Summary
We all start each day with the same number of seconds. Actually, 86,400 seconds to be exact. The question is, will you use them as effectively and efficiently as possible?
These days it is easy to become distracted with all of the social media and email communications that have become a routine part of our everyday life. Whenever you are in your work mode, distractions inevitably seem to creep in, stealing your focus, time and energy, ultimately having a negative effect on your productivity. If you allow these outside distractions to determine your agenda, you are also, in effect, allowing them to determine the direction of your life.
To become a high performance achiever it is critical that you gain control of your time and become a master of time efficiency. To do this, it’s important to first assess how you are currently spending your time.
We all have 84,000 seconds a day and an honest assessment of how we actually use them usually reveals there is much time wasted each and every day. There are precious minutes and even hours wasted each day that could instead be put to use moving you toward your goals and the attainment of financial freedom.
Planning and prioritizing the tasks you need to complete each day in order to move you closer to your goals is also essential. The Daily SuperRicher Orgaizer is an excellent tool that I specifically designed for this purpose. This simple yet powerful tool can help you become a master of time efficiency and it is available as a free download at http://old.tonyneumeyer.com .
Ultimately, taking control of your time and using it as productively and efficiently as possible will allow you to take control and achieve the lifestyle and financial freedom that you have envisioned for your future.
Transcript
Picture this scenario. You are sitting at your desk (or wherever you do your best work) tackling that project that needs to be done by the end of the day. You’re motivated, have your laptop in front of you, you’re feeling great and ready to go. You start typing away and right when you’re in a good thought, you see an email pop up. Now you’re distracted. You’ve lost focus so might as well look at the email. But the problem is, you don’t just look at the one that came in, you start looking at all the others and well now you might as well check your Facebook page too.
Welcome to the world of today’s distractions. What I’m talking about is insidious time stealers like email and social media. Too many people are letting themselves become victims to their email, tweets, posts, mentions, hash tags and so on. They feel the need to respond so compelling it’s like a drug addict waiting for the next fix. We as a society have truly become addicted to technology and social media.
However, in order to become a high performance achiever it is critical that you gain control of your time. You need to master the simple process of taking charge of how you use your time and who you let have some of it.
How Much Time Are You Spending?
Think about this. We all have 86,400 seconds in a day and once they are gone they are gone. No amount of money will allow you to get back the time that has passed. So how effectively you those 86,400 seconds can become a great equalizer for making money and getting “stuff” done!
I’m sure you’re thinking, “But wait, email, Facebook, Instagram, etc. is partly how I make money.” That’s great. I’m not telling you to stop it completely. I’m merely suggesting you get a hold of your time and prioritize what needs to be done. And that means, no outside distractions during the time you are engaged in work.
So, the first question you must ask yourself in order to become the master of your time is, “How am I using my time now?” When I speak with people about this, and they are honest, the end result is almost always that they are wasting a great deal of time each and every day.
After we dissect their day together, I typically find most people can easily gain at least one more hour a day that they can use to be productive. Now we can talk about what productive means, but let’s just say for our purposes now we are talking about advancing toward a better life than you have right now, whatever that means to you.
One of the quickest ways to gain one hour a day is to get up one hour earlier in the morning. I get up at about five in the morning every day and often earlier. I have done this for years and it was one of the keys to being able to build a multi-million dollar business part time, while still in a full time real estate career. The other key to this strategy is NOT allowing those outside distractions to suck your time away. It won’t do you any good at all to get up earlier if you’re not focusing on the task at hand. Use the extra time to further your growth.
In order to figure out where your time suckers are you need to analyze the use of your time for every minute of every day. When I have people do this exercise for seven days, and they do it honestly, they are amazed at the results. Typically they come away finding at least one hour extra per day and many come away finding much more. These are hours that can be used, as I said earlier, to move your life in the direction you want it to go.
Mark down in five or six minute segments everything you do each day for seven days. Understand the significance of this exercise because it is part of the foundation to achieving your dreams. You want to mark down each time at work you do something of a personal nature as well as the projects you are working on, the phone calls, the text messages and all the other distractions.
As mentioned earlier, email can be a real time stealer. Most people do not need a response to their email immediately. Unless you are dealing with a particular situation or are in a customer service roll, most emails can wait until the end of the day. Answering your email only once or twice a day can increase your productivity hugely.
When evaluating your time, make note of everything you do, whether productive or not. Being honest with the exercise is often the biggest challenge for people. But remember, it’s about being honest with you, not someone else.
Plan to Plan
Planning your day, every day, is extremely important! We all use a calendar of some sort but marking appointments is not enough. Planning involves knowing the tasks you must accomplish each day to move you toward the completion of projects as well as the tasks to move you toward your goals and ambitions.
At the end of each workday take a look at the next day and plan out what you must do, whom you must speak with and who should be contacting you. In order to do this simply and easily, I have put together an efficient one-page planner, “The Daily SuperRicher Organizer”, that keeps me on track throughout the day. I know what I must accomplish each day before it starts. This allows me to concentrate on the most important tasks and get them done as efficiently as possible. This simple yet powerful tool can help you become a master of time efficiency and is available as a free download at old.tonyneumeyer.com .
With The Daily SuperRicher Organizer, I write four goals or projects that I am working on with the tasks I need to do that either complete the project or move me closer to the completion of it. I also include a list of the people I must contact and those that need to contact me. These should be people that are integral in moving you to the completion of your goals or projects. They may be contacting you via email or by phone. But one of the things you want to fully avoid is looking at emails from anyone other than those whom you are expecting to hear from. Remember the scenario in the opening paragraph. A trick I learned to avoid distractions with emails is to arrange your emails alphabetically by “from” and only focus on the person you need to hear from.
Then there are the “Must Dos” today. As the name says, these are things you must do today before you move on to anything less than your top priorities. And lastly, I have a spot for the day’s appointments. This isn’t your time calendar per say; however, I put them there so I have them in the forefront of my mind. They are there with everything else I need to accomplish that day.
Stay on Task and Create Your Future
It may seem to some that I am making something out of nothing when it comes to planning your time and avoiding distractions, but when you become enslaved by your inbox, tweets, Facebook, etc. you are allowing other people to create your agenda and therefore your life. Taking charge of your time is one of the most critical aspects of making the most out of your future. Remember, we all start each day with the same number of seconds. The question is will you use them as effectively and efficiently as possible?
