Book summary “Master your time, master your life”: summary

Introduction

You live in a demanding environment filled with constant digital distractions and interruptions that damage your workplace productivity. You often feel overwhelmed by endless tasks and struggle to achieve your true potential.

Brian Tracy argues in Master Your Time, Master Your Life that time management is really the management of yourself. You can take complete control of your life only by mastering your thoughts, behaviors, and choices.

The book provides a practical system to help you organize every area of your personal and professional life. You will learn how to set clear goals, apply rigorous prioritization methods, upgrade your earning ability, and unlock your creative potential.

• How do you set and achieve clear, written goals?
• How can you eliminate digital distractions and take charge of your schedule?
• What methods help you solve complex problems and generate breakthrough ideas?

1. Foundations of Time and Personal Mastery

The quality of your life is determined by how well you manage your time, which is really the management of yourself. The top three percent of successful people achieve financial success because they have clear, written goals and plans that they work on every day.

The Quality of Your Life

Successful people accomplish vastly more because they use their time effectively. Everyone shares equally in having 24 hours per day.

Psychologists indicate that self-esteem is tied to self-efficacy. This is the confidence to master your life and achieve goals. When you operate in a reactive-responsive mode, you lose that sense of control. You can build true response ability by taking charge of your daily choices.

Arnold Toynbee wrote a 12-volume work titled A Study of History covering 23 civilizations over 2,500 years.

Intelligence is demonstrated primarily as a way of acting that moves you toward your chosen goals. You can apply personal strategic planning to double your productivity by focusing exclusively on high-value actions. The A/B Method divides all daily activities into tasks that move you toward your goals versus tasks that do not.

• Divide all tasks and activities into two categories: A tasks and B tasks.
• Discipline yourself to do only A tasks.

The Goal Setting and Achieving Formula

People with written goals and plans earn and accumulate on average ten times as much as others with the same levels of intelligence and education. Goal setting acts as a blueprint to prevent wasting time on reactive tasks. Eighty-five percent of wealthy people work on one big goal all the time. Three percent of poor people have one big goal and work on it occasionally.

You can turn vague desires into concrete realities when you practice a specific seven-step goal-achieving formula. The author has taught this Millionaire Maker Formula to 1 million people across 72 other countries.

• Step 1: Decide exactly what you want by being specific.
• Step 2: Write it down and attach a measure to it.
• Step 3: Set a deadline for when you want to achieve the goal.
• Step 4: Make a list of everything you can possibly do to achieve the goal.
• Step 5: Organize your list by sequence and priority to create a plan.
• Step 6: Take action on your plan by taking the first step.
• Step 7: Do something every day that moves you toward your most important goal.

By moving past vague hopes and dreams into measurable objectives, your subconscious mind works continuously to attract resources. This unlocks the Momentum Principle of Success for your major definite purpose.

2. Productivity Tactics and Overcoming Distractions

Electronic interruptions and digital distractions constitute a major pandemic of poor performance that severely reduces workplace productivity. The ABCDE Method provides a systematic way to prioritize tasks based on their potential consequences.

The Great Pandemic

Constant smartphone usage and checking e-mail trigger dopamine hits that fatigue the brain, causing temporary drops in IQ and making deep work difficult. You face a constant attraction of distraction and e-mail disease in the modern office.

According to Robert Half International, 50 percent of each workday is wasted in activities contributing no value. The average adult checks email 145 times per day and spends 3.5 hours daily checking apps, email, and text messages. With 1,200,000 apps available on smartphones as of 2016, responding to constant messages costs you 10 IQ points in the course of the day. Every time you open an alert, 17 minutes are required to refocus on an important task.

Treating the workplace as a social play place rather than a productive environment sabotages career advancement. Employees often delay starting actual work until late morning and wind down early, driven by habits formed during schooling years where institutions served as social hubs. The average employee actually starts work at 11:00 A.M. and begins winding down at 3:30 P.M.

• Ask why you are on the payroll and what you have been hired to accomplish.
• Check whether what you are doing right now is the highest and best use of your time.
• Work all the time you work by starting immediately and ignoring non-work chats.

The ABCDE Method

The Law of Three states that out of all tasks performed in a role, only three account for 90 percent of the value contributed. Identifying and focusing exclusively on your three main responsibilities while minimizing minor tasks dramatically increases your return on energy and overall output. Spending just 10 to 12 minutes planning the entire day gives you back 120 minutes of productive time, yielding a 1,000 percent return on energy invested in planning.

High-performing individuals focus on tasks with serious consequences while delegating or eliminating low-value tasks that have no meaningful impact.

• Go through your task list and write the letters A, B, C, D, or E before each activity.
• Assign an A to tasks that you must do with serious potential consequences.
• Assign a B to activities that you should do with mild potential consequences.
• Assign a C to things that would be nice to do with no consequences at all.
• Assign a D to all tasks you can delegate to someone else at a lower cost.
• Assign an E to tasks that you can safely eliminate.

To apply the Law of Three, make a list of everything you do in the course of a week or month. Ask the first magic question to identify the single task of greatest value and circle it. Ask the second magic question to find the second most valuable activity. Ask the third magic question to determine the third activity that enables maximum value contribution. Do fewer things by stopping small tasks, do more important things by focusing exclusively on the top three tasks, do your most important tasks more of the time, and get better at your most important tasks through continual self-improvement.

3. Appreciating Earning Ability and Managing Spare Time

Your earning ability is your most valuable financial asset, defined as your capacity to get results that people will pay you for. Top-performing individuals invest two hours a day, five days a week, into learning and upgrading their skills.

Appreciating or Depreciating

While you could lose all your money, your earning ability stays with you as the total accumulation of your knowledge, skills, experience, and hard work. Like any asset, it can appreciate through continuous learning or depreciate if you fail to upgrade your skills.

Research by Anders Ericsson showed that high-achieving executives consistently carve out time to master new skills. By compounding these skills with existing ones over the years, they multiply their total value and earning potential.

Ericsson investigated executives who started at the bottom of large companies and eventually earned up to 301 times the average income of their employees by adopting this deliberate practice strategy.

You can apply these practical steps to master your most important skill:

• Identify the one skill that, if you were excellent at it, would enable you to make a more valuable contribution than any other skill.
• Set it as a goal to develop this skill, create a learning plan to attain this skill, and then work single-mindedly to master this one skill, no matter how long it takes.
• Set aside a minimum of ten hours per week during which you learn, study, and develop your most important skill.

You are always self-employed as the president of a personal services corporation called You, Inc., and your rewards depend entirely on the value of your services. Top performers accept high levels of responsibility and view themselves as the chief executive officers of their own careers. Regardless of who signs your paycheck, your income is determined by the work you do, how well you do it, and the difficulty of replacing you.

Robert Reich observed that in top-performing companies, employees use inclusive pronouns like we, us, and our, whereas disengaged employees in lower-performing companies use they, them, and their. Sixty-five percent of employees today are officially disengaged from their work.

The By-Products of Life

Your spare time acts as a personal by-product of your life that can be invested in learning to multiply your future earnings. Out of 168 total weekly hours, you spend 124 hours on working, sleeping, dressing, eating, and traveling, leaving an average of 44 hours a week in spare time. Just as manufacturing plants turn waste by-products into profitable items, you can use your discretionary spare time intelligently rather than wasting it on entertainment, allowing your knowledge to compound.

Bayer Chemical Corporation discovered Aspirin when an executive noticed workers taking a crystalline powder by-product that pained their headaches, turning industrial waste into a multi-billion dollar remedy.

The top 20 percent of earners in any field earn 80 percent of the money, making it vital to commit to entering this top tier. Statistical calculations show that top earners make an average of sixteen times the income of the bottom 80 percent in the same amount of working hours, driven primarily by their commitment to ongoing skill acquisition. People in the top 20 percent enjoy an average annual income increase of 11 percent, while people in the bottom 80 percent see an average increase of 3 percent or less.

Brian Tracy described how hearing about the 80/20 Rule at age twenty-four when he was struggling in direct commission sales with holes in his shoes triggered his decision to join the top 20 percent.

You can direct your spare time with these actions:

• Put the power of compounding to work in your life by acquiring additional skills in your spare time.
• Resolve to join the top 20 percent of income earners in your field.
• Find out what the highest earners do in their spare time to stay ahead and then do the same things over and over until they become habits of thought and action.

Your success and advancement during work time depend on mastering productivity basics and actively eliminating major time wasters. Because work time is frequently fractured by interactions and organizational structures, maintaining high performance requires rigorous self-discipline to counter distractions and focus on high-value tasks. Seventy-five percent of work time is estimated to be spent interacting with other people, and 40 to 50 percent of work time is consumed by planned and unplanned meetings.

You must systematically manage the seven major time wasters at work: interruptions, unexpected visitors, meetings, fire fighting, procrastination, socializing, and indecision. Each time waster drains your productivity and breaks your train of thought. Using targeted defenses helps reclaim lost hours.

You can master work time basics through these steps:

• Set clear goals and objectives.
• Plan out your work in detail, on paper.
• Set clear priorities on your tasks.
• Work all the time you work.
• Batch your calls and your e-mail activities.
• Create a quiet time for work and set specific meeting times.
• Create an agenda, start and stop on time, and cover the most important items first in meetings.
• Think before acting, delegate responsibility, write down details, and get the facts during a crisis.
• Think on paper, gather materials, do one small thing to get started, and salami-slice tasks to overcome procrastination.

4. Creativity and Problem-Solving Methods

Every person generates multiple million-dollar ideas annually, but most fail because they do not take action. Writing down at least twenty answers to a well-defined question forces the mind past obvious responses to reach breakthrough solutions.

The Billion Dollar Idea

You generate about 4 ideas each year that could make you a millionaire if you executed them. You often dismiss your insights or fail to test them while others capitalize on the same concepts.

Four businessmen in San Francisco could not find a taxi during changeover time from 5:00 P.M. to 7:00 P.M. in June 2009. This led them to start Uber, which reached a valuation of $62.5 billion by 2016.

Creative thought and progress are blocked by the comfort zone, learned helplessness, and the fear of failure or rejection. In 2006, Nokia and BlackBerry controlled the cell phone market with 50 percent and 49 percent shares respectively. Dismissing Apple's iPhone as a toy, they failed to innovate while 947.7 million units of iPhones were sold by May 2016.

Problem Solving Tools

Asking strategic questions helps you bypass flawed operational models and stimulate fresh perspectives. You can apply specific problem-solving actions:

• Ask what you are trying to do especially when experiencing resistance or unexpected results.
• Ask how you are trying to do it, remaining flexible about the method while strict about the goal.
• Ask what your explicit and implicit assumptions are regarding the situation.
• Ask what you would do if your assumptions were completely wrong.

Unlocking creative genius follows a structured psychological sequence involving verbalization, visualization, emotionalization, relaxation, and realization. You can use the mind storming method to generate insights through structured discipline:

• Take a clean sheet of paper and write your most important goal at the top in the form of a clear question.
• Discipline yourself to write down at least twenty answers to your question.
• Take action immediately on at least one of the ideas you have generated.

Group brainstorming leverages collective intelligence when conducted under strict rules. Alex Osborn developed this method in 1946 to tap into a higher group mind:

• Gather a group of four to six people for a session.
• Keep the session strictly fifteen to forty-five minutes long.
• Enforce no criticism, no ridicule, and no judgment of any ideas.
• Focus on the quantity of ideas rather than quality.
• Encourage everyone, especially shy participants, to contribute.
• Assign one person to keep notes and record each idea.
• Encourage participants to submit later thoughts if they arise.

Senior executives of a $20 million company applied systematic problem-solving to their growth goals over five years and increased their sales to $105 million, realizing a 500 percent increase. You can overcome limitations by testing your own obstacles:

• Identify the three biggest problems in your life and three best solutions to each.
• Ask what limiting factor or constraint sets the speed at which you achieve your goal.
• Ask whether anyone else with your problems or fewer resources is achieving the goal anyway to test excuses.

Conclusion

All the strategies, tactics, and principles detailed in this book fit together into a unified system of self-mastery. Time management is not a mechanical skill involving calendars and clocks, but a comprehensive approach to life that combines clear goals, rigorous prioritization, continuous learning, and creative problem-solving. When you align your daily tasks with your highest values and critical result areas, you gain control over your destiny and achieve extraordinary outcomes.

To put these ideas into daily practice, follow these rules:

1. Write down your goals clearly every single day and make definite plans before you begin any project.
2. Apply the Pareto Principle by focusing your energy on the top ten percent of tasks that yield the highest value.
3. Use the ABCDE method to prioritize your daily activities and eliminate low-value tasks without hesitation.
4. Invest two hours a day in continuous learning and skill upgrading to multiply your earning ability.
5. Practice the twenty-idea method on your most difficult problems to unlock your innate creativity and take immediate action.

10 Key Ideas

1. The quality of your life is determined by how well you manage your time, which is really the management of yourself.
2. People with written goals and plans earn and accumulate on average ten times as much as others with the same levels of intelligence and education.
3. Electronic interruptions and digital distractions constitute a major pandemic of poor performance that severely reduces workplace productivity.
4. The ABCDE Method provides a systematic way to prioritize tasks based on their potential consequences.
5. Your earning ability is your most valuable financial asset, defined as your capacity to get results that people will pay you for.
6. Top-performing individuals invest two hours a day, five days a week, into learning and upgrading their skills.
7. Your spare time acts as a personal by-product of your life that can be invested in learning to multiply your future earnings.
8. Because work time is frequently fractured by interactions and organizational structures, maintaining high performance requires rigorous self-discipline to counter distractions and focus on high-value tasks.
9. Every person generates multiple million-dollar ideas annually, but most fail because they do not take action.
10. Writing down at least twenty answers to a well-defined question forces the mind past obvious responses to reach breakthrough solutions.