pithy insights from the best books on time management and the art of extraordinary performance [3/3]

• You must remind yourself that the sands of time are slipping away from your hands, and once they’re gone, they are never coming back again. 
• Highly successful people consider time to be their most valuable asset. You have to make sure day in and day out that you remain focused and not let the time stealers get the better of you.
• Adding more tasks into an already-full calendar is not good thinking. It leads to nothing but overwork and in a few cases severe burnout.
• The 80/20 time management principle helps you to first identify the 20 percent of your tasks that produce 80 percent of the desired outcomes, and then single-mindedly focus on them. When you employ this kind of “time revolution,” you’ll find yourself achieving greater success than before, but without any extra effort.
• Going through non-essential emails and discarding them repeatedly has no impact on our long-term goals. That’s why it’s crucial that you get rid of this reckless behavior. 
• Where your focus goes, energy flows. To use your time efficiently, you must direct your attention towards a meaningful project. 
• The most successful people use their early-morning hours to accomplish their highest-value activities. 
• Early mornings are the best times to focus on things that are most important to you because your willpower is renewed after a good night of rest.
• The best morning routines are all about doing activities that matter to you but require an extra dose of self-motivation. These are essentially things that are neither urgent nor have an immediate payoff, but still might positively impact your life in the long run.
• The most successful people spend their mornings doing one of these three things: nurturing their careers, nurturing their relationships, or nurturing themselves. 
• To perform our best i.e. unlock the power of full engagement, we must focus not on accomplishing more into our finite hours but instead figure out ways to do more with the time we have on our hands. The most effective approach to achieve this is to shift our focus from managing our time to managing our energy. 
• Energy, not time, is the primary source of efficiency and high performance.
• A useful strategy to efficiently manage your energy levels and get more accomplished in a given time is to work less and take more breaks.
• Like we control the environments of the animals we domesticate, we can also design our own environments so that any adaptation is nothing but an improvement over our past situation, inching us closer to our goals. 
• Relying on willpower alone to get things done is not only pain-inducing, but also an extremely poor strategy to bring positive change in our lives. Instead, the most effective approach is to create an alternate environment that compels us to live and act in accordance with our superior aims.
• To set realistic goals, we must let go of our perfectionism and accept ourselves as we are, not as the ideal person that we desire to be. 
• Developing awareness of how much time you truly have helps you focus on your priorities and hence make better choices in your daily life.

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If you enjoyed these insights, I’d encourage you to read my book Daily Productivity (The Daily Learner, Book 5). The condensed timeless knowledge in these meditations will assist you in navigating through the complexities that come with working in the modern world.

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