Brian Tracy argues time is the most precious, perishable resource and that most people suffer "time poverty" by reacting to external demands rather than deciding what matters. Personal time management begins with clarifying three sets of goals—family/personal, business/career, and personal development—and focusing on highest-value activities so "hard time" (work) does not crowd out "soft time" (family). He gives three recurring questions to prioritize tasks and closes with a call to action to identify and act on your highest-value activities.
Chapters
Why your life depends on Time Management Lack of clarity is the number one time waster. Always be asking, what am I trying to do? How am I trying to do it? 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. Instead, 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. 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. The very act of taking a moment to think about your time before you spend it will begin to improve your personal time management and increase your productivity immediately. Many people think that time management is only a business tool, like a calculator or a cell phone, or that it's something that you use to increase productivity and eventually be paid more money. However, time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core skill on which everything else in life depends on. 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 you can exert a tremendous amount of control over how you use your time and increase productivity throughout the day in your personal life. Personal time management begins with you. It begins with your thinking through what is really important to you in life. 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 family and personal 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. Your outer life will be a reflection of your inner life. If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and 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 that, you must go to work on yourself and and never stop. 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. There are three key questions that you can ask yourself continually to keep your personal 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's really important to me to do in this situation? Then make sure that what you're 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 or satisfaction of all the things that I could be doing at one time? What are the things 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 your life so that you are doing one thing, the most important thing, at every moment. Personal time management enables that you 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 now? We'd love to hear from you. So our question today is, what are your highest value activities? Leave a comment below and we'll be sure to follow up with you. Thanks for watching. And as Brian says, if you want to change your future, take action and take action now.
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