Time Power - Dick Tracy. Why manage your time?

What is the motivation for wanting to manage your time better?  It probably seems obvious enough, but is it really that clear in your mind?  The book opens by bringing some much needed clarity to the subject.  Our fundamental objective in life is to be happy.  Managing your time can make a huge contribution to achieving that.  In fact time management is really life management.  Time is the stuff of life so the more we can get out of it the more we get out of life itself.

This ought to be motivation enough, but getting clear what time management can do for me was a huge reinforcement of my desire to be well organised about using my time.  The book claims you can achieve an extra 2 hours of productive time a day.  This is a big claim - and one that invites skepticism.  But while I am a great skeptic and think skepticism is generally a good thing, for this I am prepared to abandon my normally rational approach.

I would love an extra two hours of achievement every day.  I could get so much more done on my business and still have time to write.  That equates to an extra 500 hours a year.  If I devoted just half of that to writing that would be a hefty 250 hours.  At my personal writing rate of 2000 words an hour that equates to a very substantial 500,000 words in a year.  That would be enough for a book.  If believing this is possible makes it more likely that it is possible, then I am prepared to believe it.  After all, if I am wrong I haven't lost anything.  If I am right I have a substantial amount of writing to show for it. 

But I haven't abandoned my reason altogether.  I also have a handy way of monitoring my performance.  If my word count per week gets up to the 14,000 a week that the Time Power approach promises I will know that I am on the right track.  

But the extra time is only one of the benefits and not the one that most appeals to me.  I also want to achieve a feeling of control over my life.  This includes being less stressed and more financially independent.  If I can achieve more towards either of those my life would improve considerably.

So with 400 of this week's 14,000 words spent on this article I will move on to actually doing stuff.  Wish me luck and I will be back soon with more reports on my progress.



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