Time Management: Fact or Fiction?
by Michael Veltri
This post will take 90-seconds to read and can radically transform your life. Yet some of you won’t read it because you think you don’t have enough time. You’re wrong. You have all the time in the world. And then some.
I use to think I didn’t have enough time for this, that, or the other. I fully embraced David Allen’s fascinating GTD™ (Getting Things Done) system to help me “manage” time. I had every little email, to-do item, project, thought, note, VM, piece of paper, and you-name-it neatly categorized and arranged so I could get more done. But I never had enough time to do it all and just kept creating MORE work for me to do.
Until I finally burned out. Over a 20-year hyper-productive era, I achieved a high level of success both in corporate American and as a serial entrepreneur. And along the way, I became successfully miserable. I had morphed from a human-being into a lonely “human-doing”.
And to help you avoid the same successfully miserable, super-reactive, and hyper-stressful life, here are three important lessons I learned that will, ironically, allow you to get more done — but with ease, joy, and abundance:
Lesson #1: Time is unlimited and will never run out. Ever.
Lesson #2: You cannot manage, control, or delegate time.
Lesson #3: You can, however, very easily control your energy, focus, and well-being.
Now you super-successful, high-achieving, type-A rockstars that have read this far and still don’t believe me, I get it. It took me a while to wrap my head around these concepts and to let go of trying to control time. When I finally did, the responsible results I created were stunning — I would not be the business keynote speaker that I am today.
So here are a few simple Action Steps to help you find harmony with time and morph back from a human-doing to a human-being:
Get Into Action Now:
Discover “Einstein Time”: Read the second to the last chapter in the fantastic leadership development book by Gay Hendricks called The Big Leap. Or simply Google “Einstein Time” to shift your disempowering context around time.
Take care of your health and well-being, otherwise you won't have the vigor to fulfill your priorities in earnest. One way to do this is to ensure you have an empowering and supportive “Third Place”. (Click here for an article I recently wrote on how to do this.)
Multitasking is a myth. Trying to accomplish more than one thing at a time takes longer to do and creates inferior results. Plus, it causes you to lose focus and scatters your energy. See each task through to completion before moving on to the next.
Embracing the fact that you have all the time in the world for everything you want to accomplish in life is a practice. And once you create this time management transformation, your leadership will expand in new ways and you will have new-found motivation in your life where it previously did not exist. I guarantee it.
If you have any questions on the action steps listed here, post a comment below or hit me up on Twitter @mpveltri . I’ll be sure to get back to you right away. Because I have allllllll the time in the world!
And If you liked the ideas presented here, please consider purchasing a copy of my nationwide bestselling book, The Mushin Way to Peak Performance: The Path to Productivity, Balance, and Success. In the book, you will find a whole lot more valuable tools and techniques to help you make better decisions, fuel-inject your leadership, and create responsible results in business and life.