Introduction
Hi, I’m Max, a professional behavioural specialist.
A question for you – what is your most precious resource in life? Money? Your network? Your health? All of these can be recovered. But what’s the one resource that can never be recovered?
Your Time.
We are born, we have four thousand weeks, and that’s it, we’re gone. Here are some more questions to think about.
How are you currently spending your weeks?
How many do you have left?
How often have you thought about that?
Today we will go over the strategies for regaining ownership of our schedules, but the preciousness of our time can not be overstated. The secret to becoming more effective with our time is to become protective over it, like an overprotective parent is over their baby.
Today’s reading will focus on three of the main steps I have used with my clients to regain control of their schedules. A key distinction when it comes to effective time management is that a lot of high performers make this mistake – DO NOT MISTAKE BEING BUSY FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE.
Now, let’s get into the meat of today’s topic. How do we create powerful focus with our time?
Step One – Become A Military General
Imagine yourself as a military general, in charge of an army. But instead of your army consisting of soldiers, your army consists of minutes. Take a moment to grasp that.
One of the most powerful concepts you can learn is what is referred to in the military as CONCENTRATION OF FORCE. This is one of my top three tenets as a coach, and I couldn’t recommend this as a life philosophy more strongly. In the military, concentration of force refers to the process of concentrating as many soldiers to the weakest point of the enemy, with powerful execution.
This is an absolutely bulletproof principle – it applies in military, sports, business, relationships, spiritual practices, anywhere!
Truly it is one of the most effective principles in human knowledge.
So, General, two questions for you:
- How are your forces currently being concentrated?
- Where are the most effective places to concentrate your forces?
Here’s a blueprint that I often lay out for my clients. Moving forward, your time can be exclusively focused in these three areas, and these three areas ONLY.
- Your business.
- Your family.
- Your personal development.
That’s it. All your troops are focused in these three areas and creating a sustainable and healthy balance. Every minute a troop is sent to one of these three base camps. What results would that yield for your business, for your family, and for your sense of happiness?
Step Two – Don’t Just Win The Battle, Win The War
A wise military general is not only concerned with winning the battle ahead of them, but they are able to effectively connect this battle with the LARGER CAMPAIGN that is at stake. Translating this to our time, are you conscious of how the current spending of your time is connected with where you want to be six months from now, a year from now, five years from now? When we connect each of our daily actions to a larger goal, and we effectively delay gratification for the sake of achieving something greater in our lives, we become an effective military general.
There is a larger war at stake here, and you are in tasked to win this war.
To put this more simply, here are three questions for you to consider:
- What is your top one-year goal for your business?
- What is your top one-year goal for your family?
- What is your top one-year goal for your personal development?
Connect the battle of the hour, the day, the week, and the month to the larger campaign.
To put it simply – all the actions that we commit to today need to be connected to these one-year goals. If they’re not, we aren’t effectively strategizing. And if they are, the question is, how powerfully?
Step Three – Become Friends With Saying No
If you have been following along in today’s reading effectively, now we understand that there are only three areas in our life to dedicate time – our development, our family, and our business.
Effective time management is not about how to squeeze more out of your day, it’s actually about doing less! When a commitment comes up, ask yourself “Would taking on this commitment move me toward my yearly goal for my business, family, or my development? And if so, by how much?” – and unless the answer is “Hell yes”, then say no!
When a script or novel writer takes his work to an editor, the editor’s job is to CUT OUT anything that inhibits the point of the story! Some editors have been known to slash up to fifty or even sixty percent of the first draft of a novel, often bringing the writer to tears! But the point of a good editor is to grasp and understand the essence of a story and cut out anything that delineates from that essence.
See your life that way! Distill your life down to the three areas we talked about, and one yearly goal for each area. That’s it.
Everything else? Strategically work your way out of it.
Effective time management is not about more, it’s about less! And now with extreme ownership of our schedule, we can begin the process of more effectively concentrating our forces in the areas that matter the most.
If you’re committed to this, reach out to me for a complimentary 30-minute conversation here.
Max. Behavioural Specialist.
