Tips for Effective Time Management: The science behind it, the secrets of how geniuses do it and why it is essential for business

Time management is absolutely essential to achieve success. Managing time effectively is a key skill to master. I have chosen this topic because time is a resource you cannot afford to waste if you have your own business or want to succeed in general. Although I talk about business, the research in this article is very valuable and can be applied to personal life. This will greatly benefit you if you struggle with managing your time and don't know why you can't get it under control. 

Schedule everything
If you do not have a set schedule to follow, time will go by very quickly and before you know it, you will be either bankrupt or having to rush to get a job to make ends meet. If you can schedule everything even your time off, time with family and work, you will be able to train your brain to understand the difference between leisure activities versus work. In addition to this, your business performance will be greatly impacted by how effectively you are able to manage your time.

I am putting time management into a series of things to consider when starting your own business or to improve life in general. I wish I had done this myself when starting my business, but I did not even know much about it then. I always had issues with time management since I was a kid and grew accepting it over time. I only started paying more attention to it until lack of time management skills led me to loosing business and overworking myself to the point that it affected my health. 

I then started researching and working on mind hacks in order to manage time more efficiently. I am still a work in progress, but I am so much better now than I was in 2007 when I first started with my business. Following the tips I describe throughout this article plus learning from the experts has greatly benefited my business but more importantly it has benefited me as a person.  My goal with this article is to help you understand the importance of managing time effectively and the benefits it can bring to anything you want to do in life. 

The key elements
Managing time requires a healthy state of mind and focus to get things done. If I had known this earlier in life, It would have saved me a lot of unnecessary stress and made my life much easier. Although, I managed to meet some deadlines in my business, I had to give up 80% of my sleep in order to stay on schedule. This affected my health over time and client relationships. It took me over three years to improve on my time management skills and incorporate them to my daily work routine. Once I started managing my time better, I was able to get my sleep back. The results have been great, it has greatly decreased my stress levels, it has brought a lot more stability to my income stream and best of all I have become happier.

Focus like a genius

I grew up believing that to succeed at achieving a difficult task you needed to work hard and this meant to put a lot of hours into it. This couldn't be further from the truth as working hard at something is not dependent on the amount of time you put into it, but rather on the amount of focus and the quality of time you put into it. Cal Newport, assistant professor at Georgetown University, wrote an article on his blog titled "If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers" about a study from the Universität der Künste in Berlin on the habits of elite over-achievers. It turns out that the study concluded that successful individuals follow a pattern of focusing hard on the objective to achieve rather than working an excessive number of hours at it:

This study sheds some light on this paradox. It provides empirical evidence that there’s a difference between hard work and hard to do work:

• Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into two sessions). It also provides you measurable progress in a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation. Therefore, although hard work is hard, it’s not draining and it can fit nicely into a relaxed and enjoyable day.

• Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you, like the average players from the Berlin study, feeling tired and stressed. It also, as we just learned, has very little to do with real accomplishment.

Focusing and prioritizing were two of the things I struggled with the most. I used to stay up at night working hard to meet deadlines. The worse part was that I was pretty much working throughout most of my day as long as I was awake. I ended up being tired all the time and it eventually took a toll on my health. All of this made me unproductive and became hard to do work for me. The reason was because I was multitasking and trying to do everything at once; reading emails, answering text messages, phone calls, social networking, etc. I engaged in multiple projects simultaneously and I was making very little progress at all of them. This frustrated me and it made me very stressed out. 

One day while being distracted reading blogs, I started discovering some of the information that I am putting in this article which came as a wake up call for me. I realized that there was a different way of doing things and achieve better results. 

Some articles suggested meditation and quieting the mind which I started doing. I also started talking to a therapist about it who gave me some good tips as well. I started controlling my thoughts and my emotions much better. It helped me have more productive work days.  

I also created a special weekly calendar and schedule everything from my work projects, diner, play time with the kids to spending time with my wife. This was great because I was able to manage expectations with my family. It was a way of disciplining myself to stay on track. 

I learned over time that I was most productive early in the morning when my family were still sleep. I started going to sleep early with my wife and kids and waking up at 5 am to have one hour and a half of pure production time before the family woke up. I would then help my wife with the kids and continue with my work day. This was truly liberating and it provided a boost of accomplishment early morning. This made me feel awesome because I was taking care of my priorities in a more productive way. 

Attention is a limited resource

It is easy to read and conclude that if all geniuses do is focus hard at something then if you do the same, it should technically work the same way for you. However, focusing is not simply achieved with a mere decision, it takes a healthy state of mind to do it and to remain focus. There is an entire science behind how the brain works and how distractions affect us. The more you know how to manage what you focus on, the better chances at remaining focused. I recently read an awesome article by David Rock the author of Your Brian at Work, called "Easily distracted: why it's hard to focus, and what to do about it". This inspired me to buy his book Your Brain at Work, which it is a great read and I highly recommend it. Brian goes deep into why attention is a limited resource:

"Every time you focus your attention you use a measurable amount of glucose and other metabolic resources. Studies show that each task you do tends to make you less effective at the next task, and this is especially true for high-energy tasks like self control or decision making. So distractions really take their toll."

I discovered that attention was a limited resource by pure accident. I only learned in more detail after reading Your Brain at Work. I did this by scheduling the work that needed the most focus for early morning such as software development, application maintenance, database administration, security assessments. And leave the work that needed less focus for later in the day such as writing or answering emails, phone calls, social networking and marketing  etc. Prioritizing my work made me more productive and it made my clients happier. 

After diving deeper into the science of the brain, studies and statistics, David suggestions remind me of a powerful famous quote by Pablo Cohelo "Control your mind or it will control you." David writes in his article the following:

"So, inhibiting distractions is a core skill for staying focused. To inhibit distractions, you need to be aware of your internal mental process and catch the wrong impulses before they take hold. It turns out that, like the old saying goes, timing is everything. Once you take an action, an energetic loop commences that makes it harder to stop that action. Many activities have built-in rewards, in the form of increased arousal that holds your attention. Once you open your email program and see the messages from people you know, it's so much harder to stop yourself from reading them. Most motor or mental acts also generate their own momentum. Decide to get out of your chair and the relevant brain regions, as well as dozens of muscles, are all activated. Blood starts pumping and energy moves around. To stop getting out of your chair once you start will take more focus and effort than to decide not to get up when you first have the urge. To avoid distractions it's helpful to get into the habit of stopping the wrong behaviors early, quickly, and often, well before they take over."

Avoiding distractions is king when trying to focus and perhaps it is one of the most difficult things to do. I struggled to stay away from checking social media, reading the newspapers, checking the latest viral video on You Tube. The way I decided to help myself was to separate my work computer from my fun computer. I bough a cheap laptop for my online fun where I saved all my passwords to all the fun websites that I like like Facebook, The New York Daily News, blogs, etc. I also scheduled half hour a day to indulge in online mindless activities. I also took it a step further and firewalled my work computer to block all access to fun websites. 

A healthy state of mind
The other key element to time management is quieting the mind. It leads to achieving focus and inner peace. It takes training the mind to understand how to sort out emotions and distractions in order to achieve better focus. I get very excited when I hear or read people talking about this subject matter because it is something I have struggled with my whole life. I recently listened to the SPI 71 podcast with Pat Flynn who interviewed Sean Webb author of Iampodcast.com who mentions a study that found that the average distraction comes every 11 minutes. This co-relates to the same topics mentioned by David Rock in his book. Sean Webb says the following:  

"When the distractions come in from external factors that is most common. But a lot of times if your mind is a little crazy and always throwing up other ideas in front of you,should I pay attention to this, should I pay attention to this? Well, if you do pay attention to it, that’s going to increase your stress level."

Sean suggests mediation as a great way to achieve balance and quiet the mind. I love mediating and engaging in exercises to eliminate the noise in my brain. This is great at learning to control the brain and manage thoughts. I have gained being able to focus on my work more easily and have gained inner peace. 

Conclusion
I am big into time management mainly because it is one of the biggest problems I have struggled with most my whole life. Lack of time management skills has had major repercussions in my academic and work years. I did research and started coming up with mind hacks to improve my time management skills. The more I learned, it became a function of focusing hard and eliminating distractions. I achieved both by learning about the science of how my brain works because it allowed me to understand how to engage distractions and achieve focus. This lead me to meditating and getting some help from a therapist. I put this article together to put my work on time management in a nutshell to help those who need to develop time management skills and struggle with staying focused. The resources in this article will allow you to dive deeper into the science behind focusing and accomplishing hard work without having to do hard to do work. This will aid you at balancing your inner and outer environments in order to evolve as the true over-achievers that you all are. 

Thank you so much for reading and please leave me your comments.

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