Self-control: How to take control of your time and life?

Chapter 18 Mastering Time (1)
Why is it so hard to plan
Time is a topic that no one can avoid.For someone who wastes time unconsciously every day, mentioning the word can feel like a needle prick: "Yeah, I can't even control my own time, I can't plan my life - it's like a mess, so please Don't mention it any more, just pretend nothing happened."

Many people cheat themselves by self-numbing, and in this way, they get caught in a vicious cycle of making plans, vowing to use their time well, and managing it, only to fail each time.As some students said to me: "Planning is like a kind of drug. It's like taking a shot of stimulant every time. I imagine how beautiful the future will be. After a few days, it becomes boring and I start all over again."

How to make the most of our time is a problem that every person who desires to be successful must face and solve.How can you control your life if you can't even control your own time?
How can I manage my time effectively?Edward works for a well-known media company in Illinois. When I asked him how he manages his time, he covered his face with his hands and looked pained. "Wow, please don't ask me," he begged, " First of all, I am afraid of controlling time, not because I don’t realize its importance, but because I don’t think I understand its importance deeply enough.” His awe of time deeply moved me, but He continued: "I belong to the kind of person who has no concept of time. I don't know the time without looking at the watch. In my mind, an hour is like a collection of thousands of seconds. I spend more time on each task than I do. Expected to take longer to complete. Plus, I'm a total procrastinator."

I said: "Really, can you give some examples?" Edward hesitated for a while and replied: "Sometimes my work pressure is very high and I need to concentrate, but my attention is always unconsciously distracted by the magazines and computers around me. Scattered with irrelevant newspapers, work is often procrastinated until the end. The time that should be used for work is lost in this way, and in the end I found that my work took double or even triple the time.”

In this regard, he once used the idea of ​​​​"overactive brain" to comfort himself: "Maybe my thinking is extremely divergent." He laughed.For all the earnestness and seriousness with which Edward was judging himself, he was a complete loser when it came to timing.

People like planning, and Edward is also fond of planning. As a result, most of the planning is idle, and there is no time to complete it.So where does all our time go?At the beginning of the time course, I first emphasized a fact to the students: there is no such thing as "no time" in this world!If you are like many people who have no time to complete their work because they are "too busy", please remember that there are many people who are busier than you but complete more work.

The reason is that while they don't have more time than you do, they know how to use their time better.They are successful people who can master time and fully grasp the skills of using time, rather than just learning the ability to plan.Like driving a car, what's so difficult about learning to steer?The question is whether you can get the car to your destination on time.

Time management courses will help you achieve two goals:

1. Don't be a slave to time, but use time to achieve your life goals.

2. Manage your time successfully as if you could control your left and right hands.

In Time Lessons in Self-Control, we've created an effective system that's helping millions of people use the moments of their lives more effectively and in turn take greater control of their lives.We are not telling people how to reduce those unnecessary actions in life, and use the most refined process to complete the work at hand in the shortest time, and minimize those unnecessary actions.Doing so means that each movement is carefully considered, thought out, and then reduced to a series of mechanical actions.It just makes your life pretty boring, and you could even say that this overly procedural extreme makes every activity of ours dull.We just encourage people to think more about their actions, use precise thinking to manage time reasonably, make plans and execute them effectively.

According to my suggestion, you can think more about how to use your time, you can jump out of a lot of work and look at them with a relaxed mind.In this way, you don't have to work so hard at work, and you can do more things you want to do and enjoy your life better.

In mastering time, we should focus on "efficiency".This is the secret of many people's difficulty in achieving planning-people usually pay more attention to the degree of investment rather than performance. With the infinite increase of investment, their energy can no longer support the heavier and heavier time tasks.A productive person chooses the most important of all possible tasks and accomplishes it in the most efficient way, rather than trying to get everything done.

It should be clear to you by now that making the right choices about how you spend your time is more important than getting the job done faster and better.Although it is a good thing to be efficient and pursue results, and it is necessary to increase investment (including money and other resources), in my opinion, the importance of effectiveness is far greater than efficiency.

Some students asked: "Sir, please tell me in one sentence, what is efficiency?" I said: "Efficacy is to allow yourself to make the most important choice in the shortest time, and to use the most precious time for the most Important things.” That’s the truth about time management.In practice, some of these techniques may surprise you, or make you feel very uncomfortable - if you are used to procrastinating.Let’s say you have 10 minutes to go to a party.If you use your time like most people, you probably find ways to kill it, listening to music, reading novels, or playing games online.But I suggest you: "Don't do it! Think about what else is more important than a party!"

If you take advantage of those 10 minutes, you might start a job you've been putting off for the past few days.For example, the drafting of an important contract with a client; several important calls that have been delayed for a long time-for some reason you never had time to communicate with them.At this time, you can pick up these tasks and finish them quickly.

This suggests that this session will also help you kick the habit of procrastination for good and keep your morale high throughout the working day until your work is done.

Everyone's time is the same, each of us has 24 hours a day, no more and no less.Not even God can give you more time.However, we can help ourselves to use these fixed times more effectively with the time lessons in this section.

Does "hint" help?
Time management does not equal event reminders.This is the first principle you need to remember.Many people fall into this major misunderstanding. They think that managing their time is to formulate and start an "event reminder" program.For example, before going to bed the first night or after waking up in the morning, they first think about what to do in the day, when it is suitable for them to do it or it is possible to do it, and then add them to the calendar one by one, and then set a reminder alarm clock , so as not to forget it by then.

Then at this moment, the alarm clock will go off, or the phone will play music, reminding myself that it is time for "something".This method can indeed help us avoid some mistakes and losses caused by forgetting and negligence, so it is very popular among people, who believe that this is the best way of time management, and it is also a powerful tool to assist people in self-control.

However, this does not solve the underlying problem and the delays are still happening.You know, turning off the alarm clock is just a matter of stretching out a finger. For a person who is happily rolling in his sleep, this is a breeze-and he is willing to do it, and it is even an instinct of human beings.

If your work and life are all trivial things, there is not much distinction between primary and secondary, and you only need to complete these things step by step every day, using this common "calendar + alarm clock" method is basically enough.Like reminding to wake up at 6:8 in the morning, reminding to go to work at 12:6, reminding to have lunch at 10:[-] noon, reminding to leave work at [-]:[-] pm, reminding to go to bed at [-]:[-] in the evening, or arranging to buy a birthday gift for a friend on a certain day next week... …There is no priority for things like this, and there is no need to spend time arranging the order, just complete it step by step, and don’t forget which thing is good.

There are many things that need to be done at a specific moment. This kind of event can be set as a repeated event, and it will be reminded regularly every day. After forming a habit, there is no need to be reminded by the outside world. The biological clock of the human body will automatically tell us to do it this matter.

At present, many people use this method to arrange their daily schedules.In my opinion, it can only control the trivial details of your life, and things that should be managed by "instinct and habit".For a person who is constantly pursuing progress, always wants to improve self-control and achieve greater success, this method is far from meeting the needs, and should be adjusted as soon as possible.

1. Hints will keep you always in a race against time.Take Lewis for example, when is he the fastest?Of course it's game time.

If Lewis had asked himself to run the fastest all the time, he would have been exhausted.The same is true of racing against time. If you occasionally encounter a situation where a flight is about to take off and you are still stuck in traffic halfway, the race against time becomes particularly important at this time.

You will tell yourself anxiously: "I want to catch up with time, this is part of my plan!" Then you will do everything possible to rush to the airport, in order to complete the plan you have made, and fulfill your promises to yourself or others. You have to stimulate your potential, or drive fast, run red lights, or rack your brains to find a shortcut.

It’s not a bad thing to race against the clock once in a while, it means most of your time is easier because important work gets done in that compressed time.However, running a race against time for a long time can easily cause physical and mental strain, and the gains outweigh the losses.Its biggest problem is nervousness, for fear that it will not be able to complete the planned plan.Subconsciously, the event reminder pattern becomes a tormenting "God's death knell."When the mind and body are very tired, the reminder sounds, and people will be depressed: "Ah, the death knell is sounding, I don't want to do it at this time, or I don't need to do it, but I have to complete this procedure!"

In this way, it is easy to lead people into an endless loop of racing against time.Time is always moving forward, which is its characteristic. It runs continuously, passes automatically, and does not feel tired at all, but it is impossible for people to always run forward along a pre-predicted path.People will always encounter variables, and they will always encounter more or less changes and influences on the road.When there's more and more change, the tool of event reminders becomes a "negative factor" that increases stress and drives you out of control.

2. The schedule composed of "reminders" will automatically expand until you are unable to complete it.Few people can count exactly how many thoughts we flash into our daily schedule and add them to our schedule. Most of our thoughts are just a momentary thought and forgotten after a while.But people still try to jot it down as part of the "reminder".

In other words, people cram a ton of thoughts into their schedule each day, bloating it.Now the mantra of many people has become: "I'm too busy recently, I don't have time!" , In the end, he couldn't complete any of them, and the reminders were completely used as decorations, to show others that he was a self-disciplined person who lived according to the plan, but in fact his life was completely out of order.

How to understand "my time"

In the course, I asked: "What is the time? Please answer me immediately!" More than 24 participants in the audience raised their hands to answer, but all of them answered incorrectly.Almost none of the trainees really understand the meaning of time.Einstein said: "Time is not a real thing, it only exists in people's subjective concepts." Yes, this is the essence of time.The focus of our time management is not time, but "priority of events". "My time" is "the time I can use to process events in an orderly manner", not the accumulation of [-] hours in mathematics.

If there are so many things you want to do each day and your time is so limited, why not filter?Anything that takes time requires serious consideration: Is it worth it?
(End of this chapter)