Book Review: Time Power - Brian Tracy

I listened to Brian Tracy's Time Power on the audio book edition a couple of months ago, and I was impressed.  A few of the ideas he proposed sank in and I implemented, but most of it morphed into a warm fuzzy glow in my memory without actually leaving much impact other than a good feeling.  But what I did take from it and start using has proved to be pretty useful so I have started listening to it again.  And this time I will take it more to heart and use it to improve my  time management.  The promise of the book is a very clear one.  You will gain an extra two hours a day of productive time.  Think what you could do with that!

Before I start on describing the details of what I am doing a quick review of the book and Dick Tracy himself.  The book is structured a bit like an onion in that each chapter peels away a bit more.  But it is pretty much onion throughout.  The style is to describe an idea about how you can get more out of your time. This is usually to do with a way of organising yourself or of motivating yourself.  Most of them are reasonably familiar ideas, but they are all presented with a really refreshing level of clarity.

Like Steve Pavlina,  Brian Tracy has a strong dollop of woo at the centre of his offering.  He doesn't emphasise it, but it is clearly there to see.  There are many oblique references to spirituality, life purpose and general mumbo jumbo like the law of attraction.  But like with Steve's stuff, there is enough sound advice and thought provoking ideas to make this a minor issue.  In fact, it helps you keep a critical mind alert for nonsense and so engage with the information.

In outline, the approach is to set your goals, internalise these goals by frequent repetition and then draw up plans and take actions to turn these goals into reality.  The emphasis is on actually doing this, and getting things down on paper.  One of the suggestions - actually more than a suggestion really, rather a cornerstone - is to write out your goals every day.   I did this for a while and found it really helped.  Then I stopped doing it.  The beneficial effect continued for a few weeks then began to fade.  So I have started again this week, and within days I am feeling the benefits again.

You might have assumed that it was lack of persistence that led me to drop the habit.  But in fact it was a practical issue.  I had been using a sheet of file paper and a ring binder and had been rewriting my goals every morning then doing a plan for the day before I actually got out of bed.  Unfortunately the snapping of the ring binder disturbed my wife.  So I had to stop and it took me four weeks to work out that all I needed to do was to get a hard back notebook instead.  On such minor details empires can be won and lost.