like a photocopier. It may have other uses, but it's a business tool. So here's the rule with using the telephone. Get on and get off fast. See how fast you can get on and off the phone. Control your telephone calls, as we said before. other people. Let us your telephone calls get batched so that you can call them back and you control the calls. Call back at their lunch times, call back at the end of the day. Call back so you

control the time. Now when somebody calls you and you take the call, here's the key question. Always ask, what can I do for you? They'll always have a tendency to say, hi, how are you doing? How's things going? How's the weather out there? You say, fine, what can I do for you? And get straight to the point of the phone call. Another thing that you can say is how can I help you. But make it very, very clear that this is a business call. If you're going to be making phone calls, look upon a phone call as a meeting by wire. And what you do is you make an agenda for the meeting. What many people do, if you talk to people all the time, keep a file on that person. And when you think of calling that person, take out the file and work on your agenda.

Go down the agenda. When you completed the agenda, you say, thank you very much. I'll let you go now. I know you're busy and hang up the phone. What do you do with talkative people? Talkative people, You say, excuse me, I've got another call coming, I've got to run. If that doesn't work, you say, my boss is calling me. If that doesn't work, hang up the phone in the middle of the conversation, as though the phone line has been cut off. A person probably won't even pay any attention to it because they're so used to being cut off by other people.

Remember this, is that people are time-wasters, and the great majority of people have no goals, they have no priorities, they have no plans, they have no concern about becoming successful, and they think that you are the same. They think because their time isn't worth anything, that your time isn't worth anything also. So be very alert to that. By the way, one final point. When you have telephone meetings, keep good notes. I heard a very smart man say that the power is on the side of the person with the best notes. I have lost thousands of dollars because I have agreed to something on the telephone. I have not documented it. The person has come back to me and said, you agreed

to something else, and they had it written down in their files, and I couldn't argue. So when you're on the telephone, write. One final point is always have a pen, always have a pencil, always have a pad. Never pick up the telephone without a pen in your hand. The most incredible thing I hear over and over again is when I call people and I try to leave a message, the person's, their voice drops and they say, oh, oh, just a minute, I'll go and see if I can find a pencil. And the phone goes clunk. And the person goes away and they come back and they say, oh, geez, this pen won't work. just a minute and the phone goes clunk and they go away again. If a person ever answers the phone without a pen in their hand, you know, this person is going nowhere in life. It's as simple as that.

My own personal opinion, of course. The next key is punctuality. One of the most important things you can get in terms of reputation is a reputation for being punctual, which means being on time. My friend Joel Weldon says it very well. He says, if you're not early, you're late, that there is only one, one minute period in any appointment when you're exactly on time. And so if you aren't there early, you're there late. Less than 5% of people in America are punctual. Less than 5% of the population is punctual. And those people stand out.

As a matter of fact, if you want to stand out from the average person, all you have to do is develop a reputation for punctuality. Pretty soon people say, boy, he or she sure is punctual. He or she sure is punctual. Let me tell you something about punctual people. If you ask a person, what do you think about so-and-so, who is very punctual.

They will say, I think this person is more competent, more reliable, more dependable, more intelligent, more valuable, and more likely to be promoted and given greater responsibilities than the person who is late all the time. The person who's late all the time is considered unreliable, sloppy, undisciplined, a poor time manager, and not capable of greater responsibilities.

Why is it that people are not punctual? Two reasons. One is they don't realize how important it is. It never occurs to them that when you you are late for an appointment, you are insulting the person who has agreed to see you at that time. If you are in sales and you're late for appointments, you can forget it. I had an interview with a person the other day who I was hiring for a very expensive position. She showed up to an appointment 15 minutes late. A person who comes 15 minutes late to the first appointment, the basic

rule is this is never hire a person who comes late to an interview. The person who comes late to an interview is sending you a flash. It's a signal that this person is unreliable, incompetent, undependable, and if you let them get away with it, you're in for trouble. I'm just passing on that. Punctuality, coming back to that. Lombardi, Vince Lombardi, the Green Bay Packers, had what he called Lombardi time, which meant 15 minutes early. If he said to his team, be here, Lombardi time, that meant be there 15 minutes early.

Develop the reputation for being punctual. And finally, one other thing is if you are a superior and you have subordinates or you have people working for you reporting to you, don't keep them waiting. If you agree to see them at 3 o'clock, don't keep them out there spinning their wheels standing around. It's one of the worst insults that you can do to people. And if I could just come back one more time with regard to communications, you know one of the great time wasters in life? This is aside from the points that we're talking about is lack of concentration, distraction, fatigue. It's not paying attention.

How many times have you had problems, serious problems, because you had a conversation with a person and they agreed to do something or you agreed to do something? and one or the other of you forgot all about it, didn't remember it wasn't paying attention, it wasn't done, it cost an enormous amount of money. How often does that happen to you? Paying very close attention is a powerful time management tool. If somebody comes in to see you, cut off all phone calls, close the door, clear your desk, and concentrate single-mindedly on a person. Ten minutes of concentrated conversation will clear up more than one hour of interrupted conversation.

Pay attention, take notes. Now, number 19 is called work simplification. Do you know that at the turn of the century in the United States, it took 50% of the American population to feed, working on the farms, to feed the other 50% living in the cities? Today, it takes less than 3% of the farm population to feed the other 97% in the cities and half of the world besides. The reason for that is because of mechanization, systematization, simplification of the agricultural process. As a matter of fact, every great advance that has been made since the Industrial Revolution, has been toward simplification. Always be looking for ways to do tasks faster, easier, cheaper,

quicker, better. Always be looking for ways to do them faster. As a matter of fact, over and over again, individuals have put their careers on the fast track by finding ways to streamline existing processes. Now here's a couple of other ideas which have been very useful to me in terms of getting more done in a short period of time. Here are the six, maybe seven key ideas. If you want to get more done in a given period of time, or if you want to get more done, period, you can do one, you can work longer. In other words, you can spend more hours working, but that's not a great idea because your productivity starts to drop off and you start to make mistakes, but you have to come back and correct and so on. Number two is you can work faster. You can get more done

within a short period of time. Number three is you can do fewer things, but do more important things, do higher payoff tasks in the same period of time to increase your productivity. Number four, is you can do things that you are better at. One of the qualities of leaders is that leaders, exceptional people are always concentrating their time on doing what they do best. So ask yourself, what is it that I'm the best at? What is it that I do the easiest? You can sometimes dramatically increase your productivity

simply by concentrating on where you're good. Another thing that you can do is make fewer mistakes. You know, there's an old saying that there's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it over? If you make fewer mistakes, you will get far more done within a certain time, within that time period. And the last thing which many people miss is do things together. Teamwork. Putting a group of people together to work on a complex project can sometimes get the project done in two hours,

whereas it would take another individual eight or nine or ten hours. So do things together. Work as teams with other people. Those are the keys. But work simplification means always finding faster, easier, newer, quicker, cheaper, more efficient ways to do what you're doing. Number 20 is the magic word. The magic word in time management is no. Learn to say no to activities, tasks, responsibilities, and obligations that do not contribute to the most important goals that you have set for yourself. The word no is magic.

And the place and the time to use the word no is early and often. It's like the wastebasket. Wastebasket is your best friend when you're sorting the mail. You know the average person spends eight months of their life sorting junk mail, reading through junk mail, absolutely phenomenal, recent study. It's incredible how much of your life is taken up by people who ask you to do things and you do it because of a sense of obligation. Let me tell you, as I said to you before, most people do not value their time so they don't value yours. Now, how do you deal with a person who you know, who you like, who you respect, who ask you to do something? Very simple. When they ask you to do something or work on a committee or take on a project,

Ask, especially if you have the, and it's not if your boss, but especially if you have control, is say, let me think about it and get back to you. There's an old saying that delay is the cruelest form of denial. If they press you for a decision, say, I cannot make a decision. Now, I have to think about it. And after you thought about it for 24 hours, call them back and say, I've thought about it. I simply don't have the time. But thank you very much for thinking about me and get on with the rest of your life.

You know what Nancy Reagan says? Nancy Reagan says, just say no. Now in time management, the word no is one of the most powerful of all words. It'll save you hours, weeks, months of working on projects that contribute nothing to your goals. And finally, number 21 is balance. In all of time management, you have to ask this question is, what is the purpose of managing your time? What is the purpose of getting an extra two or three hours a day? And the purpose is to enhance and improve the quality of your life. And the most important things in a person's life are their health, their peace of mind, and your relationships. In fact, the quality of your relationships is the true measure of your quality of life.

So take time to invest time in your relationships. Spend time with the people who are close to, your spouse, your loved ones, your parents, your children. Take time because that's what life is. Life is managing your time so that you can do the things that are most important to you. We start off in life thinking, boy, if I'm really successful at my job, then I'll be able to do all of these things for myself and my family. And what happens is we lose sight of that goal and we become totally preoccupied with the job. Do you know how much time the average working parents spends talking to their child in America today? 30 seconds per day.

Do you know how much time the average couple spends talking together? Intimate communication? Four minutes, according to the recent research. Very, very important. If you want to be successful in life, you've got to be sure what your priorities and values are. And your highest value must be the people that you love and the people who love you. They must be your help. They must be your energy. They must be your peace of mind. They must be your emotional and spiritual development. They must be the completion of you as a human being. So when you are using all these time management techniques, remember that the purpose of using these time management techniques is to enhance the overall quality of your life.

Ask again, what would you do if you only had six months to live? What would you do if you only had six months to live? Who would you spend your time with? Where would you go? What would you want to do? What would be important? What would be unimportant? If you ask that question over and over again,

you'll have a tendency to keep your life in balance. Everything in moderation. Now, if I could just summarize by saying two or three quick things, the essence of success in time management is goals. The key to goals is to write them down and to make organized plans for their accomplishment. The key to those organized plans is to set priorities and determine what is more important and what is less important. And always concentrate in the most valuable use of your time. The key to concentrate on the most valuable use of your time is to stay at the task until it's finished.

Persevere without distraction or diversion. Keep at it. Hammer, hammer, hammer, until your most important tasks are finished. And finally, finally develop that sense of urgency. Do it fast. Do it now. Fast tempo is essential to success. Fast tempo goes hand in hand with energy, with happiness, with enthusiasm, with self-esteem. So make crystal clear what you want to do. Make crystal clear the steps and start working on those steps and do something every day to move you toward the most important goals of your life. And if you do that, you will be an excellent time manager, an excellent personal manager,

an excellent life manager. You will have a great, great life.