Great Time Management Advice

I often talk in my seminars about the importance of time andtime management -- how rich people and poor people both havethe same amount of time every day - 24 hours (which by theway, I find fascinating).

I want to share with you four great time management ideas that were excerpted from the 2004 Weekend Event, Speaker Round Table Session - Enjoy!

Brian Tracy: I always give the principle of: Begin the day by "Eating That Frog".

It basically says that if the firstthing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, then youwill have the satisfaction of knowing it is probably theworst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.

And your "live frog" is your most important task. Nowthere's two corollaries to that. The first one is if youhave two frogs to eat, eat the ugliest one first and thesecond corollary to that is if you have to eat a frog at all, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it too long.

So the key to high performance is to plan every day thenight before, in advance, and set priorities for it. Andthen say, "if I can only complete one task on this list before I was to be called out of town for a month, which one task would it be?"

And whatever that is, it becomes your frog and the next morning discipline yourself to start in on that task, the most important thing on your list, and do only that until it is complete.

If you can develop that habit, you can double and tripleyour productivity, you'll take full control of your life,you will eventually become wealthy, and the personal feelingof pride, accomplishment, discipline and achievement you getwill be absolutely extraordinary. It is one of the most important of all lessons to learn, and one of the hardest things to implement if anybody has tried to do it.


Denis Waitley: Stop watching in prime time and start living in prime time. Prime time is 7-11 pm EST, when all ofAmerica is watching other people making money and having fun in their professions. So if you want to watch other people making money, having fun in their professions, which gets their ratings up so they make more money, go ahead and do things that are tension relieving, instead of goal achieving.

But if you truly want to live your life in prime time, then write in prime time, have intimacy in prime time, talk with your children in prime time, live and do in prime time instead of unhooking and engaging in tension relievingactivities.

Every book I've written, all seventeen, have been written 7-11 pm weekly and on Saturdays. And why? Because I am earning money the rest of the time, and I don't have time to write a book except in prime time. So stop watching and use the television set as an appliance. It has doors on it. Close the doors and use like an iron,when you need to iron your clothes, bring out the TV set.

Jim Rohn: Regarding the television, I knew a guy who wasn'tdoing too well and he wanted some advice from me. I knew hehad a television set and knew he watched a lot of television, so I asked, "How much did that television cost you?"

He said, "about $400."

I said, "No, you're mistaken."

He said, "No, this television set cost me $400."

I said,"Well that's to buy it. To watch it, I am sure it is costing you about $40,000 a year to watch."

He finally got themessage and he called his brother-in-law, who had a pick-up, and he and his brother-in-law hauled his television out ofthe house. His brother-in-law did say, "Well, you can just shut it off." And he said, "No, for now I don't trust myself, Jim Rohn is right. I'm not going to let this television set cost me $40,000 a year anymore."

Vic Johnson: My biggest tip would be in an area that I struggle a lot. About 15 years ago I heard someone say to never handle the items in your inbox more than one time.So I adopted that for email.

Now I get over 300 emails everyday even though I have all kinds of filters, some ofthem going to other people, etc. My biggest challenge is totouch that email only one time. Either I forward the email, I return the email and delete itor drag it to a folder for action by someone else or deleteit.

If you continue to have to go back and revisit that emailover and over trying to make a decision that's time --that's wasted time -- plus it's on your mind until you get rid of it.So if you are in a profession and you handle a lot of emails and you're still getting a lot of items in your inbox, only touch them one time.

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