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The Secret to Time Management

By Joshua Seth |

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I just spent the whole day lying in a hammock stretched between two palm trees, sipping rum filled pineapples on the beach of a private island, just off the coast of the Dominican Republic. Well, not the WHOLE day. I also played with a sea lion for a while and rented a kayak for $5 bucks and paddled around the island. (The first hour was significantly easier than the second due to strong headwinds at the Eastern tip).

But this article isn’t meant to just annoy you with another story about the globe-trotting mini-vacations that have consumed about half my life for the past couple of years. It’s to reveal to you the secret of how I am able to live like this and still get things done. After all I have a business to run, a household to maintain, and various responsibilities to people who depend on me.

The secret is a little known and often misunderstood principle of time management and it goes something like this: “Work will expand to fill the time allotted to it”. In other words, the more time you give yourself to complete a task the bigger the job will become. The opposite is also true.

Time Compression Motivator

If an emergency popped up right now, would you be able to complete all of your work for the rest of the day in the next two hours? Really think about it for a moment?

If you had to, if someone had a gun to your head and said “finish everything you have to do today in the next two hours or I will blow your brains out” could you find a way to get everything done? I’ll bet you could. I’ll bet you’d turn off that noise on the TV, stop inefficiently multitasking, fly through your emails, answer what was necessary and discard the rest, and generally become a whirlwind of energy and productivity. You’d focus on the most important things first. You’d delegate. You instantly become results oriented instead of indecisive and unfocused and “busy”.

The gun to the head analogy is a powerful motivator. But what about the “sipping rum pineapples in hammock on the beach” scenario? If I told you you could learn to focus your energies in such as way as to reduce your work time by about 80% with no appreciable diminishment in results would the remaining free time be enough of a motivator to get you to do it? If not, then you probably haven’t taken the time to close your eyes and imagine exactly what you’d do with all that free time once you had it.

Would you bungee jump in New Zealand? Jet ski in Brazil? Scuba dive in Bora Bora? I’ve done all three and it’s not that tough to achieve once you know how.

Here’s the first step:

Figure out what you’d like to do with your life if you had the time and money to do it. Imagine you had all the money you’ll ever need right now. How would you spend your time?

This is a little exercise I’ve engaged in periodically since I was a kid. The dreams and desires change, but the drive remains engaged because the goals are always worthwhile. Once you’ve clearly defined an amazing objective, written it down and told it to your friends, you’re far closer to reaching it than if it remained a vague and distant dream.

Most people never reach their goals because they never precisely define or articulate them in the first place. They don’t bother to do that because they think they’re too busy to do it now and put it off for some distant tomorrow that never comes.

The Cold, Hard Truth

Is it possible that most of what you do on a daily basis is just some form of paper shuffling? Unproductive, indiscriminate business that is keeping you from living a life of adventure and intrigue? If 20% of your activities produce 80% of the results then everything else is just a distraction that fills up most of your time.

I know that’s a tough pill to swallow, but once you do it gives you the freedom to start putting boundaries on your work time and expanding your leisure time. Time freedom is what gives money value anyway. The freedom do do what you want, where you want, whenever you want.

I’ve still got work to do today. I woke up this morning with my to-do list written from the night before. Here’s what’s on it:

• Write this week’s blog post
• Read and respond to emails
• Contact outsourced workers to assign new tasks
• Mix down the next recording in the “Take Action Now” 6 CD set I recorded last week (soon to be released!)

This list is sparse, achievable, and every item in it creates forward movement in my business. Everything that’s menial, managerial, or maintenance oriented had been outsourced or eliminated. Still, it could have easily taken me all day to do. Instead, I will complete it in the next two hours. How? Because I know that work expands to fill the time available for it. Therefore, I made some great dinner plans two hours from now that I really don’t want to beak. That’s enough of a motivator to get me to focus like a laser on the completion of these tasks for the next two hours until they are done.

I started with the hardest one first (this article, because it’s creative in nature and could’ve sucked up time without clear boundaries). I’m writing as fast as I can type and it feels like we’re closing in on the summation right about now. I’ll do the easiest task last (mixing down the recording because the mechanics of the process are pretty rote to me at this point). I’m compelled to take action because I have a limited time in which to do it and a clearly defined goal that I will reward myself with at it’s conclusion.

The Point

Remember, the goal is not to have more time in which to do more work. The goal is to do the most important work in the least amount of time and then go out and live your life! You do this by prioritizing your tasks, focusing on what’s productive, and ignoring everything else for a predefined period of time until it’s done.

How can you structure your work throughout the day in a similar manner so as to maximize both productivity and free time? It’s a question well worth considering. The results can truly be life changing.

Update To This Article

The “Take Action Now” time management system referred to in this article has been released and is flying out the door. To discover how you can reprogram your brain to get more done in less time, click this link: http://joshuaseth.com/take-action-now

NOTE: Comments are now closed. Here is what was submitted…

bobbi

thank you for this. I’ll have to try it. Know I might not get fustrated now when I try to complete all my tasks for the day.
PlanningQueen


I am not long to blogging and I am now finding that I need to be much more disciplined with how I spend my time. It is so easy to keep just doing “stuff”. Thanks for the tips.
Joyce Higgins


I really like the Stop procrastinating since I seem to do that a lot. I’m going to really get with it and not do more work but do it faster and have more time for myself.
Thanks.
Joyce

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