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The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment
Achieve More Success with Less Stress
- Read in 13 minutes
- Audio & text available
- Contains 8 key ideas
Synopsis
The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment (2013) is a practical guide to living a life by design instead of impulse. It provides step-by-step strategies for planning your days around the commitments that really matter to you, setting up effective routines, and finding people to help you stay on track. It also reveals the importance of dealing with emotional baggage like guilt and shame, which can derail even the best-laid plans.
Key idea 1 of 8
The first secret to effective time investment is to make action-based priorities.
Imagine your friends, family, and colleagues just helped themselves to money from your wallet. It would be pretty infuriating, wouldn’t it? You might even be tempted to call the cops!
You’d never let people help themselves to your cash. So why do you allow them to do the same with your time? Time is a limited and precious resource. But, often, we don’t treat it that way. We allow colleagues to heap extra work onto us, or get roped into too many committees. Sometimes we waste our own time, too, like when we fall prey to the temptations of social media, and spend hours scrolling on our phones.
There’ll always be people (and apps) that are hungry for your time. If you don’t want to get pulled in all directions, you have to define clear boundaries around time investments. But you can only do that if you know what your priorities are.
The key message here is: The first secret to effective time investment is to make action-based priorities.
To identify your priorities, you first need to ask yourself a very important question: What makes your life successful? This really is a personal question. It’s got nothing to do with what society deems important and worthy. Success, for you, may look like having enough time to work on your butterfly collection while holding down a job that pays the bills. Or it may be about spending time with all your friends.
Once you’ve considered what success means to you, make a list of your real priorities, in order of importance.
That’s just the start. Now you need to make your priorities action-based. For example, if spending time with family is number one on the list, then perhaps you need to leave the office earlier, so you’re always home in time for dinner.
Of course, your priorities can change. Sometimes a major life event, like illness or a new relationship, will mean you need to reassess your needs. You may need to temporarily devote more time to your health, or scale back extra work to allow space for romance to blossom.
Living according to your priorities is a dynamic process that requires constant balancing and rebalancing. As long as you keep asking yourself that question – What makes my life successful? – then you’ll always have a North Star to work toward.
Key ideas in this title
- The first secret to effective time investment is to make action-based priorities.
- Strong emotions can derail the best-laid plans – unless you acknowledge them.
- Cultivating a positive mindset is essential to achieving your goals.
- The second secret to effective time investment is to set realistic expectations about how much you can do.
- The third secret to effective time investment is to strengthen simple routines.
- You can create your own effective routines by following four easy steps.
- To be successful, ask for help in achieving your goals.
- Final summary
