Book summary “How to get control of your time and your life.”: summary

Introduction

You often feel overwhelmed by the demands of daily life, drowning in tasks while important goals slip away. You might try to work faster and squeeze more chores into each hour, but mere efficiency fails to bring satisfaction.

Alan Lakein argues that true time management is about effectiveness and making the right choices rather than mechanical efficiency and rote speed. You gain control by bridging the gap between your daily actions and your deepest personal desires.

The book provides a practical system to help you evaluate your priorities, organize your schedule, and eliminate unproductive habits. You will learn how to confront procrastination and take charge of your future.

• How do you uncover what you truly want from life?
• How do you separate high-value tasks from trivial distractions?
• How do you overcome the fear that leads to avoidance?

1. Control Starts With Planning

Everyone must live on 168 hours a week. As an effectiveness expert, Alan Lakein distinguishes himself from time-and-motion organizers who remove the thinking from activities.

Effectiveness means selecting the best task from all available possibilities and doing it well, which adds thought and enjoyment back into life.

Control over your time starts with planning, which brings the future into the present so you can act on it now.

Planning should be treated as writing rather than mere thinking or daydreaming to reduce vagueness and help make concrete decisions about what, when, and how to execute tasks. Achieving greater control over your time ultimately results in greater personal freedom. When you consciously manage your time and separate tasks that matter from those that do not, you reduce the feeling of being at the mercy of your environment. You gain the ability to arrange circumstances to suit your personal goals.

Extreme approaches to time management turn useful traits into liabilities, creating the overorganized person, the overdoer, and the time nut. The overorganized person plans endlessly without acting. The overdoer culls every minute with activity without assessing value. The time nut is neurotically preoccupied with never wasting a single second. The ideal state is balanced control like good muscle tone.

People ultimately make their own choices and are the sole decision-makers regarding how they spend their time, despite external constraints. While external factors like age, race, and background impose real limits, individuals often blame outside forces when they are actually failing to manage the areas where they do have free choice. Role adjustments are required when life circumstances change.

Mr. Williams, a production manager in Kalamazoo, was bored and wanted a change, facing complex choices about relocating to Chicago or switching industries entirely.

The ABC Priority System helps categorize tasks based on value, ensuring that high-yield items are tackled first. Items are marked with capital letters to indicate relative value. A-items yield the most value, B-items have medium value, and C-items have low value. These priorities are relative and can shift over time and depend on perspective.

You can apply the ABC Priority System using specific steps:

• Write a capital letter A to the left of items on the list that have high value.
• Write a B for those with medium value.
• Write a C for those with low value.
• Break down A-items further into A-1, A-2, A-3, and A-4 based on urgency and time of day.

2. What Do You Really Want From Life

Unwritten goals remain vague dreams. Writing them down makes them specific, allowing them to be analyzed, updated, and refined.

Creating a written Lifetime Goals Statement gives direction to life, helps discover true desires, and provides a measuring stick for daily activities.

Over 15,000 people in seminars and consultations have composed Lifetime Goals Statements to gain a clearer picture of their life direction. You can uncover these goals using a structured exercise.

You need several pieces of paper, a pen, and a clock to start. Follow these specific steps to uncover your lifetime direction:

• Set aside about fifteen minutes with several pieces of paper, a pen, and a clock.
• Take exactly two minutes to list answers to the question: What are my lifetime goals?
• Take an additional two minutes to make changes necessary to feel satisfied with the general statement.
• Ask the second question: How would I like to spend the next three years? (or five years if over thirty), listing answers for two minutes and improving them for two minutes.
• Ask the third question: If I knew now I would be struck dead by lightning six months from today, how would I live until then?, listing answers for two minutes and improving for two minutes.
• Spend an additional two minutes minimum reviewing and improving all three sets of answers.
• Select top three goals from each list and label them A-1, A-2, and A-3.
• Culled from the nine goals, write down the three most important long-term goals in order.

Long-term goals must be complemented by short-term planning that specifies concrete activities you can actually execute. You cannot do a goal; you can only do an activity.

To achieve A-goals, you must rapidly list potential actions without early censorship, eliminate low-priority items, and establish a clear action program for the week.

You can translate your top targets into immediate tasks using another systematic method:

• Take three fresh sheets of paper and write one A-goal at the top of each.
• Spend three minutes making as long a list as possible of activities contributing to the first A-goal.
• Spend three minutes each to list activities for the second and third A-goals.
• Spend a minimum of three minutes on each list adding, deleting, and refining activities.
• For each activity, ask if you are committed to spending a minimum of five minutes on it in the next seven days; if no, draw a line through it.
• Combine pruned activities into one master list of about a dozen items.
• Classify the most important activity as A-1 and number others accordingly.
• Set deadlines and schedule the A-activities into the next seven days.

3. How Scheduling Helps

To accomplish important lifetime goals, you must block out dedicated time for A-activities and firmly banish C-items during this period.

Scheduling means making time for what you want to do, not just fitting in mandatory meetings and deadlines. Start small by allocating fifteen minutes daily exclusively for A-items and gradually increase the duration. You can block time horizontally across a weekly calendar or vertically down the page.

• Start small and allocate fifteen minutes each day to use exclusively for A-items.
• Gradually increase this time for the A-items as you grow more comfortable.
• Try blocking A-time horizontally on a weekly calendar at the same time each day.
• Block vertically down the page reserving specific blocks as A-time for the week's project.

A husband whose wife kept booking social dates wrote busy alongside all Tuesday nights in her calendar, successfully freeing up A-time to spend alone with her.

Spending a short time each day on planning repays your efforts many times over, especially when you feel too busy.

By failing to plan, you fail to discriminate among ABCs and might not do the best A-activities. Planning can be done in the morning when you are fresh to build momentum, or in the evening to gain perspective and let your unconscious work overnight.

• Spend only ten minutes at the beginning or end of the day planning.
• Plan in the morning as well as in the evening.
• Use Friday afternoon for reviewing the week and planning the following week's projects generally and Monday's in detail.
• Use Monday morning for refining your plan and starting your A-goals of the week.

Conscientious clients who kept track of their planning time found it totaled less than four hours a week, yet kept them focused on important things. The author averages three and a half hours a week on planning.

To maximize productivity, align your schedule with your internal prime time for concentration and external prime time for dealing with others.

Internal prime time is when you work and concentrate best, which should be reserved for prime projects rather than routine tasks. External prime time is when external resources or people are most readily available for decisions and inquiries.

• Check your concentration over two weeks to identify your two clearest-thinking hours.
• Save all your internal prime time for prime projects.
• Save routine tasks for non-prime hours.
• Reserve at least an hour a day of uncommitted slack time to handle unexpected crises.

An architect who was working sixty hours a week suffered from a bleeding ulcer, but when he cut his hours, delegated drafting, and relaxed at Lake Tahoe, his health improved and he got more done. He shaved fifteen hours off his weekly total.

Keeping a daily To-Do list with ABC priorities and treating it like a game is a primary secret of successful people. People at the top use a To-Do list every single day as a guide to action, whereas people at the bottom do not use it effectively.

• Head a piece of paper To Do and list those items on which you want to work.
• Cross off items as completed and add others as they occur.
• Rewrite the list at the end of the day or when it becomes hard to read.
• Label each item according to ABC priority and delegate as much as you can.

A gas and light company chairman who presided over five manufacturing companies treated his To-Do list like a bingo card, aiming for a no-miss day where every item was crossed off. Salesmen should consider weeding out 20 percent of low-dollar customers.

You can squeeze in progress toward your lifetime goals by establishing short-term special-emphasis goals lasting from a week to a couple of months. By keeping a special-emphasis goal in mind, you can pounce on spare minutes throughout the day to convert them into A-activity time.

• Develop special-emphasis goals lasting from a week to a couple of months.
• Do something each day to squeeze in at least one A-activity for each special-emphasis goal.
• Write the goal on a letter card and slip it into your pocket as a reminder.
• Put up a private sign on your desk as a behavioral reminder.

A gourmet cook had a special-emphasis goal of trying a new vegetable dish each day for a week by laying out the whole week in advance. Finding a new dictionary word and checking its meaning takes one minute.

Overlooked pockets of time such as transition time in the morning, commuting, waiting, and sleep can be deliberately harnessed to achieve lifetime goals. Transition time offers a quiet block alone to plan your day or engage in hobbies.

• Extend or enrich transition time in the morning for planning or hobbies.
• Use commuting time to listen to educational cartridge tapes or plan your day.
• Use waiting time to read classics or think through problems sequentially.
• Pose a question to your subconscious just before falling asleep to work on tough problems.

Most people experience forty minutes a day of transition time, while one efficient man reduced this to fifteen minutes. Your subconscious has from four to eight hours to work while sleeping. Robert Kennedy was reported to have listened to Shakespeare plays while shaving during his transition time.

Work expands to fill the time available only because alternatives are absent; allowing people to go home early upon completion repeals Parkinson's Law. Forcing employees to sit at their desks when work is finished breeds bad time habits and psychological aggravation.

• Try to convince your boss to let you go home if you have finished all your work.
• Ask permission to satisfy personal priorities like reading books while handling routine posts if leaving early is denied.

Standard time put into a job is eight hours a day. Nathaniel Hawthorne spent years at the Customs House in Salem, Massachusetts, and still produced four novels including The Scarlet Letter.

Comprehensive time-tracking of every minute is a waste of time, but selective recordkeeping of specific problem items can successfully alter habits. Trying to report everything is hopelessly complicated and causes people to give up within days.

• Avoid recording what you do every minute twenty-four hours a day.
• Watch your time selectively by keeping track of particular problem items consuming inordinate time.

The full-tracking method covers twenty-four hours a day and 168 hours a week, which the author rejected. An aerospace engineer scheduled every minute of his leisure with intense activity until an experiment in wasting time helped him accept relaxing as a good use of time.

4. Tasks Better Left Undone

The 80/20 rule states that 80 percent of the value comes from 20 percent of the items, so you should focus on those high-value tasks and leave most lower-value ones undone.

When items are arranged by value, a small fraction yields the vast majority of results. Applying this principle allows overwhelmed individuals to comfortably ignore low-value tasks and concentrate their limited time and energy on the critical 20 percent.

A political candidate realized that 80 percent of his voter exposure came from 20 percent of his speeches, allowing him to cancel unimportant speaking engagements and focus on crucial meetings.

• Arrange a list of items in order of value.
• Identify the top 20 percent of items that yield 80 percent of the value.
• Label them A and get them done while leaving most of the remaining eight items undone.

People often get bogged down in trivial C-activities because high-value A-activities involve risk, uncertainty, and potential failure. Top-value activities are often new and untried, meaning they cannot be performed perfectly the first time. Because people want the immediate satisfaction and feeling of efficiency that comes from finishing easy tasks, they resort to desk-neatening or clearing minor items while postponing hard A-1 priorities.

A harried field representative gives one more instruction to the office help forty-five minutes before his flight, risking missing his plane to do a C-task. A homemaker collects five hundred untried recipes instead of cooking substantial meals.

• Ask yourself how terrible it would be if you did not do a specific C-task.
• If the answer is not too terrible, simply do not do it.
• Resist the temptation to do C's just in case.

Trivial C-tasks can often be turned into CZ's, which are tasks that can be deferred indefinitely or allowed to die a natural death.

Many low-priority tasks settle themselves through the passage of time or prove entirely unnecessary if subjected to an aging period. Using a designated file or index cards helps test whether these items truly require action or can be thrown away.

A doctor stopped piling unread books in his office and switched to a 3x5 card entry for each item to clear his desk.

• Make a note of an uncertain item on a 3x5-inch index card.
• Stick the card in a file folder labeled Possible CZ's.
• Review the folder once a month and throw away the cards for items that no longer need doing.

5. Overcoming Procrastination and Fear

Fear is at the root of all avoidance, and you can conquer it using specific psychological strategies alongside the Swiss Cheese Method.

An overwhelming task often causes procrastination because it feels too complex or time-consuming. By defining instant tasks that take five minutes or less and connecting them to the main goal, you create a hole in the task, which helps build momentum and leads to involvement.

Preparing an annual departmental budget feels overwhelming, but breaking it down into instant tasks like getting last year's budget or arranging a meeting makes it manageable.

• Make a list of possible instant tasks connected to the overwhelming A-1.
• Set priorities among the listed instant tasks.
• Execute an instant task that requires five minutes or less.
• Try another instant task right away if the first one leads to a dead end without biting the same hole twice.

People frequently avoid high-priority tasks because of subconscious fears regarding mistakes, rejection, or added workloads. When pep talks fail to extinguish heavy fear, you must contain it, use judo to turn its force to your advantage, or balloon the fear to absurdity.

Mr. Blue procrastinated on calling new industrial purchasing agents due to a fear of rejection, but successfully landed an account by judoing his fears into research and ballooning worst-case scenarios.

• Ask yourself what you are afraid of and single out the specific fear causing avoidance.
• Contain overwhelming fear by setting strict boundaries around when you will indulge it.
• Judo your fear by using its negative energy to fuel your preparation and research.
• Balloon your fears into complete absurdity until the worst-case scenario bursts.

Embracing trial and success by accepting initial failures allows people to learn what works and make steady progress toward their goals.

People often minimize losses rather than maximize gains out of fear of making mistakes. Making mistakes acts as a great time-saver by eliminating unrealistic goals and revealing the correct path through trial and error.

Abraham Lincoln faced numerous job losses, business failures, nervous breakdowns, and political defeats in elections for the legislature, Congress, and Senate before being elected President in 1860.

• Remind yourself of the saying: If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly!
• Look for new areas to make do and treat each mistake as a step closer to success.

10 Key Ideas

1. Alan Lakein argues that true time management is about effectiveness and making the right choices rather than mechanical efficiency and rote speed.
2. Control over your time starts with planning, which brings the future into the present so you can act on it now.
3. Creating a written Lifetime Goals Statement gives direction to life, helps discover true desires, and provides a measuring stick for daily activities.
4. To accomplish important lifetime goals, you must block out dedicated time for A-activities and firmly banish C-items during this period.
5. Spending a short time each day on planning repays your efforts many times over, especially when you feel too busy.
6. To maximize productivity, align your schedule with your internal prime time for concentration and external prime time for dealing with others.
7. The 80/20 rule states that 80 percent of the value comes from 20 percent of the items, so you should focus on those high-value tasks and leave most lower-value ones undone.
8. Trivial C-tasks can often be turned into CZ's, which are tasks that can be deferred indefinitely or allowed to die a natural death.
9. Fear is at the root of all avoidance, and you can conquer it using specific psychological strategies alongside the Swiss Cheese Method.
10. Embracing trial and success by accepting initial failures allows people to learn what works and make steady progress toward their goals.