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This is my second pass at offering usable notes for this aged (1973) classic of time management. I really liked the chapters from 10 on. I'm not so sure about the first 9 chapters.
Why You Should Care about Your Time
Time = Life. Effectiveness, not efficiency. The system is not inflexible, mechanical or burdensome and is meant to be fun and open for experimentation. Users include businessmen, housewives, students, creatives, and counter-culture types.
Your Payoff: Control of Your Life
Don't be over-organized, overactive, or pre-occupied about time. Needs change over life cycle. You're the judge, so pick and choose ideas. More control => more freedom.
Drift, Drown, or Decide
More choices than ever before. Everybody wants a piece of you. You have more freedom than you think. You may be stuck in the past. Choices are complicated, balancing short- and long-term rational, emotional, and physical considerations. You may decide out of: 1., habit, 2., demands of others, 3., escapism, 4., impulse, 5., default, 6., conscious decision. [What about non-impulsive intuition ??? Think about sports, for example, or the "flow" phenomenon.]
Control Starts with Planning
Bring the future into the present so you can do something about it now. Make a lot of plans; some of them will be good and, over time, you'll get better at it. Being explicit about your choices can be painful. Planning = making a list + setting priorities. Use letters to indicate rough relative priorities. Within your A priorities, it might pay to break it down to A-1, A-2, etc. Expect the priorities to change, even from day to day. A few minutes spent on an A item can convert it to a B or C item with respect to spending more time on it.
What Do You Really Want from Life ?
Write down a Lifetime Goals Statement. Exercise: First question: "What are my lifetime goals?" Write down as many words relating to goals as you can in TWO MINUTES. Edit it for TWO MINUTES. Add one or two more goals not included that are implicit in your current pattern of living. Second question: "How would I like to spend the next 3 years (5 if you're over 30 !!!) ?" Same approach to answering. Third question: "If I knew now I would be struck dead by lightning six months from today, how would I live until then ?" Same deal, assuming that you don't have to focus on straightening out your affairs. If answer to third question differs from first two it may show that you're not happy in what you're doing. Select top three from each list, then select top three from the nine (or fewer if there is duplication). Repeat the exercise a few times, at increasing intervals, until you are satisfied.
Get Started Right Now
List activities (do-able actions) for A goals. First, the possible (being creative, inclusive, and non-judgmental), then set priorities according to what is most effective NOW. Spend three minutes listing activities for each of your three top goals. [This is more of a goal breakdown exercise than an NA-generation exercise.] Eliminate low priority tasks by drawing a line through them (you can always reconsider them next week. Schedule your A activities and do them as scheduled.
How Scheduling Helps
The new activities need to fit in with your prior routines and commitments. Beginning-of-day or end-of-day planning is an essential activity. Both are recommended because of the different perspectives: momentum-building in the AM and informed in the PM. Friday PM is good for a weekly review. Block out time for A activities. Don't bother with diary-keeping; just make a change in the direction you know is right. Internal and external prime time need the most care in scheduling. Leave some slack in the schedule and recovery and prep time.
How to Find Time You Never Knew You Had
Habitual overtime is counter-productive. Make the most of time spent in transition from one major activity to another, including early AM. [DA's "weird bits of time" ?] Commuting time, coffee breaks, meal times, and waiting time all merit exploitation in some way. Pose yourself a question before sleep. Give less than 100% to a boring job that you do just for money [ Really !!!]. Use your spare time for a "special-emphasis goal". [DIT's "current initiative" ???]
Making the Most of Priorities
Play the To Do List game every day. Keep the lists in one place and roll-over undone A priorities. Exclude routine items from the list. Include both urgent (but not C items) and A-list activities. Delegate what you can. Separate As and Bs from Cs, so that its obvious when you are wasting time by doing Cs. To dos can be grouped functionally, by location, by person, or by similarity of work content. [Sounds like DA's contexts] Do your As first. If you have to do something of low value, make it an A by, say, documenting it so you could analyze it for delegation, automation, re-engineering. Upgrade what you do so this year's As become next year's Cs.
[All of this leads up to Lakein's question, three chapters further: What is the best use of my time right now ? He seems to recommend that we keep a well-developed sense of the alternative uses of our time so that we can compare what we are doing or might do with other possibilities.]
Dennis C. During
"To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, American women's rights advocate (1815-1902)
"What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth." - Richard P. Feynman, Nobelist, physicist, raconteur, bongo player, safe-cracker
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