THE ONLY TIME MANAGEMENT YOU’LL EVER NEED (PART 2)
This article is the second part of the series. Again, if you use only two of the 15 time management systems written in this series, you are already ahead of the pack.
Learn it and apply it, that’s my advice. Most likely you heard these advises but never applied the principles. Do three of the 15 golden nuggets and I guarantee you, your life will be very different in a year.
Anyway, you can check the first part of the series here. But let’s move on to the next golden nugget.
Gold nugget number six, always carry a notebook.
Everybody I spoke to talked about carrying a notebook.
Richard Branson has written about it over and over again. He says the single most important possession is his little notebook. That’s how he built the virgin brand. There’s all these people that just swear by this power of jotting down little notes, whether it’s journaling or notes from meetings or words of wisdom from the books they read. But it just really changes their life.
And one of the things that David Allen always says that our minds are best used for processing different ideas, not to hold onto information.
You’d be surprised when you start carrying around a notebook with you, just how much information comes into your mind that you want to capture. Now when you start capturing that information, you realize, holy crap, I’ve been holding onto so many good pieces of information and it’s just been gone.
Lose it, or I hold onto it.
And it just ruins the ability to allow your mind to free itself up to process new information, which is the best state for your mind to be in.
Golden Nugget Number Seven, control your inbox.
To be honest, many of us use our email inbox and text messages and other social media Apps as a form of procrastination, as a form of a little reward. It releases dopamine. It’s kind of like pulling that handle on a slot machine.
These companies out there and other people in our lives, they want our attention and that’s fine, but it can get in the way of our productivity. So the bottom line is shut off the notifications on your phone, on everything. It’s okay to to go to email or messages and all of that, but do it when you want to do it. Not because someone else is calling you.
Kind of like Pavlov’s dog, you know, ringing a bell and I’m reaching for my phone. I process email like anything else, three times a day, morning, noon and night. Now again, the number is not so important, right? I mean, I know people who only process it once a week or once a day and others people will tell me, hey, I’m a stockbroker, whenever I need to get back to people, I need to. Finding a time to process or read the mail should not be every 30 minutes or 15 minutes, but you can open and check the mail maybe every hour, the idea is to be intentional about it.
Shut off the notifications.
So if you’re out there and you haven’t shut off your email notifications, what are you waiting for I’ve done that long time ago. I shut it off because it’s just a distraction.
Golden Nugget Number Eight, schedule and attend meetings as a last resort.
Now we can’t all, you know, be like Mark Cuban and just say no to our boss and other people have meetings. We can say no much more often. We can say no to a lot of meetings. We could say no to meetings before noon, like let’s keep our deep work in the morning. Then our collaborative work in the afternoon.
And if you have to say yes to a meeting, say no to long meetings.
Richard Branson again says there’s few meetings that need to last more than five or 10 minutes. And so that’s just the ideas. Let’s say no as often as possible. At least one day a week say no and then try to say no to long meetings.
Golden Nugget Number Nine, say no to everything that doesn’t support your immediate goals
They’re not being rude, but the most highly successful people, they know what their values are, their goals are, and they filled their calorie with things that’ll get there and that doesn’t leave time for a lot of other things.
You know, we’re raised from being really young to like, hey, you know you, you want to be liked so you want to help people. You’re told it’s nice to help people. You don’t want to be rude. What’s helpful to me is when I realized that every time I say yes to something, I’m actually saying no to another thing or many things.
I got myself into so much trouble, because I like to be liked and so I would say ‘yes’ to people all the time. Even though I knew by saying ‘yes’, it would screw up my schedule, I’d have to push other things. In the back of my head I was like, you’re not going to do this anymore.
You’re not going to say ‘yes’ to every request, your whole schedules are thrown off or are off course because you said ‘yes’. Be good at saying ‘no’ and doing it in a very polite way, in a delicate way is something that a lot of people out there have to do.
Golden Nugget Number Ten, follow the powerful Pareto principle.
Pareto principle is more commonly known as the 80–20 rule and it’s this idea that most of the results in almost any goals you want to achieve, or 80% of the results comes from about 20% of the activities.
So it’s just really pausing, slowing down and looking at all the work that you’re doing to build your business, to get your work done. What are the handful of tasks that are getting you most of your results. Just focus on those things.
I learned this from the Japanese Engineers that I was working with before. His example in the real world is meetings. 80% of meetings are wasted and only 20% of the agenda are productive. So focus 80% of the team’s time and effort to the top 20% of the agenda.
