After a careful study of some of the masters of time
management, including Steven R. Covey (Seven Habits Of
Highly Effective People), Roger Merrill (First Things
First), and Timothy Ferriss (4 Hour Work Week) and after
comparing their amazing time management principles to a
highly dysfunctional test candidate (myself) I have
developed three principles that have helped me become much
more effective.

Principle 1. KNOW WHAT YOU SEEK. According to Dr. Covey,
human beings are comprised of four different fundamental
areas: mental, physical, spiritual, and social/ emotional.
Take a sheet of paper, write down the four things, and ask
this question: What one thing could I do, that would bring
the greatest positive improvement in this area?

Next, identify the different "roles" you play in your life.
Things like wife, husband, father, mother, daughter, member
of a community, church or club, entrepreneur, cyclist, etc.
Then ask the question for each of these roles as well. You
now have a list of goals that cover every important area of
your life.

Principle 2. DEVELOP A DAILY AND WEEKLY METHOD OF
OPERATION. (MO). First, throw most of your long range goals
in the trash. They're meaningless. Why? Because they delude
you into thinking that it doesn't matter what you do TODAY.
But today is all you have. How can you possibly reach a
massive goal in five years if you don't do the daily work
necessary to get there? Yet not everything has to be done
on a daily basis, some thing are best performed weekly. For
example, in the role of "husband" I try to have a date once
a week with my wife. Weekly makes more sense than daily.
But monthly isn't near enough! Very few goals outside of
daily or weekly make sense. So take all the goals
determined above, and develop your daily and weekly method
of operation. Write them down on a single piece of paper,
and display it where you will see it often.

Principle 3. REDUCE AND SIMPLIFY. Think you don't have
enough time? Think again. You have the exact same 24 hours
as Bill Gates or Mother Teresa. One major difference
between highly effective and dysfunctional people is simply
in the use of time.

Every morning, look at your daily and weekly MO. Start into
those most important activities you have chosen, and stay
on task until they're all done. Do not let ANYTHING
distract you from each item. And don't multi-task. Do one
at a time through to completion.

There are four things you will have to manage if you want
to do this effectively: e-mail, the telephone, media, and
other people.

E-mail. E-mail is perhaps the biggest time waster in
business today. And very few e-mails are mission critical.
Here are some steps to take in killing this time sucking,
income reducing monster: 1. Turn off the "you've got mail"
sound on your computer.

2. Only check your e-mail twice per day, once per day if
possible. The best times are noon and 4 PM. If once only,
then do it at 4. If you need to, set up an autoresponse
letting people know that you are only checking your e-mail
at 4 PM, and if it's an emergency item to call you on the
phone. When I started checking e-mail twice a day I thought
I would miss out on opportunities or cause grief to
colleagues. Surprisingly, within a week I was down to once
a day, and my personal effectiveness was through the roof.

3. Go through e-mails QUICKLY, and eliminate the junk
aggressively. If you have dysfunctional friends that think
they need to send you stupid "pass this on to 10 people
and..." e-mails, politely ask them to stop sending them.
Unsubscribe from mailing lists. Don't feel obligated to
respond to every e-mail you receive. The delete button is
your friend.

Telephone. Do you feel like a ringing phone is an
emergency? It's not. Believe it or not, the world will
still function just fine without you for a few hours. Learn
to ignore the phone while working on your priorities, and
let voice mail do its job.

Media. Kill it. Cancel your newspaper. It's only filling
your head with negative crap anyway. Stop watching the
news, reading magazines, and celebrity gossip at your home
page. Do not surf the internet idly. As a matter of fact,
set your home page to a non distracting page like
google.com, or a site that helps you achieve one of your
major goals. Think you'll miss out on something big if you
cut media out of your life? Nope. Trust me, if a major
earthquake sinks a continent, you'll hear about it real
quick.

Other people. This one you have to be careful with. What's
the point of life if not for the relationships we have? At
the same time, by following the effectiveness principles
outlined above, you will have more time than ever for loved
ones. The key is to not let others invade your sacred space
when you are working on your MO's. Use the "do not disturb"
button, warn your family before you go into your office,
and take care of interruptions quickly. That will help you
eliminate casual, time wasting interactions, saving time
for the important, planned people time that you create
through being more effective.

The 80/20 rule dictates that 80 percent of the results are
achieved by only 20 percent of the work. By using these
principles you can eliminate the 80 percent, work only on
the 20, and cut your work time down while increasing your
effectiveness and creating time for those things that
matter most in your life!

About the Author:

Dave Sherwin is a full time marketer and stay at home dad.
If you want to learn how to use technology to create a full
time residual income, check Dave's blog here:
http://escapethematrix.net/blog