I’m always on the look-out for time management tips to help me improve my personal productivity. I recently heard about a concept called “time-tagging” from Jack Cheng, and I’ve decided to give it a try this week.
Time-tagging seems like a simple concept. When you make your to-do list for the day or week, put a time-tag next to each item on the list, noting the approximate length of time you think it will take to accomplish the task.
According to Jack, time-tagging will help you . . .
- Filter - If you’ve got 20 minutes until the next meeting, don’t just kill time doing mindless stuff until the meeting starts (because you know you don’t have enough time to do something “big”). So take a quick look at your list and find a couple of tasks that you can easily accomplish during that 20 minute period.
- Clarify – Sometimes we put off doing things because we think they are bigger and more time-consuming than they really are. By thinking about how much time the task will take, you move one step closer toward achieving it. And we’re able to break-down large tasks into less daunting steps. Jack follows the 5-60 rule: if it takes less than 5 minutes, don’t write it down – do it now. And if it takes longer than 60 minutes, it probably needs to be broken down into a few smaller, more manageable steps.
- Democratize – By identifying how much time each task or project takes, you see which projects are more important than other ones, based on the weight of time it takes to accomplish them (though this won’t always be the case). Sometimes we do what we “feel” like doing, not what we know we should work on. Seeing things in terms of time give our conscious minds some leverage — that extra little boost we need to overcome the mental hurdles that stand in the way of putting creative energy toward something amazing.
Like I said earlier, I’m going to give time-tagging a try this week, and I’ll let you know how it goes.
Does anyone else use time-tagging? If so, how is it working for you? Has it increased your productivity?
You might also like:
How to balance your time
How to shave ten hours off your work week
Can email addiction keep you from achieving your goals?
What’s the best way to build wealth? Is it to work for a top company? Own your own business? Or is it something else?
Success expert Brian Tracy, author of “Getting Rich Your Own Way”, says there are basically five ways that you can build wealth starting with nothing in America, based on over 25 years of research into American millionaires.
- Inherit it – Less than 10 percent of wealthy Americans inherited any of their money, and it’s becoming less and less every single year.
- Achieve it Professionally – You can become a doctor or a lawyer or an architect or an accountant. You can become extremely good at what you do, be paid very well, and hold on to the money.
- Become a Senior Executive at Large Corporation – You can be highly paid; you can have stock options and bonuses. And if you stay with the company long enough, you can become wealthy.
- Win it – But only a tiny fraction of one percent of wealthy Americans got that way by winning their money. As a matter of fact, the odds against you winning the lottery are the equivalent of lightning striking twice in the same place. They’re millions and millions to one.
- Start Your Own Business – Starting your own business has been and will always be the high road to becoming wealthy for most self-made millionaires. 74% of all self-made millionaires in America own their own businesses. Entrepreneurship in America offers more opportunities and opens more doors than all other possibilities put together. This is why it has been said that if you have the ability to start your own business and you don’t do it, you are a fool. I’ll repeat that. If you have the ability to start your own business and you don’t do it, you’re a fool.
Where do you start? The very first thing you do is you make a decision to get your finances under control. Some years ago, a man named George Classon wrote a book called The Richest Man in Babylon. It’s a classic on financial success and what Classon said in that book was that the key to becoming wealthy is to pay yourself first. Take ten percent off your earnings, off your gross income every month and put it aside. Learn to live on ninety percent or less of your gross income. So the very first thing that you do is you begin to save your money.
Action Exercises Now, here are three things you can do immediately to put yourself onto the high road to personal wealth:
- First, resolve today to begin saving your money a “little bit at a time. Set a goal to save 10% of your earnings, to put it away and to never touch it. This will change your life.
- Second, immediately register your own business or sole proprietorship. Open a bank account, get business cards and letterhead and create the corporate entity under which you can do business. Your business opportunities will appear far sooner than you think. If you build it, they will come.
- Third, buy your copy of Brian Tracy’s new book entitled, “Getting Rich Your Own Way,” which will guide you step-by-step in how to make your own fortune.
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