How to Master the Art of Time Management | Earl Nightingale, Jim Rohn, Brian Tracy in Spanish

Living Successfully Day by Day

Sometimes, a goal seems so far away, and our progress feels painfully slow, that we tend to get discouraged. Sometimes, it seems like we’ll never measure up. And we’re about to go back home, into old habits. Those, though they might be comfortable, now lead us nowhere. And there’s a way to overcome this. It’s been used, successfully, by many of the world’s most successful people. And it’s been advocated for by many of the greatest thinkers. It’s living successfully day by day.

A life is made up of days strung together into weeks, months, and years. Well, let’s reduce it to its lowest common denominator: a single day. And then, even further, to each task of that day. We understand it like this, a successful life is nothing more than a bunch of successful days. Together, it will take many days to reach your goals. And I don’t know who will reach that goal, in a maximum time. Every day must count. Think of a single day as a building block. With which you’re constructing the tower of your life. Just as a bricklayer can only lay one stone at a time. You can only live one day at a time. And it’s how these stones are laid. That determines the beauty. The strength of your tower. If each stone is laid correctly, the tower will be a success. If, on the contrary, they are laid haphazardly, the whole thing wobbles and looks quite bad. It may seem like a rather elementary way to look at it, but I want to make it clear.

Alright, let’s take it one day at a time. From when we wake up in the morning until we go to sleep at night, keeping our goal in mind. As often as possible. Now, each day consists of a series of acts. Acts of all kinds. And the success of a day depends on successfully completing the majority of these acts. Well, if everything we do during the day is a success, done to the best of our ability, we can sleep that night comfortably. Because we’ve done all we could, that our day has been a success, that one more stone has been successfully laid. That’s how you truly live. Do everything you can do each day. You don’t need to overwork, or rush trying to do as many tasks as possible. If not, don’t try to do today’s work tomorrow, or next week. It’s not the number of things you do, but the effectiveness of each task separately that counts.

Gradually, you’ll increase the number of acts and perform them much more effectively. Acquire the habit of success. And that’s why successful people go from one success to another. Because for them, it’s already a habit. To acquire the habit of success, you only need to be successful in these small acts. Every day. This makes the day a success. This is enough to succeed during the week, month, year, and lifetime. That’s why I say success is not a matter of luck, or much less. It can be predicted and guaranteed. And anyone can achieve it by following this plan. Almost before you know it, you’ll have achieved your goal. And looking back, you’ll realize that your success wasn’t attributable to just one day, week, or month. But rather, it’s been the constant, relentless, successful succession of individual days, That turned your life around.

That’s how a skyscraper is successfully built. A house, a human life, day by day. And each day, composed of a collection of successful acts. One successful act at a time. To move to the place you’ve chosen, two things are necessary. One, don’t lose sight of your goal. And two, keep growing. From the perspective of competence and effectiveness. And don’t get impatient. Don’t let the hundreds of little distractions, of each day try to veer you off course or bother you. Don’t pay attention to them. Shake them off, stand firm, and move on from them. Focus on each act of the day, from morning to night. And perform each one of them successfully. Know very well that if each of your actions is carried out successfully. At least the vast majority of them. Your life will be successful. There is no other answer.

Being Too Big for Your Current Job

There’s no way around it. The men and women who move forward with confidence are those who make themselves too big for their job, and who have a clear concept of who they want to be. Who know they can become whatever they want and are determined to be what they want to be. Remember this time, that people become exactly what they set out to be. You are too big for your current job. Yes, it’s obvious to you that you are. It’s obvious to others. As a general rule, people don’t get promoted, they promote themselves by becoming too big for their job and deciding exactly what job or what income they want to aspire to. And this makes you taking it one day. Act by act. But how do we separate. The important acts from the ones that aren’t. Have you ever heard? The only idea for which a man charged $25,000. It was worth every penny. The story goes that the President of a steel company had granted an interview to an efficiency expert named Ivy Lee. He then said that he could say something in 20 minutes, would increase his efficiency by at least 50%. He then handed the man a blank sheet of paper and said: “Write on this paper the 6 most important things you have to do tomorrow.” The man thought about it and did as he was asked. It took him about three minutes. He then said: “Now number them in order of importance to you and to the company.” It took another 5 minutes. And then he said: “Now put the paper in your pocket and tomorrow morning, first thing, take it out and look at point number one.” Don’t look at the others. Stick to number one and start working on it. And if you can stay with it until it’s done. Then take point number two the same way. Then the 3… And so on until you have all the points for today. Don’t worry if you only finish 1 or 2, you’ll work on the most important ones. The others can wait. If you can’t finish everything in this method, you couldn’t have finished it with any other. And without some system, it’ll probably take you 10 times longer to finish it. And you might not even have them, in order of importance. Do it every working day. Keep going. After convincing yourself of the value of this system have your men try it. Try it as long as you want, and then send me your check for what you think the idea is worth. The whole interview hasn’t lasted more than half an hour. After a week, it’s said, the President of the company sent Ivy Lee a check for $25,000, with a letter that said: “The lesson was the most profitable monetarily he had learned in his life.” And later it was said that in 5 years this was the plan that was largely responsible for turning it. Which was then a little-known steel company, into one of the world’s largest independent steel producers. An idea the idea of taking things one at a time, in their proper order, of staying in an act until it’s successfully completed. Before moving on to the next one, of living one day at a time for the next 7 days try the $25,000 idea in your life. Tonight, write on a slip of paper the 6 most important things you have to do. Then, order them by importance and tomorrow morning when you go to work start with number one. Stick with it until you complete it and so on to two and until you finish. When you finish the 6, take another paper and repeat the process.

Living One Day at a Time

You’ll be surprised and delighted by the order it brings to your life and the speed at which you’ll be able to accomplish the things you’re doing. By order of importance. Now this simple yet tremendously effective method will eliminate all the confusion from your life. You’ll never find yourself going around in circles wondering what to do next. Remember as you live each day to the fullest, you don’t have to worry about tomorrow, or the next day, or what will happen before the end of the month. Handling each day successfully one at a time will carry you over every obstacle, solve all problems. Being able to relax knowing that successful acts make successful days which in turn build a successful life. This is the kind, this is the kind of irrefutable logic that nobody nobody can argue with. It will work always for all people. The reason for noting what you consider most important, is obvious, managing successfully the act of each day is as important as the importance of your own acts. Doing many unnecessary things successfully can be a waste of time. Make sure the acts you take the time to do effectively are important acts. Acts that move you steadily towards your goal. Often, young people worry about passing, they think about all they’ll have to do before the school year ends. By following this course of action they can stop worrying altogether and count on excellent grades. Freshman students in high school and college are often plagued by doubts about whether they’ll be able to successfully complete the 4 years ahead of them and graduate 4 years seems like a long almost eternal time and this thought sometimes leads to a kind of resignation, fear of failure. It was a great Harvard professor and psychologist William James who said: “Indeed that no student should worry about the success of his efforts will make each day the best he can the work he has you will wake up one day and find yourself one of the great competent of your generation”. Student, homemaker, elderly person or breadwinner. This plan works for everyone. It eliminates doubt, fear, and worry and puts our lives in order. All we have to do is face each day as it comes with good spirits knowing that we only have to succeed today to ensure our future. In this way, we will move steadily forward, becoming more competent, more confident in ourselves. With the passing of days, others may seem to suddenly shoot ahead and possibly go much further. But it works, streaks are for stable people who ultimately get the reward. In the world of Canterbury was right when he said: “Work as if you were to live forever but live as if you were to die today”. Now try to write down the 6 most important things you have to do tomorrow. Then list them in order of importance, first thing tomorrow morning, tackle number one and stick with it until you complete it. If something forces you to postpone it, move on to number two but take them in order and finish them in order as best as you can. Try not to deviate from the path because of people or things. By successfully completing each act of your day you will achieve extraordinary success. There’s nothing mysterious or capricious about it, it’s entirely under our individual control and absolutely predictable. It’s simply a matter of doing certain things in a certain way every day. That’s all! There’s no valid reason on earth why you shouldn’t achieve success. In your field, in your life, or in your community. Remember that the entire boundless Universe operates according to the law of cause and effect. There are no exceptions, nothing happens by accident. For every result, there is a cause. You just have to take care of the cause, the effect always without exception will take care of itself with God’s good effect. Without cause, there is no effect. Bad cause, bad effect. It’s as reliable as the sunrise. This matter of living one day at a time is the best we can do. It has an almost incredible effect. An accumulative effect for good. For success and for the things we want. Sometimes when we see a bricklayer starting on a building. And putting the first brick in its place. It catches our attention. Because of the size of the job ahead of him. But one day, almost before we know it the building is finished.

Living a Fulfilling Life

All the thousands of bricks are in place. Each one vital to the finished structure. Each one sharing its part of the load. And so should the days of a human life be. And we will be proud and content with the final product. Remember this phrase. Life is not just the passage of time. Again, life is not just the passage of time… Life is a collection of experiences. Its intensity… Its frequency… Life is not just watching time go by. Tick tock, it’s not like that. It’s a collection of experiences. When my friend Mark died at the age of 44, someone said that’s young to die. But he lived 4 lives in one. He may no longer be as young. So, whatever the duration of your life, this is what you have to fill it with experiences, and the intensity of those experiences. Learn to study what we call specialties. Pick up the phone. This is what you should say when you pick up the phone. It’s about an important conversation, or a minor conversation. If it’s minor, a couple of compliments and that’s it. If it’s important, you might have to take some notes. So here’s the next one. Important conversations. Make an agenda before making the call. What’s more important? What’s less important? Here’s the key. Don’t focus on minor matters. If you spend a lot of time on unimportant things, I’m telling you, you’ll constantly be behind the curve. This is what we learn in sales training. What’s more important and what’s less important? Here’s less time thinking about prospects. Here’s little time making a list of prospects. Here’s less time keeping prospect books. Here’s less time going to see prospects. Here’s less time… Assessing the potential customer and then having been there. That’s all, a minor thing. Here’s something important in the presence of the potential customer. Here we spend a lot of time. And if you take a look, if you’re in sales if you take a look at a week, a week, You’d say: “My God… I’m spending 90 percent of my time on minor matters. And so little time on important things. How many hours do I dedicate to sales during my day? How many hours do I dedicate during my week? Because the time that really matters, is the time of matters. Major and minor! A little phrase I have says: “Don’t confuse movement with achievement.” It’s not so difficult to be busy. What you have to do is check what you’re busy with. Because it’s easy to take out the trash fix the screen door, wash the car and take the kids to school. It’s easy to be busy, right? The key is what… doing what? Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, everything is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle. A truly amazing matter when one examines it. You wake up in the morning and behold your purse that is magically filled with time, with 24 hours, in the unmanufactured fabric of the Universe of your life. It’s yours, it’s the most precious asset. No one can take it away from you, it’s unreachable. And no one receives more or less than what you receive. In the realm of time, there’s no aristocracy of wealth, nor aristocracy of intellect. Geniuses are never rewarded, not even with an extra hour of time a day. And there’s no punishment. Waste your precious asset as much as you want. The supply will never be denied to you. Furthermore, you can’t resort to the future. It’s impossible to get in debt. You can only waste the passing moment. You can’t waste tomorrow, it’s saved for you. You can’t waste the next hour. It’s saved for you. You have to live off of this, 24 hours in the day. You have to spend: health, pleasure, money, contentment, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. In its proper use, your most effective utilization, is a matter of utmost urgency. And the most exciting immediacy. Everything depends on it, your happiness, the elusive prize to which you all cling, my friends, depends on it. We will never have more time. We have and always have had all the time there is. When you work, work. When you play, play. Don’t mix the two, take my word for it. Don’t work playing. I used to take my family to the beach and I’d bring my briefcase. I learned not to do that. Or at the beach, I’d say, I should be in the office, I should be in the office. Now, my family is upset because I’m not at the beach and I’m thinking about the office, office, office. Now,

Personal Discipline and Time Management

When I’m at the beach, I say I should be at the office. Now you see, it’s all mixed up. Quoting a small excerpt from “Reader’s Digest” at the afternoon seminar: “Truth wherever you are, be there.” You’re at the breakfast table, be there when you’re talking to someone, be there. When you’re on your way to work, be there, enjoy the journey. Take a look around, what’s happening? Study human nature, what’s going on? You know, be there. And then, when you get to the office, come on, let’s do this.

Learning to Say No

The next essential step in time management is learning to say no. It’s easy to overload your schedule, get into all sorts of time management troubles simply because you didn’t have the strength to say no when you should have said no. It’s better to say no than to say yes and have to back out. Ron Reynolds has a good phrase that says: “Don’t let your mouth overload your back.” That’s good. Next… The time you’ve already dedicated to labor is enough time. If you work 8 or 10 hours a day that’s it, you can’t work much more than that. Burst after burst, you can work 12, 14, 16, right. Surely we’ve all learned how to do it. To put in extra time but after a while, well, you have to put your life in balance. Otherwise, your health will be in danger and your heart too. Your blood pressure is at risk. Many things, if you don’t stay in balance. So you don’t have to put in more hours, probably the only thing you have to do is make better use of the hours.

Setting Goals

A topic we’ve all heard: It’s not the hours you dedicate, it’s the number of hours you invest. You just have to be more attentive to the things that can steal your time. Here’s why: Time is like capital. You can’t let someone steal the seed from the root. You can’t let them steal the capital. And you can’t let someone steal your time. You must allocate your time. And part of the time you allocate, you must not let anyone steal it. Casual time, maybe you let someone intrude, steal a bit and take a bit, but not serious time. The first idea, the most important of all, the core of time management, the axis around which the wheel of life revolves is goals. What are your goals, what do you want to be, have, or do? What do you want to achieve in the next 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years? The top 3% in every field have goals. The rest of the population has very vague goals or has no goals at all. So the question you have to ask yourself is, who am I, where am I headed, what do I want to achieve? There are three main areas of goals you have to think about. The first are your personal and family goals. These are the reasons you’re alive. What do you want to achieve for yourself and your family? Write them down, define them clearly. The second set of goals you have to ask yourself are your business, your career, your financial goals, your material goals, what you want to achieve in the outside world, where you want to make your contribution. And the third type of goals you have to ask yourself are self-development goals, and in my opinion, your ability, your willingness, and your tenacity to develop yourself. That’s the key to achieving all the others. Here are three questions you can ask. The first question is: What would you do? What goal would you set? What would you like to be or have? If you just won a million dollars in the lottery. What would you do if you just won a million dollars? You have all the time and money. You’re completely free to decide to do whatever you want. If you won a million dollars, what would you do differently? Think about it, keep that in your mind. The second question is, what would you do if you found out today that you only have 6 months left to live? And if you only had 6 months left to live, what would you stop doing? What would you do more? Who would you spend time with? The answer to this question is very interesting. Because what it tells you is what you really value. What really matters to you. And what we’ve discovered is that self-esteem, satisfaction, happiness in life, come from aligning your goals and activities with your values. With your priorities. With what you really consider important. Now here comes the third question, and the third is, what big thing would you dare to dream if you knew you couldn’t fail? If you knew, without a doubt, that you couldn’t fail. What goal would you set? Because sometimes, answering that question will tell you the one thing you were put on earth for. One final note on goals: they must be written down. You must write them down, you must rewrite them. You must define them, you must redefine them. 1 out of 100 successful people in all fields have clear, specific, and written goals. And they carry their goals with them around the world. So let’s move from goals as the core of success to point number two which is:

Organizing Action Plans

In an interesting study, or a variety of studies that have been done, they have concluded that organized action plans are the key to all success. In fact, action without planning is the cause of all failures. Action without planning is the cause of low performance. Action without planning is the cause of frustration, wasted time, anxiety, stress, and lack of success in life. Therefore organized action plans are fundamental. Now, what is an organized action plan? An organized action plan is where you take your goal, take your objective, and you write down each of the steps you’re going to have to follow to achieve that goal. You write it down, and you make a list of all those action plans, all those different activities, and you organize them into a plan that can be applied in your day-to-day. You decide what needs to be done first and what needs to be done last, what’s more important and what’s less important. In fact, the ability to set goals and create plans for achievement is the master skill of success. If all you learned in life, all you learned in school, was the ability to be a continuous goal setter, and continuous planner, daily and nightly planning, organizing, planning, you will achieve in one or two years what people take, about 10 or maybe their whole life.

Importance of Setting Clear Goals

It has nothing to do, by the way, with your intelligence. It has nothing to do with your education. You know, half of the most educated people in the country are working for people who didn’t finish high school or didn’t finish college. Not long ago, I wrote an article for a major publication that said if you don’t have clear goals for your life, you’re forever doomed to work for those who do. Life is very simple: either you’re working to achieve your goals, or you’re working to achieve other people’s goals.

The Power of Making Lists

Very important now, the third point in excellent time management is analysis. Make a list. In fact, it has been found that if you make a list before starting any task or work, productivity will immediately improve by 25%. How do you make a list? Well, make your list for the week, the Sunday or Saturday before, and make your list for each day. The day before, and always work from a list. Why do it the eve of the day? The main reason is that if you do it the night before, the subconscious starts working on your list while you sleep. And overnight, the subconscious will solve problems and bring you ideas. In the morning, you wake up with insights, ideas, intuitions, answers that will make your day more productive. Now, the second reason why it’s a list is because if you don’t have it, it’s like driving a car without a steering wheel. You just drift and every bump, every interruption, everything that happens, will make you take a different direction. A list gives you a track to run on all day long. Another reason a list is used is that with it you can analyze where everything is, you can know what’s more important and what’s less, you can know what’s relevant, what’s irrelevant, what can be delegated, what can be tracked, or what can be postponed. The most important reason for using a list, however, is this: when you use a list and work on it, you tick things off. Every time you tackle something off the list, it gives you a sense of accomplishment. They say that happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. That happiness is the step-by-step realization of the tasks necessary to achieve a worthy ideal. And a successful life is built on a series of successful days. And a series of successful days are built on working a list step by step.

Establishing Priorities

Well, now, the fourth principle for effective time management is to establish priorities. It’s interesting! There are many people who have vague or clear goals, there are many people who make plans, but the biggest problem in human life is establishing priorities. Determining what’s relevant and what’s irrelevant. An Italian economist named Wilfredo Pareto devised in 1890 a principle called Pareto’s principle. We call it the 80-20 rule. It says that 80% of the value of what you do will be contained in 20% of the things you do. What does this mean? It means that if you make a list of 10 things you have to do today, you’ll see that two of those things are worth all the others put together. Now, the difference between highly effective people, as Wilfredo Pareto said, was that highly effective people work on the vital few versus the trivial many. The difference between the two is that ineffective people work on the trivial many. Working on things that are fun, working on things that are easy, working on little tasks that are fun and irrelevant, but keep postponing and delaying the work of their main tasks. So the key question is: What is the most valuable use of my time right now? What is the most valuable use of my time right now? I’m convinced that if all you did was organize your life and work only on the most valuable use of your time, that alone would be enough to make you an effective and efficient person. That alone would be enough to increase your productivity, your performance, your profitability. Your rewards by 10, 20, 30, 40 even 50%. So before you start, always ask yourself: Is this the most important thing I could be doing? Is this my top priority task? Does this give me the greatest return? Is this the most valuable use of my time? Here’s a simple test regarding value: Ask yourself when tackling any task, what impact will completing this task have on my future? Future decision-making is key to measuring value. Most people spend 80% of their time dealing with problems and difficulties from the past, and only 20% deal with opportunities.

The Power of Concentration

From the future. But successful people always tell you: What impact will this have on your future? Important tasks will always have an impact on the future, unimportant tasks will only have repercussions in the present and perhaps even in the past. So I say: What is the most valuable use of my time right now? And what impact will it have tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and in the future? It’s one of the keys to staying on track with regards to priorities.

The Importance of Concentration

The 5th key idea in time management, of which I am a fanatic, is concentration. Concentration, concentration! Many people come to my seminars and tell me, “Well, I never learned to concentrate.” I can’t concentrate. How do I learn to concentrate? Learning to concentrate is absolutely essential for success. In fact, it’s impossible for you to achieve anything worthwhile in life if you’re not able to concentrate on one thing at a time until it’s complete. In fact, time and motion studies have shown that if you start a task and leave it, and come back to it and pick it up and start it and leave it, and come back and do it again, it will take you 500% of the time it would take if you just picked it up and carried it out. The great time management expert Alex Mackenzie calls it “doing it once.” Once you’ve made a list of everything you have to do and prioritize what’s most important and what’s not, choose the most important and get to work on it until it’s finished. Now people say, “Well, if I stick with this task until it’s finished, I won’t get anything else done.” That doesn’t matter. If it’s the most valuable thing you have to do, if it’s the most important, if it’s the most important thing you can be working on, then perfect. When you finish an important task, your self-esteem goes up, you feel like a winner, you feel really good about yourself. But if you work on low-priority tasks, even if you complete them and do them well, you get nothing in return. It doesn’t excite you, or thrill you to do something that’s not important. In fact, most of the stress, anxiety, frustration in the world, in work today, comes from working very hard on irrelevant tasks. Benjamin Tregoe said, “If it’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well.” And I believe it was Drucker who said the worst thing in the world is doing very well what shouldn’t be done at all. So focus on one task at a time, do first things first, and do things one at a time. Here’s a very simple system you can use for the 5/1 points. Of which we’ve talked about goals, plans, and priorities. Analysis, concentration, and it’s the ABCDE method. A are the things you must do with absolute priority. B are the things you should do second priority. C are the things you should do if you’ve done A and B. And D means delegated, and E means eliminated. So when you make a list, the first thing you do is the ABC of your whole list. A what you must do, B what you should do, C what would be nice to do, and then delegate and eliminate the rest. With goals, what you do is as follows: you make a list of all the things you would like to achieve in the next 1 to 5 years. And then you go down the list and write ABC what you like to do, what you’d like to, what’s not so important. Then you take your goals and do A 1 to 2 to 3. Then you take another sheet and list the actions you’re going to take to achieve your goals. Then ABC the list. And say what are the things you have to do what things you should do. And then you put it on the list of goals. Structure it and program what you’re going to do and put it into practice. It’s called the 6-step method. Choose your goals, set priorities. Choose your activities, set priorities, program, and execute. If you do it day by day that will make you a successful person. I guarantee it.