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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Tracy
Read between
January 31 - February 12, 2024
The Four Ds of Effectiveness The first D is desire: You must have an intense, burning desire to get your time under control and to achieve maximum effectiveness. The second D is decisiveness: You must make a clear decision that you are going to practice good time management techniques until they become a habit. The third D stands for determination: You must be willing to persist in the face of all temptations to the contrary until you have become an effective time manager. Your desire will reinforce your determination. And finally, the most important key to success in life, the fourth D, is
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Napoleon Hill observed that life only begins to become great when we decide clearly upon our most important goal in life. What are your most important goals?
Think About Your Vision and Mission
To become excellent in time management, and to get your entire life under control, you need to engage in “slow thinking” on a regular basis. Start with the question, “What am I trying to do?”
In The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce wrote that “the definition of fanaticism is redoubling your efforts after your aim has been forgotten.”
Keep the End in Mind
Be clear about what outcomes you desire. As Stephen Covey said, “Start with the end in mind.” What is the final result, outcome, or accomplishment that you are striving to achieve?
To be truly happy and fulfilled, you must be working toward accomplishing something that is bigger than yourself, and that makes a difference in the life or work of others.
WHAT IS THE MOST important and valuable work that you do, in any field or profession? It’s thinking! Your ability to think clearly about what you do and how you do it will have a greater impact on your future results than any other single action you take.
Take thirty minutes or more each day to review your goals, your plans, and your progress. The best time to do this review is first thing in the morning. Take time to think, plan, dream, and create.
One common thread in these biographies that I discovered was that true greatness only emerges with introspection, retrospection, solitude, and contemplation. You will only achieve the greatness you are capable of when you begin to take time regularly to think about who you are, what you want, and the very best way to achieve
He identified one special quality that seemed to separate the high performers from the low performers. He called it “long time perspective.” Banfield found that high performers took the time to think far into the future, often ten and twenty years, and to develop absolute clarity about where they wanted to be in their lives and work at that time.
The rule is that long-term vision improves short-term decision making. You have heard the saying, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”
ALL SUCCESSFUL TIME managers are good planners. They make lists and sublists to accomplish each major and minor objective.
There is a rule that every minute spent in planning saves ten minutes in execution. The time you take to think on paper about something you need to accomplish, before you begin work, will give you a return on personal energy of 1,000 percent—ten minutes saved for every minute that you invest in planning your work in the first place.
First, in organizing by sequence, you create a list of activities in chronological order, from the first step to the final step before completion of the goal or project. As Henry Ford said, “The biggest goal can be achieved if you simply break it down into enough small parts.”
As Goethe said, “The things that matter most must never be at the mercy of the things that matter least.”
Action without planning is the cause of every failure. Resist the temptation to take action before you have planned it out thoroughly in advance.
Planning for Goal Achievement
Perhaps the most important word related to success of any kind is clarity. Successful people are very clear about who they are and what they want, in every area of their lives.
Once you have set a larger goal for yourself and your business, there are four questions that you should ask:
1. What are the difficulties and obstacles that stand between you and the achievement of your goal?
Of all the problems you need to solve, what are the 20 percent of the problems that account for 80 percent of the obstacles between you and your goal?
2. What additional knowledge, skills, or information are required to achieve your goal or complete your project? Remember the saying, “Whatever got you to where you are today is not enough to get you any further.”
Josh Billings wrote, “It’s not what a man knows that hurts him; it’s what he knows that isn’t true.”
3. Who are the people, groups, or organizations whose help and cooperation you need in order to achieve your goal?
4. Of all the people who can help you to achieve your goal, who is the most important person of all? What could you offer in exchange to gain this person’s help and cooperation so that you achieve your important goals even faster?
The most important projects in business, and in the world around us, are completed by people who make detailed plans of action before they begin. Make written plans for yourself and your business, and then follow those plans carefully until they are successful.
Chart Your Projects
MOST WORK IN business is a series of projects. Your ability to complete projects largely determines your success in your career.
Perhaps the most powerful tool you can use to maximize your effectiveness and dramatically increase your level of accomplishment is a checklist.
Your ability to clearly define and determine the steps that you will have to take from where you are today to a successfully completed project is a mark of superior thinking.
The rule, once again, is that every minute spent in planning and creating checklists will save you ten minutes in execution and getting the job done.
Create a PERT Chart Create a visual representation of your larger tasks and projects so that you and others can see it in its totality.
Set Clear Goals for Everyone You will accomplish more with clear, written goals for each key person involved in the project than you ever could with great conversations and good intentions. Make goals clear, specific, measurable, and time bounded. Remember that what gets measured gets done.
Create Your Daily “To-Do” List
PERHAPS THE MOST powerful time management tool is a daily list of activities that you create to serve as a blueprint for your day.
The best time to make a list is the night before, so your subconscious mind can work on your list while you sleep.
According to time management specialists, it takes about twelve minutes each day to write out a list of your tasks for that day. But this list will save you ten times that amount of time in improved productivity. Twelve minutes spent in preparing a daily list will give you a payback of 120 minutes, or two hours of increased productivity, when you actually begin work. That’s an incredible payoff for such a simple task.
The most important word in time management is consequences. A task is important depending on the potential consequences of doing it or not doing it. When you set priorities, you apply this principle to every task, and you always begin with the task that has the greatest consequences.
ABCDE method is especially helpful.
A is something you must do.
B items are those things you should do.
C activities are nice to do,
Robert Half International estimates that as much as 50 percent of working time is spent on C activities, things that make no contribution at all to the business.
a D activity is something that you can delegate to someone else. The rule is that you should delegate everything that you possibly can to other people to free up more time for you to engage in your A activities.
An E activity is something that you should eliminate altogether.
The Not-To-Do List Just as you need a to-do list to guide you through a busy day, you need a not-to-do list to help keep you on track.
Put on the Pressure Here’s another technique that you can use for setting priorities: Make up your daily list of activities and then ask yourself, “If I were called out of town for a month, starting tomorrow, what activities on this list would I want to be sure to complete before I left town?”
The greatest enemy of time management and personal productivity today is “majoring in minors.”
