TIME POWER (Part I)
By Brian Tracy
“Success is focusing the full power of all you are on what you have a burning desire to
achieve.” ( Wilferd A. Peterson)
Thank you for reading this. I know how busy you are, and even reading information on Time Management is something that you seldom have the time to do. I promise you that in the pages ahead you will learn more practical and immediately usable ideas, methods, strategies and techniques for getting more done faster than you ever have before. When you learn and apply these powerful, practical techniques, you will dramatically improve the quality of your life in every area. Throughout the ages, the greatest minds of all time have dedicated themselves to answering the question “How shall we live in order to be happy?” Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, wrote that the primary motivation of human beings is the
“pleasure principle,” the constant striving toward the things give us pleasure and that make us feel good about ourselves and our lives.
In the final analysis, we all want to be happy. We spend most of our lives searching for the combination of lifestyle ingredients, relationships, work, money, sports, hobbies and other activities that will give us the deep down feeling of happiness and well being we seek. This information on Time management is designed to give you hundreds of valuable ideas you can use immediately to organize your life and activities, so that you can get more of the things that you want and need to achieve your own happiness.
Time Management Is a Tool
Time management can be viewed as a tool with which you can build a great life, marked by high achievement and a tremendous feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. Time management can be looked upon as a vehicle that can carry you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. Time management can be seen as a set of personal disciplines that, once mastered, will enable you to be, have and do anything you want or need to achieve whatever successes in life give you the greatest pleasure and happiness.
The Common Denominator of Success
The more I studied success and successful people, the more obvious it became to me that they all had one thing in common. They all placed a very high value on their time, and they continually worked at becoming better organized and more efficient. I eventually came to the conclusion that no success is possible without excellent time management skills. You cannot even imagine a happy, fulfilled person whose life is in a state of disorganization and disarray. The best discovery I made was that, when you develop the disciplines of time management, you simultaneously develop many of the other habits that lead to high achievement, wealth and success in every part of your life.
The starting point of developing good time management skills is for you to realize that time management is really life management. It is the way you take care of your most precious gift. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Do you love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff that life is made of.” As you learn to master your time, you simultaneously master your life and take complete control over your future.
This report is designed to give you every tool that you will ever need to become excellent in time management in your career and personal life. As you read, think about how you could apply these ideas immediately. Underline key points and make notes. Implement the action exercises at the end. Be prepared to read and review this information more than once if you wish to memorize and internalize these ideas permanently. Spaced repetition is essential to learning.
Once you master these skills, you will be set up for a lifetime of increased personal efficiency, and high achievement. You will become a new person, with a new way of looking at life. You will get more done in less time than you ever thought possible. You will take complete control over your life. “When every physical and mental resource is focused, one’s power to solve a problem multiplies tremendously.” (Norman Vincent Peale)
The Psychology of Time Management
“The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it – as long as you believe 100 percent.” (Arnold Schwarzenegger)
The Law of Correspondence says that your outer life tends to be a mirror image of your inner life. Everywhere you look, there you are. Everywhere you look, you see yourself reflected back. You do not see the world as it is, but as you are - inside. If you want to change what is going on in the world around you - your relationships, results and rewards - you have to change what is going on in the world inside you. Fortunately, this is the only part of your life over which you have complete control.
The Starting Point of Success
The starting point of becoming excellent in time management is desire. Almost everyone feels that their time management skills could be vastly better than they are. People resolve, over and over again, to get serious about time management by focusing, setting better priorities and overcoming procrastination. They intend to get serious about time management sometime, but unfortunately, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
The key to motivation is “motive.” For you to develop sufficient desire to develop Time Power, you must be intensely motivated by the benefits you feel you will enjoy. You must want the results badly enough to overcome the natural inertia that keeps you doing things the same old way. Here are four good reasons for practicing time management.
1. Gain Two Extra Hours Each Day
You will gain at least two additional productive hours per day by practicing what you learn in this report. Just think! What could you do or accomplish if you had the gift of two extra working hours each day. What projects could you start and complete? What books could you write and publish? What subjects could you learn and master? What could you accomplish with two extra hours that you were able to focus and concentrate on completing high-value tasks? Two extra hours per day, multiplied by five days per week, equals ten extra hours per week. Ten extra hours per week multiplied by 50 weeks per year would give you 500 extra productive hours each year. 500 hours translates into more than twelve 40-hour weeks, or the equivalent of three extra months of productive working time each year.
By gaining two productive hours each day, you could transform your personal and working life. You could achieve all your goals, double your income over the next two to three years, and eventually achieve financial independence, if not become rich.
2. Improve Your Productivity and Performance
Your productivity, performance and income will increase by at least 25% over the next year. Two extra hours, in addition to the eight hours that you work each day, is equal to a 25% increase. What you are earning today is what you are being paid today as a result of what you are producing today. If you increase your productivity by 25% or more, you must eventually
earn and be paid 25% more. And if your current boss won’t pay you for improved performance, some other boss will come along and gladly give you more money for your ability to produce greater results.
3. Increase Your Sense of Control
You will have more energy and less stress as you practice these ideas. You will have a greater sense of control over your work and your personal life. You will feel like the master of your own destiny, and a power in your own life. You will feel more positive and powerful in every part of your life.
Over the years, psychologists have done extensive research in the area of what is called “Locus of Control.” They have discovered that you feel positive about yourself and your life to the degree to which you feel in charge of your life; you have an “internal” locus of control. With an internal locus of control, you feel that your life is in your own hands, you make your own decisions and you are responsible for your own actions and outcomes. You are the primary creative force in your own life.
Psychologists have also found that if you have an “external” locus of control, in that you feel that you are controlled by people and circumstances outside of yourself, such as your boss, your bills, your family, your health or some other factor, you will feel negative, angry and often depressed. You will feel frustrated and unable to change. You will develop what is called “learned helplessness” and see yourself more as a “creature of circumstances” rather than a “creator of circumstances.” When you have an external locus of control, you feel that you are a prisoner of external forces. You often see yourself as a victim.
4. More Time for Your Family
You will have more time for your family and your personal life as you get your time and your life under control. You will have more time for your friends, for relaxation, for personal and professional development, and for anything else you want to do. When you become the master of your own time, and gain two extra hours per day, you can use that extra time to run a marathon, complete a college degree, write a book, build a business, and create an outstanding life. With two extra hours per day, you can put your life and career onto the fast track and begin moving ahead at a more rapid rate than you ever thought possible.
Three Mental Barriers to Time Power
If everyone agrees that excellent time management is a desirable skill, why is it that so few people can be described as “well organized, effective and efficient?” Over the years, I have found that many people have ideas about time management that are simply not true. But if you believe something to be true, it becomes true for you. Your beliefs cause you to see yourself and the world, and your relationship to time management, in a particular way. If you have negative beliefs in any area, these beliefs will affect your thinking and actions, and will eventually become your reality. “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”
1. You Will Decrease Your Naturalness and Spontaneity
The first myth of time management, or negative belief, is that if you are too well organized, you become cold, calculating and unemotional. If you are extremely effective and efficient, some people feel that they will lose their spontaneity and freedom. They will become unable to “go with the flow,” to express themselves openly and honestly. People think that managing your time well makes you too rigid and inflexible. This turns out not to be true at all. Many people hide behind this false idea and use it as an excuse for not disciplining themselves the way they know they should. The fact is that people who are disorganized are not spontaneous; they are merely confused, and often frantic. Often they suffer a good deal of stress. It turns out that the better organized you are, the more time and opportunity you have to be truly relaxed, truly
spontaneous, and truly happy. You have a much greater internal locus of control.
Here is the key: Structure and organize everything that you possibly can. Think ahead, plan for contingencies, prepare thoroughly, and focus on specific results. Only then can you be completely relaxed and spontaneous when the situation changes. The better organized you are in the factors that are under your control, the greater freedom and flexibility you have to quickly make changes whenever they are necessary.
2. Negative Mental Programming
The second mental barrier to developing excellent time management skills is negative programming, often from your parents, but also from other influential people, when you are growing up. If your parents or others told you that you were a messy person, or that
you were always late, or that you never finished anything you started, when you become an adult, you may still be operating unconsciously to obey these earlier commands.
The most common excuse is “That’s just the way I am,” or “I have always been that way.” The fact is that no one is born either messy and disorganized, or neat and efficient. Time management and personal efficiency skills are disciplines that we learn and develop with practice and repetition. If we have developed bad time management habits, we can unlearn them. We can replace them with good habits over time.
3. Self Limiting Beliefs
The third mental barrier to good time management skills is a negative self-concept or what are called, “self-limiting beliefs.” Many people believe that they don’t have the ability to be good at time management. They often believe that it is an inborn part of their background or heritage. But there is no gene or chromosome for poor time management, or good time management, for that matter. Nobody is born with a genetic deficiency in personal organization. Your personal behaviors are very much under your own control.
Here is an example to prove that most of what you do is determined by your level of motivation and desire in that area. Imagine that someone were to offer you a million dollars to manage your time superbly for the next 30 days. Imagine that an efficiency expert was going to follow you around with a clipboard and a video camera for one month. After 30 days, if you had used your time efficiently and well, working on your highest priorities all day, every day, you would receive a prize of one million dollars.
How efficient would you be over the next 30 days?
The fact is that, with sufficient motivation (one million dollars!), you would be one of the most efficient, effective, best-organized and focused people in the world. The best news is that after one full month of practicing the very best time management skills you know, you would have developed habits of high productivity and top performance that would last you the rest of your life.
Program Yourself for Effectiveness and Efficiency
There are several mental techniques that you can use to program yourself for peak
performance.
1. Positive Self Talk
The first of these methods for programming your subconscious mind is “positive self talk,”
or the use of positive affirmations. These are commands that you pass from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind. Affirmations are statements that you either say out loud or say to yourself with the emotion and enthusiasm that drives the words into your subconscious mind as new operating instructions. Here are some examples of affirmative commands that you can use to improve your time management skills.
Begin by repeating over and over to yourself, “I am excellent at time management! I am excellent at time management!” Any command repeated over and over again in a spirit of faith, acceptance and belief, will eventually be accepted by your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind will then organize your words, actions and feelings to be consistent with these new commands.
You can continually repeat, “I am always punctual for my appointments! I am always punctual for my appointments!” You can create your own mental commands, such as “I am well organized!” or “I concentrate easily on my highest pay-off tasks!” My favorite time management affirmation is to repeat continually, “I use my time well. I use my time well. I use my time well.” When you repeat these words over and over, with emphasis, they are eventually accepted by your subconscious mind. You will then find that your external behaviors will start to reflect your internal programming.
2. Visualize Yourself as Highly Efficient
The second technique that you can use to program your subconscious mind is visualization. Your subconscious mind is most immediately influenced by mental pictures. In self-image psychology, the person you see is the person you will be. Begin to see yourself as well organized, efficient and effective. Recall and recreate memories and pictures of yourself when you were performing at your best.
Think of a time when you were working efficiently and effectively, and getting through an enormous amount of work. Play this picture of yourself over and over again on the screen of your mind. In athletic training, this is called “mental rehearsal.” This requires practicing and
rehearsing in your mind before you actually engage in the physical action. The more relaxed you are when you visualize yourself performing at your best, the more rapidly this command is accepted by your subconscious mind and becomes a part of your thinking and acting later on.
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