15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management pdfdrive com

Entrepreneur: Would it be helpful to theme product development and customer
acquisition days?
Executive: Would it be helpful to time block internal meeting times, but also
free thinking times?
Freelancer: Would it be helpful to theme one day a week just to deal with
pesky things like finding clients and sending invoices?
Student: Would it help to theme one night a week as “party night” and
another night for “study in the library time”?
Stay-at-Home Parent: Would it be helpful to theme Sunday afternoon as
time to pre-cook a week’s worth of meals?
S
ECRET #
12
Batch your work with recurring themes for different days of the
week.
How much more productive would you be, how much less stress would you
feel, if your days were organized to maximize your effectiveness?
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CHAPTER #13
Don’t Touch!
(Until You’re Ready)
Can one small change in your habits gain you dozens of minutes each day
and free up mental energy?
How Do You Sort Your Mail?
You can tell a lot about people by how they go through their daily mail. Here’s
how I used to do it…
After a long day at work, I come home, grab the mail from the box and
walk back into my kitchen. Curious and procrastinating, I flip through the
stack. Junk mail, electric bill, junk, mortgage statement, junk, junk,
magazine, hand written card with no return address, junk, junk, car loan,
junk, junk.
The small card certainly stands out, and I open it right away. It’s an
invitation for my son to go to a birthday party in a few weeks. I pull up the
calendar on my iPhone. It looks like he’d be able to go. I’ll have to double
check there are no other plans.
I put the card down and open the electric bill. I’ve been blasting the air
conditioning so much I wonder how big the bill is. Yikes! I decide to open
the other bills to glance at when they’re due.
I set the bills down and pick up BusinessWeek and flip through the pages,
reading a couple headlines and thinking I’ll have to remember to come back
and read one of the articles.
Finally, I put the magazine down on the island and begin to cook dinner.
Later that night, I’ll return to the mail, sort through it, and throw out all the
junk mail. I’ll leave the magazine in the kitchen (cluttering my environment)
and toss the rest on my desk in the office. In the days ahead, I’ll reopen the

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bills to pay them and, if I remember, reopen the invitation, glance at the
calendar again, and send back an RSVP.
While this type of “processing” of mail might not seem like a big deal, it’s
often a sign of how we do everything: we come back to things over and over
again.
When we process our email, we might respond to each “ding” by scanning
who it’s from and what the subject line is. We then decide whether or not to
open it. If we open it and read it, we then decide to leave it in our inbox so we
can respond to it later…when we’ll read it all over again.
We might take off our dirty clothes and throw them on the floor in our
bedroom. Later we pick them up and throw them in a pile in the closet. Once a
week—or when we can’t actually close the door to the closet any longer—we
get a laundry basket and put the clothes in it and then take it to the washing
machine. Later we’ll come back and actually start a load of laundry.
‘Touch It Once’ Mentality
Highly successful people take immediate action on almost every item they
encounter. They know that to be efficient, they want to expend the least possible
amount of time and mental energy processing things. In short, they practice a
“touch it once” mentality.
Here’s how I now go through snail mail using the “touch it once” principle:
•
I walk out to the mailbox and grab the mail.
•
As I walk back up my driveway, I pick out all the junk mail.
•
I toss the junk mail into the recycle bin in my garage before I
even walk back into the house.
•
I easily pick out the magazines and put them in my magazines-
to-be-read stack on the coffee table.
•
I take the remaining bills—that’s all there is left, no-body sends
letters anymore—and set them on my bills-to-be-paid pile next to my
computer.
•
Because I’ve time blocked 30 minutes every Friday morning for
paying bills, I don’t even bother opening those envelopes until that
time.
I actually think the ‘touch it once’ rule is so important I recommend you
immediately take action on something if it will take five minutes or less to
complete. As long as it won’t interfere with a pre-scheduled task, you are

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generally better off taking immediate action than having to come back to it in the
future.