John Assaraf says the problem isn't time, it's what you do with it. Highly productive people focus on the critical few tasks using Pareto's principle, set tight self-imposed deadlines to force focus, and stop confusing busyness with actual productivity. List your tasks, prioritize by impact, and schedule the highest-impact work first.
Chapters
Today we are going to be talking about this thing that you call time, alright? It does not stand still unless you're in a really great meditative state. Here's what I would like you to do. Before I get started, do me a favor, hit the share button and just let's get as many people as we can onto this. Today. I'm helping you help me spread the love and help me spread the word. So hit the share button, That'll be great. Okay? You've got 8, 10, 12, 15 hours in a day to get shit done. And most people are wasting time. And this is your precious asset. Not the hourglass, not the sand, but time. Bruce Lee said, if you value your life, you will value your time. Because time, time is what makes up your life. So let's talk about the concept of how to achieve more in one day than you do in a week. Here is something to consider. We all have from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed time, a block of time, and it's comprised obviously of our day, is comprised of 86,400 seconds in a day. Now here's what I want you to think about. If somebody gave you $86,400, okay, for every 24 hour period of time, number one, would you be happy? Would you like, yeah, I just won the lottery, $86,400 to start off every day, wouldn't you invest that money wisely? And what if they also said to you that if you don't spend the $86,400 in you lose it, it's gone forever? How many of you would spend those $86,400 all the way to the end and maximize it? If you would spend it, just hit the like or the love button. Because I would spend it as phenomenally as I could. And so here's the thing to remember. Everybody has the same amount of seconds. Everybody has 86,400 400 seconds. And so you don't have less or more time than anybody else. And that takes me to the first point that I want to share with you. And that was there's no such thing as time management. You cannot manage time. The only thing that you can learn how to do better is manage what you do in time. Now, if you analyze or do any research on highly productive people, they are two, three, four, five times more productive in what they do than other people. Everybody, and I mean everybody is freaking busy. Busy with friends, busy with family, busy with kids, busy with a job, busy with their career, busy doing shit Some of it's productive, some of it is not. Write this down. Okay, somebody type this out. Don't confuse activity with productivity. Write it down for me. Somebody, you know, write it down. Don't confuse activity with productivity. Okay, so what does that mean? It means that most people are doing busy work and they're confusing. Thank you, Sharina. They're confusing being busy and being tired at the end of the day with getting the most important things done. So that's why I said there is no such thing as time management. The only thing you can manage is what you do in the block of time while you're awake. When you create an action item or a list of what you need to do and you have a deadline to achieve it, your brain actually goes into a hyper focused mode when you create self imposed deadlines and urgency factors. So when we teach our clients, whether they're employees or homemakers or business owners or doctors or lawyers, makes no difference. Or one of the things that we teach them in addition to having a goal and in addition to having things that need to get done, is to create a deadline. There's something called the Pareto principle that says that if you focus on the 20% of the things that are the most important and you set deadlines to achieve them, you will get your brain to focus on getting those achieved. So in addition to something called the Pareto principle, there's also something called Parkinson's Law, when you combine the two Pareto's principle and Parkinson's Law to say, I'm going to make a list of everything that I need to get done, but I'm going to prioritize the things that are the most important, the most urgent. And I'm going to put those onto my calendar to get them done first, not last. Not after I've done all my busy work, not after I've been on the phone, I've returned 200 emails, I've texted 16 friends, I've played on Facebook for two hours. No, no, no, no. That's what average people who are busy do versus above average people who are productive do. You have to change your mind, shift the way you're thinking, thinking about your time and what you do. So rule number one is you make a list of everything you need to do, everything you need to do for your personal life, everything you need to do for your professional life, everything you need to do for family, for friends, for lovers, for whatever. Make a whole list. And if you want to categorize it, okay, then categorize it by health, wealth, Relationships, career, business, finances, charity, etc. Then you prioritize it as to which one of these is the most important, the most urgent, the highest impact activity that I must get done today. That is the Pareto principle way of planning. Now Parkinson's law, where does that come in? Well, there's another law called Parkinson's law that says, well, when you give yourself a timeline in which to get stuff done, you will basically force yourself, you will squeeze yourself to focus on the amount of time you have and get done in the amount of time that you allow yourself. What do most people do? They have general lists that are not categorized, they're not prioritized, and then they have open ended time frames in which to get them done. Which doesn't create something called. Neural tension. You want to basically, you know, like squeeze your brain a little bit to focus on the high impact and maybe high income periods of time that will cause you to do less, but you'll do more important stuff to completion at the highest level. Let me repeat this. Do less of the high important, high income, high health, high relationship, high whatever stuff first in a shortened time frame to squeeze your window of how much time you give yourself to get things done. So then you're working with Pareto's principle and, and Parkinson's law to be able to use your brain in the right way and your emotions in the right way, to be able to be highly focused, to be able to focus on the critical few instead of the trivial many. Let me repeat or write this down. Focus on the critical few versus the trivial many. We all have so much shit to do, but they're not all critical. So we have to take our time and become better at managing the events that we put into time.
