Are you tired of feeling like you have too much to do and no time to get it done?
Feeling overwhelmed?
I can help.
People constantly ask me, “How do YOU get everything done?”
Easy: I write down the parts of my life that I want to be great in, and then I become obsessed with making time for them rather than making excuses.
Case in point: I am committed to making time for my family.
To pull this off, I have to be smart about it.
In the morning I spend time with my two daughters. After fifteen to thirty minutes of quality time, they’re done with me.
Kids don’t need hours of your time; they just need some of your time.
By being both committed to spending time with my kids and creative about how I do that (by hanging out with them in the mornings instead of at night, for example, or taking them to the gym with me), I make my time fit my needs. I don’t manage time — I make time.
By the way, it’s not just about what the kids need—parents need time together too. My marriage doesn’t exist in a vacuum, either; running a business, a marriage, a family, and the rest of life is a challenge.
Managing Time in Marriage
My wife and I do as much as we can together at the business; we look for opportunities to work together and grow the brand. We take what each of us is good at and then each invest energy in that. I don’t ask her to make sales calls; I let her do what she is good at.
One way we optimize time is to spend time together while building the business. For example, we typically don’t go out to dinner just the two of us. Instead we invite employees or customers to join us, so we optimize that time too.
I don’t see a point in spending money on a nice dinner for just the two of us. I’d rather spend four times the amount on a dinner that will produce more opportunities for us and our business. And honestly, one date night once or twice a week won’t build a strong marriage.
We have a strong marriage because we’re on the same page 100 percent of the time, including in how we view time.
Think of your time like bandwidth. If I want more bandwidth on my website, I have to pay for it. Back in the day if you went to a hotel you’d either get the free bandwidth that was slow or the premium bandwidth which was much speedier. Time is like bandwidth, and you need to increase your bandwidth.
Don’t complain about time, always saying that you don’t have enough of it.
When I got a lot going on I increase my bandwidth. I create bandwidth.
Create the bandwidth out of the problems you have. Every time I have a problem with time, I do more. I just increase my bandwidth.
The way to beat time is to pulverize it.
When you don’t have time, add something. When you look at your calendar and you think you’ve got too much going on, add something to it.
Increasing bandwidth requires you to be obsessed—not average.
“I got too much going on,” can be taken one of two ways. Are you bragging or complaining?
If you’ve made a commitment to be super successful, you have to get your hustle on to make it to the big leagues.
If you make it to the place of big success, you are going to have a lot going on.
You’ll never make it to that place if you are complaining right now about having too much going on. When you do have monster success you’ll have too much going on and you’ll look back and say, “Man, I developed my too-much-going-on muscle.”
- The richest man in the world has 1,440 minutes in a day to earn his money.
- The most educated man in the world has 168 hours a week to learn.
- The greatest athlete in the world has 365 days in a year to train.
When people say they “don’t have enough time to get things done,” that’s simply not true. Everybody in the world, from the richest man to the most educated to the best athletes, has the same 24 hours.
Surveys suggest that the average person in the US watches over 3 hours of television a day. That’s 65,700 minutes over the course of one year!
Do you realize how much you could do with that amount of time?
Take for example making phone calls to grow your business; let’s assume your average phone call is 3 minutes. Stop watching TV and you just produced an extra 65,700 minutes—60 phone calls a day or 21,900 phone calls a year!
Imagine how many customers and how much money you’re missing out on!
It doesn’t have to just be phone calls. You could be educating yourself and sharpening your skills by reading a book.
You could be sending more emails or making more personal visits to potential customers or you could be spending QUALITY time with your family.
The amount of time is not the problem, your choices with it are.
We all have the same 24 hours in a day—the same 1,440 minutes.
What are you doing with yours? As the old saying goes, “time is money”, well most people don’t have money because they don’t value time!
It’s pointless for people to worry about time management and balance. The question they should be asking is “How can I have it all in abundance?”
Quit thinking in terms of either/or and start thinking in terms of all and everything.
HOW TO HAVE IT ALL
To really understand, manage, maximize, and squeeze every opportunity out of your time, you have to fully understand and appreciate how much of it you have available to you. You must first take control of your time—not allow others to do so.
I challenge you to keep track of how you’re spending your available time, perhaps in a journal. Most people have no clue what they are doing with their time but still complain that they don’t have enough.
Personally, I use my 10X Planner.
HOW IMBALANCES HAPPEN
An imbalance is always going to occur when you don’t do enough with the time you have. Most people only work enough so that it feels like work, whereas successful people work at a pace that gets such satisfying results that work is a reward.
Get everyone necessary—your family, colleagues, associates, employees—to recognize and agree upon which priorities are most important. If you don’t do this, you will have people with different agendas pulling you in all sorts of directions.
Control your time rather than just haphazardly trying to manage it.
Set priorities and commit to a solution that lets you be the boss of your own time!
It’s pointless in my view to worry about time management and balance. I’m not interested in balance. I am interested in abundance in every area.
I don’t want to sacrifice one in favor of another. Successful people think in terms of “all,” whereas others tend to place limits on themselves.
They may believe that “If I am rich, I can’t be happy” or “If I thrive in my career, then I won’t have time to be a good mother, wife, or spiritual individual.” This way of thinking is usually flawed, and neither time management nor balance can resolve it.
If you start with a commitment to success and then agree to control time, you will create an agenda that accommodates all you want.
These six steps can help you get started.
#1 Set specific priorities.
Everyone’s priorities are different. Identify your goals and what defines success in your life, then spend your time doing things that will create that success.
Success for you could involve a variety of people and things: finances, family, happiness, spirituality, physical or emotional well-being… or, if you’re like me, all of them.
And remember, you can have them all.
#2 Get everyone around you to agree on priorities.
You’ll need buy-in from your family, colleagues, associates, employees. Without it, people with different agendas can pull you in all sorts of directions. My schedule works because everyone in my life — from my wife to the people who work with me—knows what is most important to me and understands how I value time.
#3 Track how you spend your time.
If you don’t know how much time you have—or need—how can you expect to manage it?
Logging your time, perhaps in a journal, will help you see all the ways in which you waste it—the little habits and activities that in no way contribute to your success.
Look at any action that isn’t adding wood to your fire—think online surfing, napping, drinking. Brutal, isn’t it? Yes, but if you don’t manage your time, you will waste it.
#4 Create a schedule based on your priorities.
When our daughter was born, my wife and I built a routine around our daughter’s sleep schedule and our priorities. We agreed that I would get up one hour earlier each day and take my daughter on an outing.
This way, I have quality time with my daughter before I go to the office, and my wife has extra time to sleep. Because I get my daughter up so early, we can put her to bed before 7 p.m., and my wife and I have time together as a couple.
#5 Look for ways to maximize your time.
The only way to increase time is to get more done in the time you have. Consider the expression “time is money.” What does it mean to you?
How can you treat time to make sure your time is money? What’s the most important, productive thing that you should do with your time?
One way to get more done with your time is to simply find ways to increase your productivity. Another approach: Make it a race, a challenge—make it fun. If I get 15 phone calls done in 15 minutes and you get 15 calls done in one hour, then I have essentially created 45 minutes for myself.
If I hire someone and pay that person $15 an hour to make 15 calls every 15 minutes, then I just duplicated my efforts—and my time becomes money.
#6 Continue to modify your priorities.
Things will change through the course of your life. You achieve and set new goals. Different things and people enter your world.
The busier you become, the more you have to manage, control, and prioritize.
When I became a parent, my daughter gave me another reason to create success—not an excuse to avoid working.
Our schedule will continue to change as my daughters grow up. But we are controlling our time rather than just haphazardly trying to manage it. And we are doing our best to make the most of every precious moment.
My Schedule
Establish a very disciplined schedule to keep yourself focused and productive at all times. It’s easy to become halted and thus find yourself doing little more than being worried and unproductive.
Any production or action done in adequate quantities on a daily basis is better than no production—and it will get you results.
The word production comes from the word produce, which means to cause to have existence or to happen or bring about.
It also means to compose, create or bring out by intellectual or physical effort. If you want to cause something to have existence, you must multiply time by actions to produce the economy you desire.
Don’t just think of an economy in terms of money but of all the elements that compose it—goods, services, goodwill, clients, resources, equipment, activity, contact, and any efforts at production.
In order to maximize your time and efforts live your life by the 10X Rule and tackle your projects like your life depends on it—because it does. Manage every action as though you have a camera on you every step of the way.
To show you the discipline needed to apply the proper time and actions to live by a 10X schedule, I put together my own 10X 24-Hour Clock:
05:00 – 05:45 – Kids
05:45 – 06:15 – Workout
06:15 – 06:30 – Breakfast
06:30 – 06:45 – Get Dressed
06:45 – 07:00 – Drive to Work
07:00 – 08:00 – Work
08:00 – 08:15 – Executive Meeting
08:15 – 09:00 – Work
09:00 – 09:30 – Sales Meeting
09:30 – 11:30 – Work
11:30 – 12:00 – Lunch
12:00 – 12:45 – Production
12:45 – 16:00 – Work
16:00 – 16:15 – Drive Home
16:15 – 18:00 – Work
18:00 – 18:45 – Kids
18:45 – 21:00 – Work
21:00 – 22:00 – Honey Time
22:00 – 05:00 – Sleep
If you want to move yourself, your dreams or your ideas forward you have to do a lot and you have to do a lot consistently.
The truth is success does not merely “happen.”
It is the result of relentless, proper actions taken over time. Only those who operate with the appropriate view and corresponding actions will have success.
Don’t manage time, control time!
Be Great,
GC
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