100 unchanging rules for business success
Part 9. The laws of time management
Time is a fair gift that nature gives to everyone.
No matter who you are,
what social class you are,
whatever your education level,
your knowledge,
your professional skills,
you have the same amount of time:
twenty-four hours in a day.
Once time has passed,
you cannot get it back.
Therefore,
taking advantage of every precious moment
to achieve a successful,
happy life or letting time fade away in regret,
it all depends on how you think and use time.
Your attitude towards time plays an important role in all actions
and is also an important factor in determining your present
and future future.
The biggest shift in my perspective on time came a few years ago
when I was rethinking my way of thinking
about personal relationships
with time management.
Up to that point,
I had considered myself as the “sun” of the universe,
and the elements of my life as other planets
that orbited around me in different cycles.
One of these planets is “time management”.
This planet broke out of my orbit
once I came across an article
and watched a tape on time management techniques.
Then I began to reverse my previous views
and realized that time management was the “sun” of my life
and all other factors would be the planets orbiting of the sun.
Suddenly I realized
that if I could control all my time,
all the other parts of my life would be in place.
And quite rightly so.
In fact, people with similar qualifications
or educational background often
enter the same competitive field
with similar levels of job responsibility and income.
However, over a long period of time,
some people become superior.
Their income is many times higher,
they take on more challenging job positions,
have more promotion opportunities,
and are trusted and respected
by everyone around them.
Their life is the dream of many people.
So what makes these people different
when they all have something in common
a starting point.
That is the ability to use and manage time.
They know how to organize their work effectively
and take advantage of every moment to do all the work
within their area of responsibility
with the highest productivity.
The more they demonstrate the effectiveness of their work,
the more valuable work they are entrusted
with by their superiors.
This will inevitably lead to increased income
and promotion opportunities.
When you learn and apply time management methods,
general laws and principles of time use,
you immediately identify the right direction
and can “accelerate” your career.
You’ll get more done,
faster in both your work
and personal life than before.
People who practice these laws of time management report
that they have made significant career advancements,
incomes have increased,
and surprisingly,
they have more time to spend with family and friends.
The laws of time management are timeless and immutable.
They are for everyone,
anywhere.
When you know how to allocate your activities in harmony
with these laws
and principles,
you will be far more effective than you think.
“Spend eighty percent of your time
focusing on the opportunities of tomorrow rather
than the problems of yesterday.” — Brian Tracy
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88. The law of clear
The clearer the goal,
the more effective it is in its execution.
Your success or happiness is largely determined
by the clarity of your goals in life.
Clarity will guide your thoughts and actions.
People who know how to set clear goals often reap great achievements
in less time than others.
This is true everywhere and in all practical situations.
When you’re clear about your goals,
you’ll know how to categorize your tasks,
prioritize things that can support your goals,
and eliminate or spend less time on things that don’t matter.
You can use the following seven-step process
to reach your goals faster
and easier than ever:
• Decide specifically and exactly what you want in different areas of your life.
• Be specific and detailed about your decision on a piece of paper.
• Specify the implementation period.
If it’s a big goal,
break it down into small deadlines
and put them in order.
• Make a list of actions and tasks
that you think you need to perform to achieve the set goals.
Every time you think of new tasks,
add them to the list.
• Organize the items on your list into an action plan
by prioritizing them accordingly.
• Get the most important things done right away.
This is extremely important!
• Every day, try to do one part of the task
that moves you closer to achieving one
or more of your important goals.
Stay motivated and motivated!
This seven-step process isn’t really
that difficult to follow,
but less than 3% of people actually set goals
and make action plans every day.
And this is also a number
that represents successful individuals in life.
You can quickly join this group of successful people
when you begin to set goals and commit
to a plan to execute until the end.
Regularly research and review your goals
to make sure they remain the most important ones.
Over time, you will add to your list of new goals
and will also remove
or reduce the priority of goals that are no longer
as important as you once thought.
Regardless of your goals,
build the habit of carefully planning on paper
and working on them daily.
This is the core factor to optimize work efficiency
and achieve the highest results.
“The price of success must be paid in full,
in advance.”— Brian Tracy
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89. The law of priority
The ability to clearly and accurately define your time priorities determines
the quality of your life.
Effective time management skills are reflected in the division
of time in accordance with the work priority norms.
The Pareto Principle says
that 20% of your total work accounts
for 80% of the total value of your work.
Suppose you have a list of 10 to-dos,
two of which will be worth more than the other eight combined.
According to this principle,
in order to achieve big goals,
you need to always focus on the few things
that bring the most value to your life and career.
The value or importance of a job can be measured
by assessing the possible effects of doing or not doing it.
If important,
it will have powerful effects on your life and career.
Conversely, the unimportant will have little
or no effect on you.
The ability to consider possible consequences
before acting is the hallmark of an effective thinker.
The ability to discipline yourself to do the things
that can make a big difference in your life is an important quality
that helps you get everything at hand.
“We must learn to apply all that we know
so that we can attract all that we want.” — Jim Rohn
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90. The law of the following
Before starting a new thing,
you must end an old one.
Have you ever found that you have too much to do while limited time?
Indeed, with today’s active life,
the average person works about 110% of capacity or more.
You hardly have any free time for yourself.
However, you can completely take control of your life
by stopping doing things
that are no longer valuable
or unimportant to you and start doing new things.
As life changes,
priorities will change too.
Some things that were important in one phase of your life
or career will no longer matter
when you move to another stage of your life
or when you take on a new job
with a higher level of responsibility.
Continually ask yourself:
“What tasks can I cut, delegate to someone else,
Or stop working to spend more time on the things
that matter most to me?”.
To start anything new,
you have to stop an old one.
You need to analyze your time carefully
and dare to stop doing things
that are no longer important to you
to replace them with other things.
You can’t effectively perform a new job
without actively terminating the current one.
Make today worth remembering. — Zig Ziglar
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91. The law of most value property
The ability to make money is your most valuable asset.
Assets are those that provide stable
and predictable cash flow.
Your ability to make money is the most valuable asset
you are fortunate to have.
In a competitive economy,
you work hard,
use your mind
and exploit your abilities
to affirm your self-worth
and get a commensurate income.
With this level of income,
you can achieve all material things in life.
Even though you may lose everything,
if you still maintain a high level of earning power,
you will quickly settle down
and recover your wealth.
Sometimes it takes a lifetime to develop the ability
to make money today.
But this is a depreciating asset
that you must continuously maintain
and improve to keep yourself performing productively,
with quality and efficiency.
Knowledge and skills are key
to staying ahead in the 21st century.
Your earning potential is made up of a unique combination
of these two important factors.
If your field of business
or work undergoes rapid changes,
your knowledge
and skills will quickly fall behind.
You must constantly update,
supplement or replace old knowledge
and skills with something new,
in line with new trends if you want
to maintain your current monetization
or to move forward.
What you get is always commensurate
with what you give or give.
If you want to raise your standard of living,
you must enhance your earning potential
through a complex and systematic process of learning
and practicing new skills and abilities.
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92. The law of planning
Every minute of planning saves ten minutes of execution.
The purpose of strategic planning in a company is to reorganize
and restructure the company’s activities
and resources to increase the “return on invested capital”, i.e.
the return on the cash invested in the company’s operations.
And the purpose of “personal strategic planning”
is to help you increase your “revenue on strength”,
that is, the results obtained from mental,
physical,
emotional and intellectual capital,
that you have invested in your life and career.
For every minute you spend pre-planning your goals,
your activity will save you ten minutes of work
as you work on those plans.
So careful planning ahead will give you ten times
the return on your emotional,
physical, and mental investment.
It only takes you about 10 to 12 minutes to plan a workday.
This amount of time will save you 100 to 120 minutes,
or two hours,
or 25% of your day’s productivity.
It’s important to increase personal productivity
that you use an effective time planning tool.
Almost any planning tool will work
if you discipline yourself
to always see it
as the core of your time management system.
Today, Palm Pilots (a form of handheld device)
and PDAs (personal digital assistants),
combined with personal computers,
can help you plan your time effectively more fruitful.
Start with a master list
that underlies your time planning system.
Write down everything you think you need
to do in the indefinite future.
As ideas,
goals,
tasks,
and responsibilities arise,
immediately add them to the main list.
Do not subjectively believe in memory.
Plan each month in advance
by moving the right items
from your main list into the monthly list.
It is best to do this on the last week of each month
Plan each week in advance
by moving items from the month list to the week list.
The best time is the weekend before.
Plan each day in advance
by moving items from the week list to the day list
and then add whatever else needs to be done for that day.
This should be done the night before.
Plan every project,
meeting,
and goal in detail
before you start.
The very act of planning will help you think better
and more accurately about everything
that needs to be done.
The more you get into the habit of thinking and planning on paper,
the quicker and more effective you will be at getting started.
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93. The law of rewards
The reward that you get will depend on the results of your work.
What you get is always proportional to how effective you are
when you do the job
and how difficult it is
when the company looks for a replacement
for your position.
In this day and age,
talent is always well received and rewarded.
The fastest way to get more income
and faster career advancement is to strive
to do better work in terms
of both quantity and quality.
Focus on results rather than activities.
Regularly evaluate each task and make sure
that what you do produces the most,
at any given time.
Always ask yourself:
“What are people expecting from me?”.
Do more than you get paid.
Try to go a little further.
You’ll never get stuck on that extra mile.
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94. The law of continuous
Effective time management allows you to control the sequence
of events in your life.
A positive mental attitude,
optimism and trust will increase your energy,
creativity and productivity,
helping you to achieve greater results.
A positive mental attitude is also what makes you
have a sense of “sense of control” over your life.
That sense of control is key to maximizing work efficiency.
When there is so much to do
but with limited time resources,
you will feel overwhelmed.
You begin to find yourself losing control over time.
However, time management is a tool
that you can use to control the sequence of events
and thereby take control of your life.
You have complete freedom to choose your actions.
Your current life is the sum total of the choices
and decisions you’ve made so far.
If you are not satisfied
with any area of your life,
you have the right to make other choices
or decisions that are better for you.
At any time you can stop
and decide to change the sequence
of events in your life in a new order.
In this way,
you are aligning your life in the direction
you really want to go.
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95. The law of light
There are certain tasks that,
if you take the time to complete in the past,
will help you achieve higher results than others.
You should strive to get the multiplier in your life.
There are a number of jobs that,
if done well by you,
will provide a stepping stone to support
and dramatically improve your self-worth
and your company.
One multiplier that you can figure out and use
is the “profound impact score”
– a factor that can have a powerful effect on other people’s activities.
For example,
the decision to enter into a venture capital investment,
the decision to execute
or cancel a certain contract can affect the activities of many people
and thereby affect the entire future of the company.
So, what is your “deep impact”?
Archimedes, a Greek philosopher,
had a classic saying:
“Give me a lever and a fulcrum,
and I can lift the earth.”
Which of your activities have strong leverage
to influence the activities
of others and the use of other resources?
Some of the most common forms of leverage in business
are “other people’s money”,
“other people’s knowledge”
and “other people’s efforts.
1. Other people’s money is money
that you can borrow to leverage your business activities,
to buy or sell in more quantities than you could
by simply relying on your own limited financial resources close.
This is the main reason to use credit in business and investment.
Therefore, the ability to access
and use other people’s money
is one of the important factors determining your success.
2. The knowledge of others is a second kind of leverage.
The ability to take in the knowledge
and experiences of others to get the information
and ideas you need to move forward will help you leverage your resources
and achieve more results than a single person,
individuals strive to achieve results only
by their own knowledge.
3. The third type of leverage, the effort of others,
is the time and energy of individuals with the critical abilities
and skills you need to maximize
or leverage your talent
and develop your own resources.
By developing the ability to attract the efforts,
knowledge, and money of others,
you can achieve more in the same time
than those who depend solely on their own resources.
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96. The law of the right time
Your ability to act faster than others can be your greatest asset.
In today’s work environment,
the ability to prioritize and get things done quickly
and efficiently is one of the most valuable time management skills.
You need to build a “sense of working quickly”
because with today’s dynamic life,
people often become impatient,
dissatisfied or satisfied with promises
but only believe in actual results.
Speed and the ability to do things quickly are matters
of human perception.
Once you get into the habit of doing things quickly,
with a sense of responsibility,
the opportunities
and rewards will attract more and more to you.
Busy people often work at a higher speed
than the average person.
They get more done in the same amount of time.
You need to set a goal of becoming
the fastest performer in the workplace.
Start a little earlier,
work a little harder,
and stay later than usual.
Always make good use of your working time.
Quickly handle small,
urgent tasks,
then quickly start another job.
Always set a pace for yourself
and build up to it gradually.
Avoid wasting time by all means.
Sometimes all you need to prove yourself
and achieve success is the ability to take on
and get the job done faster than anyone else.
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97. The law of practice
Continually practicing an important skill will reduce the amount of time
it takes to get the job done and improve results.
The more often you practice an important skill,
the less time you’ll have to spend working on a similar skill.
The more proficient you are at a particular task,
the shorter it will take you to complete it.
Use your knowledge to dramatically
increase your results and productivity.
Group your small tasks into groups of the same type
and work on each of them at the same time.
The more times you do one task,
the less time it takes to do the next.
Use all the experience
you have to reach the top of your career.
The more efficiently you do a job,
the more work you will do with higher quality
and in a shorter amount of time.
The combination of knowledge
and experience will make you one of the most productive
and effective people in the company.
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98. The law of time pressure
There is never enough time to do everything,
but there is always enough time
to do the things that matter most.
When you feel like you’re under pressure
to meet a specific deadline,
you force yourself to be more productive
than you would otherwise be.
According to Parkinson’s Law,
work is always extended to fill the time devoted to them.
Let’s say you have a whole day to do just one task
that can be completed in two hours
Surely that job will tend to extend slowly
and will take you a day instead of two hours.
However, this rule also reflects
that the work will collect less
to fill the time of division for them.
Use this rule by setting the deadline for yourself
and forcing you to get the job done earlier.
Continuing to analyze your work
and focus on completing the most important task,
in order to help you complete the entire project on time,
even ahead of time.
Here are four questions you can ask yourself daily
to always focus on the most important tasks:
• What are the tasks
I am doing with the highest value for my common work?
• What is my main job results?
What specific results have
I been recruited to achieve to contribute
to the company’s common goal?
• Why does the company pay me that salary?
What job do I need to do?
• What is the job
that only I can do and
when doing well will make a real difference
for my career and life?
At any time,
usually only one type of job shows the ability
to use your time most effectively.
You need to determine this job
and devote it wholeheartedly
to solve it quickly and effectively.
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99. The law of settling each job
The ability to start
and complete the most important task
will determine your productivity more than any other skill.
You can only achieve the optimal work efficiency
when focusing all your mind on the most important task
and persevering in the implementation until complete.
You will take a lot of time
when returning to a job that is doing halfway.
Even if you are a talented person,
converge all the competencies and qualities needed
to successfully complete the job,
if you do not close yourself in discipline
to focus on the most important task,
you will
It is hard to master your job
Have you ever enjoyed the feeling of success,
excitement,
confidence
and enthusiasm that soars
when you have just completed a complex or difficult task?
That’s when you are at the peak of victory.
The more difficult the road to overcome,
the more pride and great sense of self-efficacy you have.
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100. The law of capacity
Your productivity will increase dramatically
as you become more proficient at performing important tasks.
One of the most powerful time management practices
for your career is to excel at doing the things that matter most.
Core competencies,
key skills,
areas that you fully understand
and master are all factors
that determine the productivity,
standard of living
and the achievements you achieve in your field.
The market pays only the most valuable rewards
for the best work.
So your level of success depends on your ability
to do many things more efficiently than others.
Here’s an important question for you:
“Which skill, if you develop
and make the most of it,
will have the most positive impact on your career?“.
The critical skill you are weakest in determines
how effectively you use the remaining skills.
Be honest with yourself.
What skills do you find yourself weak in?
What skills determine the speed at which you complete key tasks
and achieve your goals?
What skills,
if lacking,
will affect your growth and progress?
According to the 80/20 rule,
80% of the reasons
why you can’t progress
as quickly as you want are explained
by a 20% lack of important skills and abilities.
This principle also says
that 80% of the limitations in your life come from you.
In other words,
80% of the total reason you don’t reach your goals
as quickly as you would like is
because you lack a certain skill,
ability, or quality.
Unsuccessful people always find a way to justify their failures
or problems because of external factors.
Meanwhile, high achievers always look back on themselves
Ask yourself,
“What weaknesses do I have that are hindering my progress?”.
Successful people always look at themselves to find answers
and solutions to their problems.
Less successful people are often only interested in external factors.
Who do you think will find the solution first?
The time management principles presented in this chapter
have been adopted by many organizations
and have proven effective and practical.
They are the basic and immutable laws
for you to manage your life.
In fact,
the rules of business success are not so complicated and confusing.
They are really simple,
easy to apply and will become your own
for the rest of your career.
To master these rules,
you need to clearly understand the four Ds in English presented as follows:
1.The first D is Desire – Desire.
This is the starting point of all success in work and life.
You have to really want to achieve your goals.
You must be willing to put in the necessary effort
to develop time management habits
until they become part of your character and qualities.
2. The second D is Decision – Decision.
Be flexible when needed.
You must make a clear decision
that you yourself are practicing these behaviors and habits,
no matter how long it takes.
3. The third D is Discipline – Discipline.
This is the most important quality you need
to achieve your greatest personal success and achievement.
With a high sense of personal discipline,
you can conquer the world.
Without it,
the probability of success is very low.
4. The fourth D is Determination.
This is an important quality
that allows you to overcome all the lags,
disappointments,
temporary failures and any obstacles
that appear on your journey to success.
Your determination and perseverance are a measure
of your belief in yourself.
There are no real limits
to what you can achieve in your life,
except the limits that you set for yourself,
which come from your own thoughts.
Wealth is power.
When you’re rich,
anything is possible. — George Clason