One of the surprising things brought up early in Time Power is the importance of building self esteem. Self esteem is a key component of performance. The route to building self esteem is to determine your values, strive for mastery and to know what you want. This enables you to like and respect yourself which in turn builds your confidence, which builds your performance. You can then get into a virtuous circle.
Okay so how am I going to translate that idea into action?
First off lets look at my values.
I believe in honesty, community, respect for others and for the planet. My problems with that are issues where there is a conflict between honesty and upsetting others. But I have a particular problem with my job. My actual role is one that has integrity, but it supports activities by others that supports some very dubious marketing claims. This is going to continually undermine my motivation at work and will continue to do so until I can give it up and work on my own business full time. There isn't a solution so I'll just have to be aware of it. If I describe it to myself as a known bug in the system it will help me work around it and not let it derail me.
The next aspect is striving for mastery. I need to master time management above all else so how am I going to go about that? The book claims it takes 21 days to bed in a new habit - that sounds reasonable enough though I have no idea where the figure comes from. But lets work with it. I have a whole series of bad time keeping habits. I think it will be a long time before I run out of new habits that I would like to build or old ones I want to modify. But the advice is also to not try and do too much at one time. So here is my plan. First off I'll list the first ten desirable habits that come into my head.
This is the list:
1. Don't switch on the lap top until 9.00pm on workdays.
2. Work through afternoon tea breaks.
3. Review my task cards every morning.
4. Tidy up the house when I get home before dinner.
5. Never go to bed without a clear idea of what I am going to do immediately I wake up every week day morning.
6. Keep journal and do a plan every day.
7. Regularly review goals.
8. Write 2000 words a day on average, to make up to a weekly total of 14,000.
9. Check bank balance daily.
10. Throw away stuff I'll never need again. (Or sell it if it is worth over £20)
I will pick one of those habits and do a task card for it. I can mark it every day I stick to it until I reach 21. With non-daily habits I guess I'll have to cut down the target number of marks. So the first one I'll pick is working through lunchtimes. But I'll also put the list on a card to review the other habits as well, even though I am not actually focusing on them. When I've got to 21 days on one habit I'll delete it from the list and add another. Lets see how that works.
The third item is knowing what you want. I need to look at my goals a bit more closely and keep them under review, but I think that will have to be another post.
This post is a follow up to my review of Time Power and my experience in implementing it.
http://personaldevlopmentforsensiblepeople.blogspot.com/2011/08/time-power-dick-tracy.html
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