Purpose, Priorities, Management, Activities, And The Myth Of Time Management
“Time management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have.”
-John C. Maxwell on Priorities
According to John C. Maxwell and the new guard of Activity Management Specialists, attempting to manage time is a fruitless exercise at best… What we are now beginning to finally understand, is the only thing we can really manage is ourselves.
In the effective managing of ourselves, we must also give ourselves “emotional permission to spend time on things today, that will give us more time tomorrow.” This concept of giving ourselves emotional permission as expressed by Rory Vaden, is the concept of giving ourselves permission to invest in the creation of systems that will allow us to multiply our time.
In his book Procrastinate on Purpose, Rory Vaden discusses in detail and provides concrete examples of this concept of Multiplying Time. By capturing the essence of one of our earlier Time Management and Habit Teachers, Rory “Begins With The End In Mind” by clearly identifying what the desired outcome is, and then works backwards from there.
Steven Covey provided an incredible foundation for us to build on…
By beginning with the first two habits of first being proactive and then beginning with the end in mind, Rory Vaden established the principles required to take on the challenge of TIME as both a construct and a concept. If we indeed can agree on the concept of time being finite, at least for the purposes of discussion, we can then evaluate time as a construct and determine potential possibilities of how we might view the subject through a different lens.
In his research and subsequent writing, Stephen Covey discussed Paradigm Shifts and Principles as key components of the work he created and brought forth with the publishing of his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”
When we are faced with any kind of a radical change, whether it be organizational, directional, conceptual, or in leadership, we will be forced to examine our own paradigms. If we are willing to open Pandoras Box, we might actually find that some of our very own Paradigms are no longer serving us…
Outdated Time Management techniques might just be the tip of the iceberg as it relates to our business practices, interactions with others, and overall ability to get everything done on any given day and in a manner that allows time for all of the other things that are so important to all of us.
So then, how do we make sense of this theoretical construct created by humans to break up the cycle of what we refer to as a “DAY.” How do we go about getting “from” instead of getting through the day? When we get from the day, we are proactively deciding what we either will or won’t do as it relates to the activities we allot time to for completion during the given period of time we refer to as a day.
Our daily allotment is made up of 24 hours of the “inexplicable raw material of everything” as was captured by Arnold Bennett so eloquently all those years ago when he wrote “How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day.”
Today, if we really want to Live, we will be best served to learn all we possibly can about the concept of time multiplication from the author of Procrastinate On Purpose, Rory Vaden. His ROTI formula will both capture and keep your attention the same way the formula for compound interest will capture and keep your attention if you but give your mind a chance to really embrace the concept…
Open your mind to the possibility of learning a new concept with such a radical paradigm shift that if embraced, you will find yourself for the very first time understanding how all of the great achievers actually get done all that they do in their given allotment of 24 hours, which is no larger or smaller than any of the rest of us, as time is the great equalizer and the one commodity where there exists no Aristocracy.
