EntranceTime management - Julia Morgenstern. Julia Morgenstern - Time Management
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Julia Morgenstern
Time management. The art of planning and managing your time and your life
This book is dedicated to the memory of my father-in-law, Gerardo Colon, whose boundless love and kindness will always inspire me and help me make time for the people I love.
© Julie Morgenstern, 2000.
© Edition in Russian, translation into Russian. LLC Publishing House "Good Book", 2009
Introduction
The Opportunities and Power of Time Management
I haven't always been an organized person. I have struggled with chaos, clutter, and my own disorganization my entire life, and I reached a turning point when my daughter was born. When she was three weeks old, one fine summer day she woke up, and I realized that now was the right moment to take her for her first walk in her life. Unfortunately, it took me two and a half hours to collect everything I needed: blankets, bottles, pacifiers, diapers, rattles, clothes... where was it all?! By the time I was ready to leave, she was asleep again. I missed the moment. Frustrated and disappointed, I looked at my daughter sleeping in the cradle and realized that if I didn’t pull myself together and pull myself together, this child would never see the sunshine.
So, starting with diapers, I overcame chaos, eventually putting my home, my office and my life in order. At the same time, I realized that self-organization is not a supernatural gift, but rather a skill, an art that can be learned. I just came to this conviction too late: I kept getting caught up in the turmoil of things, instead of starting with planning. I realized that after spending a little time on preliminary analysis situation and creating a behavior strategy, I will be able to build a plan, develop a method that can be applied in any situation.
Three years later I founded my own company Task Masters, a service that helps people achieve a level of self-organization that, once mastered, will enable them to live more productively and enjoy life more. My staff and I conduct workshops and provide one-on-one coaching on self-organization and planning skills to thousands of people every year. Working with people yourself of different ages, a type of activity that adhered to a variety of styles in life allowed me to deepen my understanding of the processes of self-organization of the individual and concentrate on developing solutions for each person individually, depending on his individual characteristics. In 1998, the editor of the Henry Holt publishing house suggested that I write a book about my technologies. The result was my first book, Self-Organization from the Inside Out ( ), which became a bestseller.
Fourteen years after my memorable defeat in the battle with diapers, I had the opportunity to check how far I had come in developing my own self-organization skills. Less than two weeks before celebrating an important spiritual event in my daughter's life, I received the invitation that all book authors dream of - an invitation to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show. They asked me to urgently fly out to them to clean up and arrange their offices and several houses of the show participants before the next thematic TV show... and all within the next ten days!
Was I ready to rush forward without hesitation towards this fantastic opportunity? Was I organized enough to handle everything at once? Of course yes! Now I was much more collected and organized, and most of the things related to preparing a holiday for my daughter were done. What had not yet been done, I added to the to-do list and wrote it down on a piece of paper, so that one glance was enough for me to understand the state of the preparation process. The skills of planning and delegation came in handy - I was able to prioritize tasks and decide what my employees and friends could do for me. All the necessary materials and the database were well structured, so any information that could be needed to organize these two events was at my fingertips. And in the whirlwind of the next two weeks, my organizer helped me focus on everything I had to do and where I had to go. I'm not behind schedule.
The suitcase was instantly packed, and I boarded the next plane to Chicago. I seized the opportunity and was able to capitalize on this unexpected coincidence of urgent matters and “priority conflict.” The result was one of the most wonderful, most fulfilling weeks of my life—celebrating a major spiritual event in my daughter's life and a coveted appearance on the world's most famous television talk show. This is the power of time management!
Being organized, whether it's in your environment or your time, means being prepared. This means feeling composed, in control, ready to take advantage of every opportunity available, and to deal with any surprises and surprises that life throws your way. We live in a complex, fast developing world which is full of endless possibilities. When you have strong time management skills, you celebrate life, enjoy life, enjoy life—instead of being overwhelmed and overwhelmed by it. You know what to choose. You feel clear and confident, ready for any challenge that life throws at you.
If you haven't read my first book Organizing from the Inside Out, I advise you to do this. It was intended as a textbook on self-organization. The easiest way to start the path from chaos to order is by organizing the space around you, because it is much more tangible than time. Moreover, once you have organized the space around you, you have much more free time at your disposal that you can manage. (Research shows that we lose an average of one to two hours a day searching for things or materials we need in folders and unorganized piles of papers, in closets and on racks.)
When you master the time management techniques discussed in this book, you will take control of your life. You will feel satisfaction and pleasure from how you spend and live your time. You will be able to maintain a harmonious balance between work, love, fun and personal freedom that motivates you to activity, gives you strength, brings you joy and makes your life full of meaning. You will learn to listen to yourself, establish inner harmony, and consistently use your time in a way that is meaningful and valuable to you.
How this book is structured
This book is divided into four parts:
PART 1: THE BASICS OF SUCCESSFUL TIME PLANNING:
This section will fundamentally change the way you think about time and prepare you to create your own time management system.
PART 2: SITUATION ANALYSIS: Listening to yourself. This part offers you a series of questions and tests to help you find your individual lifestyle, identify your preferences, needs and goals, and from there develop your own time management plan.
PART 3: PLANNING: Creating a model of the life you love. This section will help you create a life program that reflects your ideals and choose the appropriate means to realize it.
PART 4: ACT! This section will teach you how to put your plan into action and manage its implementation while facing the reality of everyday life.
Although you must change your traditional perceptions and learn some new skills, I am not asking you to change and remake yourself in order to fit into some rigid program. The program outlined in this book respects you and your unique personal characteristics and goals, leaving you complete freedom and flexibility. Let's get to it!
Part one
Basics of Successful Time Management
1
A New Look at Planning and Time Management
Why does time management remain such a difficult task? In my observations, the most common obstacle people face when planning their lives is how they perceive their time. Therefore, the very first step towards mastering the art of time management is to critically examine our very perception of time.
Making time tangibleMost people perceive time as something intangible. On the path from chaos to order, it is easiest to organize and order the space around you, not time, because space is what you can see. Time, in turn, is completely invisible and intangible. You cannot see it, touch it, or hold it in your hands. It cannot be accumulated, piled up, or physically moved from place to place.
Time is something you feel, sense, and it feels... completely formless. Some days whistle away somewhere in the past, others slowly, as if with great difficulty, creep past, full of melancholy and sadness. Even our tasks and affairs seem difficult to measure - they seem huge and endless in their scope and duration.
As long as time remains elusive to you, ephemeral, elusive to perceive and difficult to comprehend, you will have difficulty managing your life. You need to change your perception of time and make time more tangible. You need to learn to perceive it in more visual, measurable images.
On my journey to self-organization, I made my biggest breakthrough when I realized that planning and organizing time is actually no different from planning and organizing space. Let's compare a cluttered closet to a cluttered work schedule.
Time management from the inside outIn other words, just like a closet is a limited space in which you must fit a certain number of items, a chart or schedule is a limited space in which you must fit a certain number of tasks. Your life is not endless at all. When you think about time in this way, it no longer seems so intangible and ephemeral. In fact, each day is just a vessel, a container, a block of memory, with a certain capacity that you can use.
Once you realize that time has its limits, you begin to look at your affairs and chores in a completely different way. Your affairs and tasks become objects that you must place in the space of your time. Each task has its own volume, its own dimensions, and the arrangement of tasks in the daily schedule becomes for you mathematical equation. Once you have estimated what you need to do, you begin to calculate the volume, the capacity, of each task and then determine whether you can fit them into the space of your time.
When you begin to look at time as something that, like space, has defined boundaries, you begin to take a more sober and realistic look at what you want to achieve and accomplish in your life. It encourages you to master various techniques and time management tools that can help you get as much done as possible in the time you have.
If a cluttered closet and a cluttered life schedule are essentially the same, then putting each of them in order is also a very similar procedure. My first book said that whether you're organizing a closet, a kitchen, an office, or a work schedule, developing a long-term system of organization and planning always involves three steps: ANALYSIS - PLANNING - ACTION.
This book is a comprehensive study of how these three steps of the self-organization process are applied according to the characteristics of time management. I'll be basing everything here on a more tangible concept of time and show you how to plan and schedule your day, like a beautifully furnished room that reflects your aspirations and ideals - everything that's important to you. This will help us figure out in which space your time flows and find time in your life for important things and tasks, since every business and every task will find its place.
Managing time “from the inside out” means building a daily schedule, a life schedule that suits you. This means identifying what is important to you and finding a place for those activities in your life and schedule based on your unique personal needs and life goals. And it also means feeling deeply satisfied at the end of every day.
This book recognizes that all people are different and respects and celebrates individual differences. Each of us has our own needs at different points in our lives. There is no “right” way to live your life. I won't tell you that you should live a simple, quiet life, and I won't tell you to fill every moment with highly productive activities. Here you will not find anywhere the truisms that “he who gets up early, God gives to him; the early bird always gets the worm,” or that you should work less, or have less fun, or be something other than who you are.
Instead, the book will help you gain a deeper understanding of who you are and what you want, and then give you the tools and tools to build your life around your ideals and needs. You can learn and acquire new skills and adjust your behavior, but you cannot change who you are, who you are, and you shouldn't. This book will guide you through the process of self-discovery and discovery of your likes and dislikes, natural inclinations, needs and desires. All of them will become the basis, the foundation of your time management system, or time management. I suggest you take part in a living process, rather than follow directives and guidelines.
The following two essays can serve to illustrate how different people's lifestyles can be, and yet each person is able to successfully manage their time in an "inside-out" manner based on their individual characteristics.
Patricia is thirty-eight years old, married and has a four-year-old son. She works as an editor at a magazine women's fashion. She lives and thrives in an environment of measured work, enjoys a sense of peace and hates haste, bustle and stress. Family and personal life are as important to her as work, and it is extremely important for her to maintain a balance between these areas of her life.
Patricia is clear about her goals in life: she wants her son to grow up in an atmosphere of love and care, she wants to have a great relationship with her husband, and she wants to maintain her reputation as a reliable and talented editor.
Every morning she wakes up her son at 6:45 am, after which cute morning “rituals” begin: she and her son sing songs while she gets him dressed, eat breakfast and play before going out kindergarten. After Patricia leaves her son in the garden, she needs - and she knows it - time to transform from “mother” to “editor”. So every morning she goes down to the subway and misses four trains while looking through the morning newspapers. She boards her fifth train and arrives at the office focused and ready to work.
Her working day also consists of measured and monotonous work. She works on articles in the mornings, then communicates with subordinates and holds meetings throughout the day. She uses a notepad to see what she needs to do and by when, and doesn't hesitate to start completing her work tasks. She always delivers work on time.
She works from 9:30 to 5:30 five days a week. Three times a week she picks up her son from kindergarten; on Mondays and Thursdays her mother or husband does this, so on Mondays she stays late at work, and on Thursdays she goes with a friend to the cinema or theater. Patricia willingly entrusts the care of her son to her loved ones - she is sure that the participation of relatives in caring for her son not only helps her maintain balance in her life, but also enriches her son’s life with communication with those people who love him.
The weekend also follows a completely predictable scenario. On Friday evenings, the whole family watches videos. On Saturday mornings, she takes her son to music school, after classes they have lunch at a local restaurant and go to play at the playground or museum. Every Sunday, her husband and son go out while Patricia stays at home to prepare for the work week ahead.
Patricia pays special attention to how long it will take her to complete a given task, and rearranges her schedule so that she has enough time for each activity. She calculated how long it takes her to get her son ready for kindergarten, and wakes him up in the morning based on this calculation. Patricia's life is tightly structured around her priorities and has become surprisingly calm, predictable and joyful for her. Such a life corresponds to her personality and her ideals, brings Patricia joy and is built by herself according to the principle “from the inside out”.
Andrew is fifty-six years old and the chief executive of the world's largest hotel chain. He enjoys variety in life, enjoys interacting with a variety of people, and has always been a creative problem solver. He doesn’t have to “sweat” for long to resolve them. He is easy-going, confident, and focused. He easily changes plans, easily coping with obstacles.
Andrew is passionate about his work and his goal is to maintain and strengthen his company's leadership position. His mission is to exemplify outstanding customer service every day, pursue every opportunity to grow, and learn as much as he can about his business.
Andrew's time is structured to support his personality and help him achieve his goals. Each of his days is structured in such a way that there is room for his characteristic spontaneity and diversity of interests. Every day he appears in his office at seven o'clock in the morning and devotes the first hour at his workplace to reading specialized magazines; then one hour is allocated for email processing and phone calls. From nine o'clock in the morning his time remains open to all urgent and urgent matters and proposals that arise throughout the day in the process of managing a large corporation. Andrew makes a very short list of tasks. He understands that his job is to meet the needs of other people, and a long list of planned tasks will only frustrate people. Between meetings, he returns to his office to answer letters and calls. His job for thirty years now has been to answer every phone call (and now every email) that comes in during the day, and he succeeds. At the end of each day (which ends somewhere between six and eight p.m.), he spends another hour at his desk, answering remaining calls and emails.
Andrew is extremely effective at delegating his authority, entrusting tasks to subordinates. To manage various departments of the company, he finds and hires the most talented people. He works closely with his secretary, Dorothy, and they have a variety of facilities and tools to support the fast and efficient work of their management team. They developed special tables and forms to speed up communications and contacts between them when making business travel plans, scheduling business meetings and conferences, and adding recipients to each of his sixteen email contact lists. Their computers are networked so they can both access Andrew's work calendar, which Dorothy compiles and maintains for him.
Throughout his workday, Andrew immediately responds to requests from the people he works with. He quickly sorts through the papers on his desk, sending each one into the appropriate drawers and trays in a few moments, making short notes directly on the papers or using pre-prepared forms and forms. He makes decisions quickly.
Andrew works long hours - usually twelve hours a day - but he always leaves the evening free for dinner with his family and friends. He gets a lot of pleasure from his work - it is a source of energy for him. However, as much as he is passionate about his work, he also values his relationships with family and friends outside of work. He always devotes his weekends to rest, and also regularly takes vacations.
Andrew's life is eventful and brings him genuine pleasure. He, too, built his life “from the inside out,” in accordance with his ideals and priorities.
* * *
As you noticed, Patricia and Andrew are absolutely different people with very different approaches to work and life in general. Patricia is closely tied to her detailed weekly plan, while Andrew's plan is more of a bare skeleton, leaving room for spontaneity. But they both like the way they manage their time, they both greet each new day with excitement and energy, and feel satisfied when that day passes.
Any of us would like to manage our time the way Patricia and Andrew do, but many people are prevented from doing so. As we'll see in the next chapter, it's important to understand what's stopping you from managing your time. Once you know what's holding you back, you can focus on the solution.
Julie Morgenstern is the founder of Task Masters, which provides professional workspace planning and consulting services to businesses, organizations and individuals.
Her corporate clients include American Express, Sony Music and Microsoft. Julia is a regular on MSNBC's The Home Page show and a frequent guest on many other television programs, giving lectures and conducting seminars throughout America.
Julia lives in New York with her daughter.
Books (2)
Self-organization from the inside out
A system for the effective organization of space, subject environment, information and time.
Personal organization becomes an essential skill for survival in modern world, where only those who know how to effectively organize themselves and their environment achieve success. When we are organized, our home, office and work schedule reflect our personality and help us achieve our goals. Anyone who remains disorganized feels exhausted and disoriented in the flow of events and information.
Being organized isn't about how your environment looks, it's about how efficiently it functions. If in his space a person easily achieves his goals and is happy, then he is well organized. Self-organization is the process by which we create an environment that allows us to live, work and play exactly the way we want.
Self-organization according to the “Inside Out” principle.
Personal organization is becoming an essential skill for survival in the modern world, where only those who know how to effectively organize themselves and their environment succeed. When we are organized, our home, office and work schedule reflect our personality and help us achieve our goals. Anyone who remains disorganized feels exhausted and disoriented in the flow of events and information. Being organized isn't about how your environment looks, it's about how efficiently it functions. If in his space a person easily achieves his goals and is happy, then he is well organized. Self-organization is the process by which we create an environment that allows us to live, work and play the way we want.
This book will help you:
- create your own system for effectively organizing space, subject matter and information, based on the characteristics of your personality, your needs and goals;
- arrange your personal space at work and at home, taking into account your individuality and specific tasks;
- learn to work with the flow of information, effectively processing and structuring documents, files and data;
- identify obstacles to personal organization - technical errors, external factors and psychological barriers - and eliminate them;
- master techniques for effective planning of personal time (time management);
- choose the right devices for organizing space and the subject environment, processing and storing information.
Reader comments
Rina/ 10/19/2013 started reading “Self-Organization”... the first two chapters went with a bang! especially after David Allen and Gleb Arkhangelsky. I was incredibly happy with the simple and understandable language.
reached the chapters with detailed description organization of each office... and somehow I got tired of reading the same thing, written out on 100 pages. While I'm stuck at the offices, I'll try to finish reading.
In any case, tomorrow I’ll start organizing my office at home. new system I prefer it. clearer.
Once I finish reading it, I’ll share my general feeling and impression :) at the same time I’ll boast about the results, if any :)
ElenaK/ 7.11.2012 I agree with Elena and KyYanka. The first book is a must. In my opinion, this technique can be applied to all life problems.
It is very succinctly and clearly written, and the result is simply magical. If only for this reason, I will definitely read all her books.
Alexei/ 07/17/2012 I read time management - I read it, I laughed.....there are grains of ideas, but what do you want from a housewife?
Ivan/ 11/7/2011 That is, I wanted to say David Allen (“Getting Things in Order” and “Prepared for Anything”), not Carr)))
Ivan/ 5.11.2011 Question to those who read:
Is there any point in reading all three of Julia's books? Or is it enough to limit ourselves to “Self-organization from the inside out”, and in the other two it’s about the same?
I still plan to read Allen Carr and Arkhangelsky.
Elena/ 02/06/2011 Self-organization according to the “Inside Out” principle is just oxygen! The rescue! I recommend it to anyone who dreams of organizing their space without breaking or forcing themselves. Very cool book.
/ 08/20/2009 Galina.
Thank you so much for such useful books!
Andrey/ 07/28/2008 I only read time management - a normal book. Well done auntie.
KyYanka/ 01/26/2008 Wonderful author! Start reading with “Self-organization...” To say that I have become a highly organized organism would be an exaggeration... But I have acquired useful skills. And I’m gradually moving towards streamlining my own life! :-)
Julia Morgenstern
Time management. The art of planning and managing your time and your life
This book is dedicated to the memory of my father-in-law, Gerardo Colon, whose boundless love and kindness will always inspire me and help me make time for the people I love.
© Julie Morgenstern, 2000.
© Edition in Russian, translation into Russian. LLC Publishing House "Good Book", 2009
Introduction
The Opportunities and Power of Time Management
I haven't always been an organized person. I have struggled with chaos, clutter, and my own disorganization my entire life, and I reached a turning point when my daughter was born. When she was three weeks old, one fine summer day she woke up, and I realized that now was the right moment to take her for her first walk in her life. Unfortunately, it took me two and a half hours to collect everything I needed: blankets, bottles, pacifiers, diapers, rattles, clothes... where was it all?! By the time I was ready to leave, she was asleep again. I missed the moment. Frustrated and disappointed, I looked at my daughter sleeping in the cradle and realized that if I didn’t pull myself together and pull myself together, this child would never see the sunshine.
So, starting with diapers, I overcame chaos, eventually putting my home, my office and my life in order. At the same time, I realized that self-organization is not a supernatural gift, but rather a skill, an art that can be learned. I just came to this conviction too late: I kept getting caught up in the turmoil of things, instead of starting with planning. I realized that by spending a little time on a preliminary analysis of the situation and creating a behavior strategy, I could build a plan, develop a method that could be applied in any situation.
Three years later I founded my own company Task Masters, a service that helps people achieve a level of self-organization that, once mastered, will enable them to live more productively and enjoy life more. My staff and I conduct workshops and provide one-on-one coaching on self-organization and planning skills to thousands of people every year. Working with people of different ages, occupations, and lifestyles allowed me to deepen my understanding of the processes of personal self-organization and concentrate on developing solutions for each person individually, depending on their individual characteristics. In 1998, the editor of the Henry Holt publishing house suggested that I write a book about my technologies. The result was my first book, Self-Organization from the Inside Out ( ), which became a bestseller.
Fourteen years after my memorable defeat in the battle with diapers, I had the opportunity to check how far I had come in developing my own self-organization skills. Less than two weeks before celebrating an important spiritual event in my daughter's life, I received the invitation that all book authors dream of - an invitation to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show. They asked me to urgently fly out to them to clean up and arrange their offices and several houses of the show participants before the next thematic TV show... and all within the next ten days!
Was I ready to rush forward without hesitation towards this fantastic opportunity? Was I organized enough to handle everything at once? Of course yes! Now I was much more collected and organized, and most of the things related to preparing a holiday for my daughter were done. What had not yet been done, I added to the to-do list and wrote it down on a piece of paper, so that one glance was enough for me to understand the state of the preparation process. The skills of planning and delegation came in handy - I was able to prioritize tasks and decide what my employees and friends could do for me. All the necessary materials and the database were well structured, so any information that could be needed to organize these two events was at my fingertips. And in the whirlwind of the next two weeks, my organizer helped me focus on everything I had to do and where I had to go. I'm not behind schedule.
The suitcase was instantly packed, and I boarded the next plane to Chicago. I seized the opportunity and was able to capitalize on this unexpected coincidence of urgent matters and “priority conflict.” The result was one of the most wonderful, most fulfilling weeks of my life—celebrating a major spiritual event in my daughter's life and a coveted appearance on the world's most famous television talk show. This is the power of time management!
Being organized, whether it's in your environment or your time, means being prepared. This means feeling composed, in control, ready to take advantage of every opportunity available, and to deal with any surprises and surprises that life throws your way. We live in a complex, fast-paced world that is full of endless possibilities. When you have strong time management skills, you celebrate life, enjoy life, enjoy life—instead of being overwhelmed and overwhelmed by it. You know what to choose. You feel clear and confident, ready for any challenge that life throws at you.
If you haven't read my first book Organizing from the Inside Out, I advise you to do this. It was intended as a textbook on self-organization. The easiest way to start the path from chaos to order is by organizing the space around you, because it is much more tangible than time. Moreover, once you have organized the space around you, you have much more free time at your disposal that you can manage. (Research shows that we lose an average of one to two hours a day searching for things or materials we need in folders and unorganized piles of papers, in closets and on racks.)
When you master the time management techniques discussed in this book, you will take control of your life. You will feel satisfaction and pleasure from how you spend and live your time. You will be able to maintain a harmonious balance between work, love, fun and personal freedom that motivates you to activity, gives you strength, brings you joy and makes your life full of meaning. You will learn to listen to yourself, establish inner harmony, and consistently use your time in a way that is meaningful and valuable to you.
Julia Morgenstern Time management. The art of planning and managing your time and your life
This book is dedicated to the memory of my father-in-law, Gerardo Colon, whose boundless love and kindness will always inspire me and help me make time for the people I love.
© Julie Morgenstern, 2000.
© Edition in Russian, translation into Russian. LLC Publishing House "Good Book", 2009
Introduction
The Opportunities and Power of Time Management
I haven't always been an organized person. I have struggled with chaos, clutter, and my own disorganization my entire life, and I reached a turning point when my daughter was born. When she was three weeks old, one fine summer day she woke up, and I realized that now was the right moment to take her for her first walk in her life. Unfortunately, it took me two and a half hours to collect everything I needed: blankets, bottles, pacifiers, diapers, rattles, clothes... where was it all?! By the time I was ready to leave, she was asleep again. I missed the moment. Frustrated and disappointed, I looked at my daughter sleeping in the cradle and realized that if I didn’t pull myself together and pull myself together, this child would never see the sunshine.
So, starting with diapers, I overcame chaos, eventually putting my home, my office and my life in order. At the same time, I realized that self-organization is not a supernatural gift, but rather a skill, an art that can be learned. I just came to this conviction too late: I kept getting caught up in the turmoil of things, instead of starting with planning. I realized that by spending a little time on a preliminary analysis of the situation and creating a behavior strategy, I could build a plan, develop a method that could be applied in any situation.
Three years later I founded my own company Task Masters, a service that helps people achieve a level of self-organization that, once mastered, will enable them to live more productively and enjoy life more. My staff and I conduct workshops and provide one-on-one coaching on self-organization and planning skills to thousands of people every year. Working with people of different ages, occupations, and lifestyles allowed me to deepen my understanding of the processes of personal self-organization and concentrate on developing solutions for each person individually, depending on their individual characteristics. In 1998, the editor of the Henry Holt publishing house suggested that I write a book about my technologies. The result was my first book, Self-Organization from the Inside Out ( ), which became a bestseller.
Fourteen years after my memorable defeat in the battle with diapers, I had the opportunity to check how far I had come in developing my own self-organization skills. Less than two weeks before celebrating an important spiritual event in my daughter's life, I received the invitation that all book authors dream of - an invitation to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show. They asked me to urgently fly out to them to clean up and arrange their offices and several houses of the show participants before the next thematic TV show... and all within the next ten days!
Was I ready to rush forward without hesitation towards this fantastic opportunity? Was I organized enough to handle everything at once? Of course yes! Now I was much more collected and organized, and most of the things related to preparing a holiday for my daughter were done. What had not yet been done, I added to the to-do list and wrote it down on a piece of paper, so that one glance was enough for me to understand the state of the preparation process. The skills of planning and delegation came in handy - I was able to prioritize tasks and decide what my employees and friends could do for me. All the necessary materials and the database were well structured, so any information that could be needed to organize these two events was at my fingertips. And in the whirlwind of the next two weeks, my organizer helped me focus on everything I had to do and where I had to go. I'm not behind schedule.
The suitcase was instantly packed, and I boarded the next plane to Chicago. I seized the opportunity and was able to capitalize on this unexpected coincidence of urgent matters and “priority conflict.” The result was one of the most wonderful, most fulfilling weeks of my life—celebrating a major spiritual event in my daughter's life and a coveted appearance on the world's most famous television talk show. This is the power of time management!
Being organized, whether it's in your environment or your time, means being prepared. This means feeling composed, in control, ready to take advantage of every opportunity available, and to deal with any surprises and surprises that life throws your way. We live in a complex, fast-paced world that is full of endless possibilities. When you have strong time management skills, you celebrate life, enjoy life, enjoy life—instead of being overwhelmed and overwhelmed by it. You know what to choose. You feel clear and confident, ready for any challenge that life throws at you.
If you haven't read my first book Organizing from the Inside Out, I advise you to do this. It was intended as a textbook on self-organization. The easiest way to start the path from chaos to order is by organizing the space around you, because it is much more tangible than time. Moreover, once you have organized the space around you, you have much more free time at your disposal that you can manage. (Research shows that we lose an average of one to two hours a day searching for things or materials we need in folders and unorganized piles of papers, in closets and on racks.)
When you master the time management techniques discussed in this book, you will take control of your life. You will feel satisfaction and pleasure from how you spend and live your time. You will be able to maintain a harmonious balance between work, love, fun and personal freedom that motivates you to activity, gives you strength, brings you joy and makes your life full of meaning. You will learn to listen to yourself, establish inner harmony, and consistently use your time in a way that is meaningful and valuable to you.
How this book is structured
This book is divided into four parts:
PART 1: THE BASICS OF SUCCESSFUL TIME PLANNING:
This section will fundamentally change the way you think about time and prepare you to create your own time management system.
PART 2: SITUATION ANALYSIS: Listening to yourself. This part offers you a series of questions and tests to help you find your individual lifestyle, identify your preferences, needs and goals, and from there develop your own time management plan.
PART 3: PLANNING: Creating a model of the life you love. This section will help you create a life program that reflects your ideals and choose the appropriate means to realize it.
PART 4: ACT! This section will teach you how to put your plan into action and manage its implementation while facing the reality of everyday life.
And self-organization, founder and director of Task Masters, a company that helps people live more fruitfully. In her book Time Management from the Inside Out, she explains how to achieve inner harmony, how to learn to manage your life, how to maintain balance between different areas of life and how to learn to enjoy every day you live.
The book consists of four parts, each of which has its own goals and objectives.
- The first part is aimed at changing your views about time.
- The second part helps you develop an individual lifestyle, determine your goals and preferences, and based on all this, develop a time management plan.
- The third part helps you create a “life program” that will take into account your ideals.
- The fourth part tells you how to put your plan into action and how to stay the course when faced with everyday difficulties.
“Touching” time
Do you know why most people find it so difficult to manage their time? But because they don’t feel it. Yes, we all understand that time exists, but we cannot see or touch it. Time is something intangible. But the trouble is that as long as time seems ephemeral to us, we will not be able to “tame” it, we will not be able to fully manage our lives.
In order to learn to perceive time as something real, Julia Morgenstern suggests comparing time planning with space planning.
- If the closet is a mess, then there will be very little free space in it. If there is a mess in the schedule, then there will also be a lack of working time.
- If there are too many things in the closet, there will not be enough space to accommodate them. If there are too many tasks on the list, there will not be enough time to complete them.
- Storing things haphazardly in a closet will not allow you to properly evaluate the contents. A cluttered arrangement of things will prevent you from seeing what really needs to be done.
Result: the closet is used ineffectively, it is necessary to properly organize things in the space. The schedule is used ineffectively, it is necessary to properly organize working time.
Thus, we draw an analogy: if a closet is a limited space in which you need to arrange things correctly, then a schedule is exactly the same limited space, only you need to place things in it, not things. Every day is a kind of “container” in which you can place anything. The success of life will depend on how correct its filling is.
It is very important to understand that time is limited and the boundaries of these limits are quite clear. At the same time, it is necessary to realize that each task also has its own “weight” and volume, which means that the more correctly the tasks are placed in the “space of time”, the more of them will fit there.
Time management from the inside out
According to the author, managing time “from the inside out” means creating a schedule for yourself that will take into account the personal abilities and characteristics of a person. Each person is individual, each has their own desires and needs, and therefore, there cannot be a single correct approach to managing life.
It is very important to determine what exactly you need. You shouldn’t change yourself, your inclinations and likes. It is worth changing your life: building it around your needs. Building life according to the principle “from the inside out” means building it in accordance with your ideals and priorities.
The “from the inside out” principle does not necessarily imply drawing up a rigid schedule, however, it does not exclude this possibility. If you feel comfortable with your day planned out second by second, then you should make a detailed plan. If you feel more comfortable when there is time for spontaneity during the day, then it is better to create a plan that will give you the desired freedom of action.
What gets in the way of organization?
When a person tries to plan his time and fails, he believes that his shortcomings or his complete inability to plan are to blame. Having accepted the fact that he is unable to manage his time, he stops tormenting himself with schedules and continues to live spontaneously. However, this approach is absolutely wrong. People incapable of planning most likely do not exist at all.
When faced with difficulties during planning, you just need to correctly identify the cause of the problem. This can be done using three-level testing developed by Julia Morgenstern.
Level one. At this level, it is worth dealing with technical errors. Main mistake of this type- this is the wrong approach to planning, the use of “alien” methods.
Solution. Learn new planning techniques and choose a method that is close.
Level two. At this level, you have to cope with errors that arise due to the influence of external factors beyond your control. External factors include health problems, a disorganized partner, an unbearably large amount of work (for example, due to the fact that one of the colleagues went on vacation or took sick leave).
Solution. First, you should realize that the cause of the error is not your shortcomings, but factors that you are not able to influence, and therefore there is nothing to blame yourself for. Then you either need to select effective method combat unfavorable factors, or try to avoid their influence.
Third level. If you managed to deal with technical errors and cope with external factors, but problems with planning persisted, then the cause of everything is psychological obstacles. The most common psychological obstacles are: fear of forced inaction, fear of failure, fear of change, perfectionism and others.
Solution. First of all, it is worth understanding what causes psychological difficulties, and only then trying to free yourself from their influence.
Whenever you encounter difficulties in the process of planning your time, try to determine their nature. What problems have you encountered: technical, external or psychological? It also happens that planning problems arise due to a combination of several reasons.
Step by step, Julia Morgenstern's book brings readers closer to a new life. A life they will be completely satisfied with.