Time Power

One of the keys to developing a stronger internal locus of control is for you to manage your time and your life better. The more skilled you become at managing your time, the happier and more confident you will feel. You will have a stronger sense of personal power. You will feel in charge of your own destiny. You will have a greater sense of well-being. You will be more positive and personable.

4. More Time for Your Family

You will have more time for your family and your personal life as you get your time and your life under control. You will have more time for your friends, for relaxation, for personal and professional development, and for anything else you want to do. When you become the master of your own time, and gain two extra hours per day, you can use that extra time to run a marathon, complete a college degree, write a book, build a business, and create an outstanding life. With two extra hours per day, you can put your life and career onto the fast track and begin moving ahead at a more rapid rate than you ever thought possible. Three Mental Barriers to If everyone agrees that excellent time management is a desirable skill, why is it that so few people can be described as “well organized, effective and efficient?” Over the years, I have found that many people have ideas about time management that are simply not true. But if you believe something to 13 be true, it becomes true for you. Your beliefs cause you to see yourself and the world, and your relationship to time management, in a particular way. If you have negative beliefs in any area, these beliefs will affect your thinking and actions, and will eventually become your reality. “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”

1. You Will Decrease Your Naturalness and Spontaneity

The first myth of time management, or negative belief, is that if you are too well organized, you become cold, calculating and unemotional. If you are extremely effective and efficient, some people feel that they will lose their spontaneity and freedom. They will become unable to “go with the flow,” to express themselves openly and honestly. People think that managing your time well makes you too rigid and inflexible. This turns out not to be true at all. Many people hide behind this false idea and use it as an excuse for not disciplining themselves the way they know they should. The fact is that people who are disorganized are not spontaneous; they are merely confused, and often frantic. Often they suffer a good deal of stress. It turns out that the better organized you are, the more time and opportunity you have to be truly relaxed, truly spontaneous, and truly happy. You have a much greater internal locus of control. Here is the key: Structure and organize everything that you possibly can. Think ahead, plan for contingencies, prepare thoroughly, and focus on specific results. Only then can you be completely relaxed and spontaneous when the situation changes. The better organized you are in the factors that 14 are under your control, the greater freedom and flexibility you have to quickly make changes whenever they are necessary.

2. Negative Mental Programming

The second mental barrier to developing excellent time management skills is negative programming, often from your parents, but also from other influential people, when you are growing up. If your parents or others told you that you were a messy person, or that you were always late, or that you never finished anything you started, when you become an adult, you may still be operating unconsciously to obey these earlier commands. The most common excuse is “That’s just the way I am,” or “I have always been that way.” The fact is that no one is born either messy and disorganized, or neat and efficient. Time management and personal efficiency skills are disciplines that we learn and develop with practice and repetition. If we have developed bad time management habits, we can unlearn them. We can replace them with good habits over time.

3. Self Limiting Beliefs

The third mental barrier to good time management skills is a negative selfconcept or what are called, “self-limiting beliefs.” Many people believe that they don’t have the ability to be good at time management. They often believe that it is an inborn part of their background or heritage. But there is no gene or chromosome for poor time management, or good time management, for that matter. Nobody is born with a genetic deficiency in 15 personal organization. Your personal behaviors are very much under your own control. Here is an example to prove that most of what you do is determined by your level of motivation and desire in that area. Imagine that someone were to offer you a million dollars to manage your time superbly for the next 30 days. Imagine that an efficiency expert was going to follow you around with a clipboard and a video camera for one month. After 30 days, if you had used your time efficiently and well, working on your highest priorities all day, every day, you would receive a prize of one million dollars. How efficient would you be over the next 30 days? The fact is that, with sufficient motivation (one million dollars!), you would be one of the most efficient, effective, best-organized and focused people in the world. The best news is that after one full month of practicing the very best time management skills you know, you would have developed habits of high productivity and top performance that would last you the rest of your life.

You Are Free to Choose

Time management behaviors are very much a matter of choice. You choose to be efficient or you choose to be disorganized. You choose to focus and concentrate on your highest-value tasks, or you choose to spend your time on activities that contribute little value to your life. And you are always free to choose. 16 The starting point of overcoming your previous programming, and eliminating the mental blocks to time management, is for you to make a clear, unequivocal decision to become absolutely excellent at the way you use your time minute-by-minute and hour-by-hour. You must decide, right here and now, that you are going to become an expert in time management. Your aim should be to manage your time so well that people look up to you and use you as a role model for their own work habits.

Program Yourself for Effectiveness and Efficiency

There are several mental techniques that you can use to program yourself for peak performance.

1. Positive Self Talk

The first of these methods for programming your subconscious mind is “positive self-talk,” or the use of positive affirmations. These are commands that you pass from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind. Affirmations are statements that you either say out loud or say to yourself with the emotion and enthusiasm that drives the words into your subconscious mind as new operating instructions. Here are some examples of affirmative commands that you can use to improve your time management skills. Begin by repeating over and over to yourself, “I am excellent at time management! I am excellent at time management!” Any command repeated over and over again in a spirit of faith, acceptance and belief, will eventually 17 be accepted by your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind will then organize your words, actions and feelings to be consistent with these new commands. You can continually repeat, “I am always punctual for my appointments! I am always punctual for my appointments!” You can create your own mental commands, such as “I am well organized!” or “I concentrate easily on my highest pay-off tasks!” My favorite time management affirmation is to repeat continually, “I use my time well. I use my time well. I use my time well.” When you repeat these words over and over, with emphasis, they are eventually accepted by your subconscious mind. You will then find that your external behaviors will start to reflect your internal programming.

2. Visualize Yourself as Highly Efficient

The second technique that you can use to program your subconscious mind is visualization. Your subconscious mind is most immediately influenced by mental pictures. In self-image psychology, the person you see is the person you will be. Begin to see yourself as well organized, efficient and effective. Recall and recreate memories and pictures of yourself when you were performing at your best. Think of a time when you were working efficiently and effectively, and getting through an enormous amount of work. Play this picture of yourself over and over again on the screen of your mind. In athletic training, this is called “mental rehearsal.” This requires practicing and rehearsing in your mind before you actually engage in the physical action. The more relaxed you are when you visualize yourself performing at 18 your best, the more rapidly this command is accepted by your subconscious mind and becomes a part of your thinking and acting later on.

The Practice of Mental Rehearsal

The method is simple. First, you sit or lie in a quiet place where you can be completely alone in the silence. You then imagine yourself going through an important upcoming experience, such as a meeting, a presentation, a negotiation or even a date. As you sit or lie completely relaxed, create a picture of the coming event and see it unfolding perfectly in every respect. See yourself as calm, positive, happy and in complete control. See the other people doing and saying exactly what you would want them to do if the situation was perfect. Then, breathe deeply, relax and just let it go, as if you had sent off an order and the delivery is guaranteed, exactly as you visualized it. The best time to practice mental rehearsal is at night in bed, just before you fall asleep. The last thing you do before you doze off is to imagine yourself performing at your best the following day. You will be amazed at how often the upcoming event or experience happens exactly as you imagined it. In becoming excellent at time management, practice mental rehearsal by continually seeing yourself as you would be if you were one of the best organized and most efficient people you could imagine. Eventually these pictures will “lock in.” When they do, you will find yourself easily and automatically using your time efficiently and well in everything you do. 19

3. Act the Part

The third mental technique you can use to program your subconscious mind for efficiency and effectiveness is to act the part of a highly efficient person. Imagine that you have been selected for a role in a movie or stage play. In this role, you are to act the part of a person who is extremely well organized in every respect. As you go through your daily life, imagine you are an actor who is playing this part, who is already very good at time management. Act is if you are already using your time efficiently and well. Pretend that you are an expert in personal efficiency. Fake it until you make it. When you pretend that you are excellent in time management, eventually the action, which is under your direct control, will develop the mindset or the belief in your subconscious mind that is consistent with it.

4. Benchmark against the Best

The fourth mental technique you can use for becoming a highly efficient person is called “modeling.” Modeling requires you to pattern yourself after someone you know who uses his or her time well. Think of someone you admire for good time management skills. Use that person as your standard or your model. Imagine what he or she would do in any given situation, and then do it yourself. Many of the most effective men and women in America reached their positions by modeling themselves in their earlier years after someone who was already extremely effective, someone whom they admired and respected 20 for qualities they wanted to develop in themselves. Because of the Law of Correspondence, you always tend to become on the inside what you most admire in other people.

5. Become a Teacher

The fifth technique for programming your subconscious mind is to imagine that you are going to be teaching a course in time management one year from today. This technique comes from the discoveries in the field of accelerated learning. What the experts have found is that if you think about how you would teach new material at the same time you are learning the new material, you seem to absorb it and internalize it far faster than if you just thought about learning it and using it for yourself. As you take in these new ideas on time management, think of how you would teach them to someone else. Think of someone in your life who could benefit from practicing what you are learning. Just as you become what you think about, you also become what you teach. Just thinking about teaching something to someone else increases the speed at which you learn it yourself. And you always think about teaching those things that you most want or need to learn for yourself. One of the fastest ways to learn new ideas and techniques permanently is to share them with other people immediately after you learn them. Each time you come across a good idea in this book, take a few moments to share it with someone nearby, either at home or at work. The concentration you require to explain the new principle in your own words to another person 21 seems to drive the information deeper into your subconscious mind where it becomes a permanent part of your long-term memory.

6. Be a Role Model for Others

The sixth technique you can use to program your subconscious mind is to imagine that others are looking up to you as an example of excellence in time management. Imagine that you are setting the standard in your company or your organization. Imagine that everyone is looking to you for guidance on how they should plan and organize their own time. If others were watching you, what would you do differently each day? How would you behave in your daily work? How would you organize your time if you felt that everyone was looking up at you to set the standard, to be the role model? When you see yourself as a model, an example of excellent performance, you will always do better and accomplish more than if you just thought of yourself as personally trying to be more efficient. The more you think about yourself as an excellent time manager, the more excellent you become. The more you see yourself as a role model for others, the better you become in organizing your own time and life. Your Self Esteem Determines Your Life Perhaps the most important part of the psychology of time management, and the role that your self-concept has in determining your performance and 22 behavior, is the impact of your self-esteem in determining everything that happens to you. Most psychologists agree that self-esteem is the critical determinant of a healthy personality. The best definition of self-esteem is, “how much you like yourself.” When you like and respect yourself, you always perform and behave better than if you did not. The more you like yourself, the more confidence you have. The more you life yourself, the more efficient and effective you are in each area of your life. Self-esteem is the key to peak performance. Your self-esteem is so important to your emotional health that almost everything you do is aimed at either increasing your feelings of self-esteem and personal value, or protecting it from being diminished by other people or circumstances. Self-esteem, the feeling of liking and respecting yourself, is the foundation principle of success and happiness. It is vital for you to feel fully alive.

The Key to Peak Performance

The flip side of self-esteem is called “self-efficacy.” This is defined as how effective you feel you are at doing or accomplishing a task or job. When you feel that you are really good at something, you experience positive feelings of self-efficacy. One of the greatest discoveries in psychology was the discovery of the connection between self-esteem and self-efficacy. Now we know that the 23 more you life yourself, the better you do at almost anything you attempt. And the better you do at something, the more you like yourself. Each feeds on and reinforces the other. This finding is what makes time management so important for every part of your life. The better you use your time, the more you get done and the higher is your sense of self-efficacy. As a result, you like yourself more, do even higher quality work, and get even more done. Your whole life improves.