Time Management for Results #ThrowbackThursday

Hello, I'm Brian Tracy, and welcome to this program on time management. There's probably no skill that's more closely correlated with success and achievement in every part of your life than the ability to manage your time well. It'll bring you to the attention of your superiors faster. It'll help you to get more done in a shorter period of time. It'll make you feel better about yourself. It'll lead to faster promotions, higher status, greater pay and everything. And in the time that we have together, I'm going to share with you some of the methods, techniques and ideas used by the most superior time managers, men and women in every area of endeavor in America. Time management is essential to your health as well, not just your productivity. But you only feel good about yourself to the degree to which you feel you're in control of your time and your life. In fact, the major reason for stress in America is a feeling of being out of control, A feeling of having too much to do and too little time to do it in. In this program, you're going to learn how to gain at least two hours per day. You may be able to increase your time management effectiveness by 50% or even double your output. So one of the most important things that you think about, and we'll come back to this in a few minutes, is what would you do if you could Increase your output by 25 or 50% per day? What would it mean to you if you could double your productivity, which you can if you just use these techniques over and over again? Well, there's four requirements for you to make these techniques work for you. We call these the four Ds. The first date is desire. It's want. You must have a burning desire to be effective at time management. The second d is decision. You must make a decision that you are going to become an expert in this subject. You are going to take this course, you're going to use these materials, you're going to practice them over and over again. Because what we have found is in the absence of a decision, nothing ever happens. You need a clear, unequivocal do or die, burn the bridges decision that this is a subject that you are going to master. The third D is discipline. You must discipline yourself to practice and repeat over and over again good time management techniques. In fact, we say that time management is self discipline in action. And the ability to discipline yourself more than anything else is going to determine your success in life. And the fourth D to become excellent in time management is determination. You must have the ability to persist and you must have the determination to keep on keeping at it, on at it long enough until you become very, very good in this field. But I promise you this, the payoff is tremendous. Because, you see, time management is really life management. Everything that you do to improve the quality of your time management will improve and enhance every part of your life. You can even say it this way. The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your time management. The quality of your life will be determined by the way you use your time, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, because your time is your life. So let's talk about a psychology of time management. How do we change our mindset in such a way that we become really, really effective at managing our time? Well, we start off with this very simple fact is that your beliefs equal your realities, the way that you manage your time. Now, in fact, every single part of your life is determined by your beliefs about that part of your life. If you believe that you are an excellent time manager, that you are effective and efficient and productive and a high achiever, then you will be. However, most people have funny beliefs about time management. Sometimes they believe they're good at it when they're not. But mostly they believe that if you manage your time too well, you are not as spontaneous or as natural as normal. The fact of the matter is, the better you manage your time, the more you can be completely spontaneous and free. So the starting point of a psychology of time management is, number one, is to recognize that your time equals your money and your time and money equals your life. That what we're talking about here is life management, but we're also talking about money management. You notice that you can exchange time for money and you can also pay money in order to buy time. But both time and money combined equal life or happiness. When we talk about time management, what we're talking about is having enough time so that we can be happier in every aspect of our life. We can be happier at our work, we can have more time for our relationships, more time for our health, more time for personal and professional development, more time for emotional and spiritual growth, and so on. So therefore, when you begin to look upon time, when your belief begins to shift so that you see time as the fundamental resource of life, then your attitude toward the way you use your time begins to change. Now, the second key in the psychology of time management is your self image. Now, what do we know about self image? We know that the way you see yourself, your inner mirror, determines your external performance. The way you see yourself and we have a phenomena called self image modification. What does that mean? It means that if you continue to see yourself and think of yourself and as an excellent time manager, your external performance begins to change and you begin to use your time more effectively. How do you change your self image? Well, one of the ways is by questioning and changing your self ideal. You see, our self image is largely formed by the people that we admire and look up to, whether we know them personally or read about them or something else. So a good question is, in terms of time management, who do you most admire and respect? Who would you most like to be like? Who do you feel is really well organized and very productive and gets a lot done? What you do is you begin using that person as your ideal and patterning your behavior after the most effective time manager that you know. And surprise, surprise, your own time management starts to get better. And this brings us to the most important part of the human psyche, which is your self esteem. Now, your self esteem has been defined many ways, but your self esteem is largely how much you like yourself, how much you respect yourself, how much you value yourself. And what we've determined is that underlying self esteem is what is called self efficacy. Self efficacy means that you like yourself to the degree to which you feel you are effective at performing what's important to you. So every single act of time management where you feel more effective and more capable and more competent causes your self esteem to go up. It causes you to like yourself more and makes you more effective, better, more personable, more relaxed, happier in every part of your life. So again, the fourth key in the psychology of time management is to see yourself as a poor time manager. To start off with and say, imagine right now that I am a poor time manager, that I'm not particularly good. And the reason for this is simply this many people, if they are convinced they already know something, make no effort to learn it. But if they're convinced that they don't know it and that there's an enormous amount to learn, they become hungry for knowledge. So imagine that you don't know very much about time management. Don't make the mistake that the unconscious incompetent does. This is the person who does not know and does not know that they do not know. This is a person who falls into the intelligence trap of the low performer. They convince themselves that they don't need to learn anything and they can't be taught anything. This is the truly hopeless case. So imagine you're a terrible time manager and that everything you're about to learn is vitally important to your success and your promotion. Number five, key in the psychology is look upon time management as a vehicle. Time management is a vehicle. It's a tool. It gets you from where you are now in your life to where you want to go in the future. Do you want to increase your income? Do you want to increase your level of performance and output? Do you want to increase the quality of your life, your position, your status? Time management is how you get there. Remember, time management is life management. It's the way you use your time in your life that will determine where you are now, where you'll be in a week, a month, a year, where you'll end up. So look upon it as a vehicle, look upon it as a calculator or a computer that you can learn to operate in order to get yourself to where you want to go faster and more efficiently. Number six is imagine that you can gain two hours per day. Two hours per day will translate into roughly 10 hours per week. And 10 hours per week will translate roughly into about 500 hours per annum. Ask yourself what you would do with a 25% increase in your productivity and performance. What would you do with the time? You see, what we know is the more you are clear about how you would use the time you would save, the more likely it is that you will engage in the activities that allow you to save the time. What would you do with a 25% increase in your time? Some people write books. Some people dramatically increase their performance and their output in their chosen career. Some people are more effective in other things that they do. So first of all, decide why you want the time. And the more you want the time, the more intense your desire to get that time, the more likely it is that you'll learn the skills. Number seven, the key to your rewards in life, both tangible and intangible, is the level of your service. You will always be paid in direct proportion to the value of your service to other people. So one of the very smartest things you can do is to always think in terms of how you can increase the value of your service. Because if you increase the value of your service, you'll increase everything else. Number eight is to remember the difference between failures and successes is simply this is that successes are more productive. They use their time well. Failures work the same number of hours and sometimes even more hours. But you know what happens is they're not very productive. They work at low value tasks. They get very little done. The fact of life is you'll always be paid for what you produce. If you want to earn more, achieve more, you must produce more. You must concentrate on what successful people do, which is producing things that are better and more valuable than others. Number nine is what is called the factory model. Now the factory model simply says that a factory has three, three parts. It has inputs, it has activities, and it has outputs. And your job is to produce outputs. You will always be paid for the quality plus the quantity of your outputs. And one of the most important questions to ask yourself all the time is what outputs have I been hired to accomplish? The great majority of people get tied up in activities and they spend all of their days engaging in activities, but they lose sight of the outputs. So the most productive people in America are intensely focused on outputs. Number 10, is that the key to motivation, to feeling terrific about yourself, to having high energy, to having high self esteem? To have a positive mental attitude is achievement. It goes back to self efficacy. But whenever you achieve something important, your motivation goes up. Now what does this mean? It means working on low value tasks, even if you complete them, gives you no bang for the buck. You only get motivation, you only get excitement and enthusiasm when you complete a high value task. Think in terms of high value because the psychological impact can be tremendous. Your most positive people are those who are producing and achieving at high levels. Remember that time management is a skill. It's a skill like anything else which is learnable. Just like you learned how to ride a bicycle or operate a computer, or work a calculator, or do mathematics, you can learn a time management skill by practicing repetition over and over again. And it'll serve you all the days of your life. By the way, one of the very best uses of time is to develop a skill that enables you to save time for months and even years. Number 12 is new habits of time management or anything else take about 21 days. So make the decision that you're not going to try to change the whole world. But as you go through this program, you're going to pick one time management habit at a time. And you're going to work on that until you have locked it in and then another, and then another. So when you launch a new habit, launch strongly. Never allow exceptions. Keep at it over and over again until it's locked in, until you feel uncomfortable if you don't do it. Number 13 is to remember this is that time management is your key to the future. It's your key to the future. Everything that you ever will be is determined by your ability to manage your time. Everything that you could ever want or dream of in life is going to be determined by how you utilize your time between now and there. Number 14. Remember that time management, as we said before, is a discipline. Time management is a series of habits that require repetition and practice. And the ability to manage your time is a measure of self control, self mastery, self discipline. It's a measure of your overall character. Every single act of self discipline in managing your time better increases your ability to discipline yourself in every other area. Every single time management skill that you learn increases your ability to use other time management skills. But every laxity in discipline in time management causes your level of discipline in other areas to decrease simultaneously. It's very, very important. Number 15. There's a direct relationship between the amount of control that you feel that you have in your life and the amount of freedom that you feel that you have. We have what we call the law of control, which says that you feel positive about yourself to the degree to which you feel you're in control of your own life. And you feel negative about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are out of control. We say that you have the same sense of freedom. The more you feel in control, the freer you feel and the more is your positive mental attitude. You feel more positive about yourself to the degree to which you feel you're in control and you feel negative. You have a negative mental attitude to the degree to which you feel you're out of control. And time management gives you control. Number 16. Remember, the only time you'll ever have is now. Don't worry about the past. Discard past labels with regard to time management. Focus on today, this hour, this minute. And manage your time now and the future will take care of itself. Number 17. Remember, the key to leadership is two things. The first is performance. The key to leadership is the ability to get the job done. And the second part of leadership is results. Intense result orientation. Number 18, we're getting to the end is set a good example. Imagine yourself as a role model for others. One of the very best ways to teach yourself time management is to look upon yourself as a role model. And number 19, remember this. The greatest motivator for becoming good at time management is that there are high payoffs involved. High payoffs in terms of earning more money, feeling more satisfied, being happier, having higher levels of self esteem, feeling terrific about yourself, coming to the attention of your superiors. When you become excellent in time management, your future is literally guaranteed. Third tip. Make your list of written tasks the night before. The final way for you to make sure you have a productive day is to make this list of goals and tasks the night before.