7 Time Management Tips from Jim Rohn

 

Diana Wangeci

 

Becoming a master at time management will allow you to design your life and improve every aspect it. Jim Rohn was one of the most influential speakers when it came to how to do just this. His tips and tricks are very actionable and have revived a sense of motivation in millions of people to date.

 

Time management is easier said than done but just like anything great you will ever accomplish, the hardest step is to begin. Try not to just read through these steps but to put them to action.

 

“The problem is not that we don’t have the information, it’s that we don’t use and act on the information. We’re drowning in information but starving for wisdom.” – Jim Rohn.

 

Let your learning turn into action not to knowing more.

 

1. “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”

 

Designing your life is a nice way of saying ‘don’t let life happen to you, make your life happen’. A ship that leaves its dock without a planned destination will wonder the seas aimlessly and guess what, it will never get to where it was meant to be. Every day is an accumulation of time therefore managing your time is managing your day. This will lead to having your life planned out, day by day until you realize you have achieved most, if not all, of your goals.

 

2. “Think on paper.”

 

Write down your goals and dreams. This might be a document, app, or the old-fashioned pen to paper, but this is not an option. There is something special that happens when we jot down our goals. The mind sees them as actionable steps not just dreams we have in our spare time. Most people say they want to be successful, dream about being great, but have never written it out. Meticulously plan and schedule your life in real time on paper. This will lead to the next step which is planning out how you will achieve your goals.

 

3. “When you don’t control your time, your time will control you.” 

 

Have you ever experienced a day which you did not plan out your time and next thing you know it was nighttime and you got nothing done? This is how most people’s lives go by. They have no specific plan for their time and therefore for their lives. Your choices determine the person you end up being. See every moment as a choice, a choice of what you decide to do with it. If you control how you spend your time, you can control your successes, and failures.

 

4. “If it’s easy to do, it’s easy to NOT do.”

 

We kid ourselves, ‘Ah, that’s simple, why should I plan it out, I’ll just do it!’ This has proven not to work time and time again. Simply because if it’s easy to do, it is easy not to do. We are a product of the things we continuously do. The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy is structured around a simple principle. Every single action, no matter how small, if done over and over again will compound to a much larger product. The small things we ignore and don’t do because we never plan for them will eventually accumulate to some big action we now have to take. Which will be much harder. It starts with an apple a day… then we get healthier.

 

5. “Without a sense of urgency, desire loses value.”

 

If you don’t plan out your time you are not putting a timeline on your goals. Having deadlines creates a sense of urgency. This is why we start to work on a month-long project around the last week to the deadline. The pressure makes it seem dire and will act as a type of motivator to completing and accomplishing our goals. Put a deadline on your dreams otherwise they are just that, dreams.

 

6. “Study the art of setting goals.”

 

Every day write your goals a fresh without focusing on yesterday, this is a good way to weed out non-priorities and refocus your true goals. Focus is something lacking in today’s society. Don’t of falling ‘victim’ to this, review your goals on a daily basis to reinforce them and make realizing them practical. Derek Mills suggests a Daily Standards system where we don’t necessarily work towards a long-time goal but focus on daily goals which eventually turn into long-term successes.

 

7. “We all have the same amount of time. Killing time isn’t murder, it’s suicide. The real secret of the rich is not brilliance, it’s the management of time”

 

Start where you are, doesn’t matter where you are now. 90% of millionaires started out broke. The key to success is taking a lot of action on a great idea and the only way to do this is to manage your time. Plan around every single action, no matter how simple.

 

You can turn your life around at any given moment. The best way to do this is by time management.

 

Start simple, have a notebook where you write down how you spend every hour of your time. If you surf the web for 2 hours, write it down. If it takes you 30 minutes to stalk your favorite celebrity, write it down. Everything you do, for one week, write it down. In the end you will see where most of your time goes.

 

You will also start to resent having to write down that you spent one hour looking at pictures of a car you could only afford if you actually used that time wisely. This is a great place to start, from there you can follow the many time management tips available to you and see what works best for you.