New Time Management

“The secret of suc­cess is con­stancy of pur­pose.“
–Anony­mous

I agree that, if one wants to achieve more, the most impor­tant tool for doing so in today’s world is time man­age­ment. The chal­lenge in deal­ing with an inces­santly increas­ing demand on this scarcer com­mod­ity that we call time is preva­lent in our soci­ety. Peo­ple are busier than ever before and seem to never have enough time to do what they really want.

How­ever, if you study truly suc­cess­ful men and women, you will rec­og­nize that they always seem to have lots of time. They live in the moment, are happy and love what they do, and are intrin­si­cally very pro­duc­tive. More­over, they have intense focused con­cen­tra­tion on the task at hand and seem to man­age their time almost instinc­tively. And they do so with pas­sion, zest and fervor.

Every­thing seems to “flow” for these kinds of peo­ple. Why? I believe it is because they are con­gru­ent. Their inner selves and their outer selves are in tune with each other. What these suc­cess­ful peo­ple are telling you is that you must not look at try­ing to get more things done but at improv­ing the qual­ity of your life.

Con­cen­trat­ing solely on the future or dwelling on the past takes your present moments away from you. In other words, high lev­els of activ­ity — let alone anx­i­ety — can limit your potential.

So, there is more to time man­age­ment than just being pro­duc­tive or try­ing to get as many things done as pos­si­ble. There is a clear dif­fer­ence between pur­pose­ful­ness and productiveness.

Your poten­tial is infi­nite and, there­fore, there is no real lim­i­ta­tion other than time itself. If you don’t agree, ask your­self: “Why do some peo­ple achieve their goals with so lit­tle effort while oth­ers strug­gle end­lessly?” The answer lies not in the how but in the why. In other words, if you want to become suc­cess­ful, ask­ing “why for” is more impor­tant than know­ing “how to.”

As such, don’t search for how suc­cess can be achieved or a set of spe­cific tech­niques that will suc­ceed. Start by devel­op­ing and clar­i­fy­ing the rea­sons why you want suc­cess in your life instead.

Find out what are the pur­poses in your life. And if you don’t know, then make that your pur­pose. While work­ing harder does cre­ate more oppor­tu­ni­ties, work­ing pur­pose­fully is like work­ing smarter, for it makes it eas­ier for you to rec­og­nize and seize those opportunities.

I’m not attempt­ing to teach you some new time man­age­ment method. To me, time man­age­ment is just another way of mak­ing you work more and more — for noth­ing. In this book, you will be forced to look at time man­age­ment in an entirely dif­fer­ent way. I call it “present moment” man­age­ment. I also refer to it as life man­age­ment because it focuses on qual­ity of life instead of quan­tity of time.

It’s the proper clar­i­fi­ca­tion of your inner­most val­ues (i.e., your pri­or­i­ties) and, con­trary to the usual goal-​​setting process, to sys­tem­at­i­cally con­vert them into activ­i­ties. This way, you can dis­cover and fol­low your pri­or­i­ties at all times. You will learn how to go from “set your goals and man­age your time” to “drop your goals and man­age your life.”

Con­fu­sion comes from the lack of clar­ity. Dr. Stephen Covey, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effec­tive Peo­ple, says that, “What is impor­tant and what is urgent get eas­ily con­fused;” so con­fused, in fact, that what is urgent may seem like short­cuts to suc­cess when they actu­ally are what I call “cor­ner­cuts.” Obvi­ously, you can’t take a short­cut if you don’t know where you are to begin with.

There­fore, suc­cess­ful­ness is to have defin­i­tive clar­ity. With a clear con­science, you can develop a clear pur­pose. Helen Keller once said that, “Peo­ple have the wrong idea of what con­sti­tutes true hap­pi­ness; it is not achieved through self-​​gratification but attained through fidelity to a wor­thy purpose.”

About the Author

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