The 10 Skills of Painless Time Management

If the free market had it’s way, you would buy into the cult of productivity’s belief that you need to stock up on expensive planners, equip yourself with complicated organizing gadgets, subscribe to a dozen trendy web applications and attend $5,000 seminars to start Getting Things Done and putting First Things First.

The trouble is, technology doesn’t solve your time management problems. Those problems aren’t solved by simply “getting organized” and harnessing “willpower” – they are solved by making some pretty significant shifts in your whole mental relationship with time and what you do with it.

All a technology-based solution does is try to force you into someone else’s mode of operation, abandoning the way you do things now (because your ways are wrong!, they say) and taking on someone else’s working style.  That rarely works (unless you’re already a fan of that working style to begin with).

Don’t get me wrong – the David Allens and Steven Coveys of the world are all valuable contributors (as long as you don’t take them as gospel).  But the idea that a better system will make everything okay is simply not in line with reality.  The truth is, you don’t need a better system.  You just need to start making incremental shifts in how you treat your time, your focus and your results, and you can track it any damned way that you please.

But when someone forces you into a system – their system – that can become painful.  On the other hand, just focusing on tweaking the way you already work?  And building new habits using your existing working styles?  Now that’s painless time management.

When you’re ready to stop thinking inside someone else’s box, and start building your own, there are 10 skills you can focus on that will make an immediate difference in your life – (regardless of the “system” you personally use to execute).  Incremental improvement in any (or all) of these skills will make it a whole lot easier to create lasting, permanent change by tackling easy problems first, and then working your way up to harder ones.  When you start making small wins right away, you’ll be more likely to stick with it and get the results you’ve really wanted.

Let me walk you through how you’re going to make these ten skills work for you.

Skill #1 – Staying Motivated / Defeating Self Doubt

The first skill of painless time management is mastering the art of consistent motivation.  Now, I know it’s easy to feel motivated after you go to a time management seminar or buy a new planner system, but what usually happens is that the initial excitement fades away and you fall back into the ruts of your old patterns.

Now, this may tend to happen for a couple of reasons.  Maybe the system you chose is a lot of work to implement.  Maybe you are just meeting up with resistance trying to change the old, comfortable habits that aren’t getting you the results you want.  Maybe keeping things the way they are seems kind of, well, ok to you – you know, not great, but acceptable.  Whatever the reason, you hit a wall where either the thrill is gone, or you doubt your ability to really take control over your time.

But that’s not how you roll, at least not anymore.  You’re going to come up with a way to keep yourself excited about becoming better and better about managing your time.  And you’re going to recognize that you also have to bulletproof your confidence, to get yourself to believe that the dabbling is over – you’re going to really do it this time.  You’re going to follow through.  You nail that, you get your confidence solid and the benefits clear in your mind, and you absolutely will take action on a daily basis to be in complete control of your time.

This is the starting point – you’ve absolutely got to get this part down or you really won’t take consistent action on mastering your time.  The bottom line is that if you allow yourself to doubt your abilities to manage your self and your life, you’re going to take a much lower quality of action, if you take action at all.  You’re simply not going to get serious about taking control, because on some level you’re going to be living in doubt as to whether you can really manage the insane busyness that is your life.  But to start you have to reinforce that belief that you can do it this time.

Think for a moment about all your doubts, all your emotional baggage that has to do with time management.  Think of all the times you have felt that you just couldn’t see how you were going to juggle all the things you have on your plate, and all the things you want to do.  Think of how it felt every time you had to look at how you’ve struggled with procrastination, or in keeping your focus.

Those are rough feelings, and they drain you, they paralyze you.  But in reality, that’s all in your mind.  Those feelings, there’s a systematic way to erase them and replace them with the kind of thinking that will not only make you sure that you can take total control of your time, but that will also keep you motivated to keep taking action, even if you have a lot of internal resistance.  And mastering that begins to make time management painless because it moves it from something you have to do to something you want to do.

Now, out of all 10 of the skills I’m going to go over, I suggest that you focus on this skill first, since it helps guarantee you’ll follow through on everything else.  That said, let’s jump over to the second skill of painless time management.

Skill #2 – Facing Reality

The second skill you’ll want to master is keeping up with is what I call a reality check. This is all about really seeing where your time is going on a daily basis.  You see, we all like to rationalize how we’re spending our time.  We really don’t want to face up to all the moments of the day when we’re living in reaction and distraction, where we’re getting off track or just plain wasting an opportunity to do something really useful with our time.  Left to ourselves, we all do it – and unless you have an easy way to see where all your time is really going, you’ll never be able to reclaim the productivity you’re losing.

You already know how life works.  During your day, from moment to moment, you have to face a harsh reality:  either you’re working on the exact things that you intended to that day, or you’re not. You’re either on track for the things that you tell yourself really matter, or you’re off track.  And the scary thing is that the average person spends over 50% of their time off track, doing something other than the things they intended to do to make their real goals come to life.

How do I know this?  Because of a little tool I call a reality check.  It’s a simple tracking sheet that I’ve used with clients in the past to show them how much time they are really spending off course – whether it’s because of their own day to day choices or whether it’s the result of unexpected things popping up that they have to react to.  Ultimately it doesn’t matter though, because it’s all stuff that slows you down, that takes you off of the course you were meaning to travel on.

And unless you have a tool to track that kind of thing, you’re going to be wasting a lot of time that could be making you money faster or giving you the free time you’ve been looking for.  That’s why you want to get your hands on that reality check, so you can see exactly where you need to make changes to guarantee you stay on track.  In fact, just keeping track of where you’re spending your time during the day gives you an automatic productivity boost, I’d say, of at least an hour a day on average.  (Don’t believe me?  Try it for a day and see the difference.)

You can accomplish this with a pencil and paper, an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever.  Your system, your preference.  Anything that lets you easily track what you’re doing throughout the day.

Circles of Activity

Now, everything you can do during the day falls into one of several categories, which I call circles of activity. Just imagine a bulls eye target made up of four circles in it to get an idea about what I’m talking about.

The bulls-eye in the center, that’s what we’re going to call the circle of intent. This is where you are when you’re spending time doing exactly what you set out to do for the day – in other words – when you’re following through on the things you intended to do.  Naturally, this is the bulls-eye, because you want to spend as much time as possible on target, doing the things you planned on doing every day.  This is where you get into that state of flow where you’re really getting tons of incredible stuff done, time seems to lose its meaning and your productivity goes through the roof.

Now, you know and I know that life doesn’t just let you hang out if the circle of intent. If it did, your to-do list would be very short and you wouldn’t be listening to me right now.  No, most of the time you’ve got to fight for your right to be there, because you get dragged outside of that circle all the time dealing with things that pop up as well as your own bad habits.

When this happens, this puts you in the second circle, the one surrounding the bullseye.  This circle is called the circle of reaction, because it’s where you are when you’re reacting to some urgency that’s sprung up around you.  Sometimes breaking away from intent and dealing with the reaction makes sense.  For example, if you’re working on finding new business and someone is calling you up to close a deal and write a check, then answer the phone, that’s a good thing to react to.  Or maybe a true emergency pops up and you have to rush someone you care about to the hospital.  Life will throw things like that at you.  You gotta do what you gotta do.  In fact, I’d call this less of reaction and more like an intelligent response.

But on the other hand, there are plenty of things that you shouldn’t be breaking away from the circle of intent to react to.  You don’t have to do them – or maybe at least you don’t have to do them now.  You already know what these things are – they’re the things that seemed urgent, that seemed like a good idea to work on at the time … but they weren’t the best use of your time right then.  They could have waited.  They should have been scheduled for a different time.  But instead, you jumped, either because you reacted to the urgency or you just wanted to get away from the task you should have been focusing on.  This is what you want to avoid, by resisting the temptation to trade the good for the best.

Now, that covers the circle of intent – where you want to spend most of your time – and the circle of reaction – where you’ll undoubtedly spend some of your time.  That leaves the next circle to deal with, and it’s an ugly one.  It’s called the circle of regret. I don’t even need to give you examples of what this is.  You already know.  It’s full of the things you look back on and say to yourself, Man, I wish to God I hadn’t wasted my time doing that.

Sometimes you spend time in the circle of regret because you’re trying to distract yourself, or trying to escape from dealing with something in your life.  Sometimes you get there simply because you’re being sloppy with your time and you don’t know what to do, or you lose track of time doing something pointless.  But it almost always keeps happening because you aren’t tracking where you’re spending your time. If you did, you’d be so fed up with yourself that you’d fight to stay out of that circle as hard as you could.

The way start fighting against this is to simply track your time, and track what circle you’re spending it in.  Just like tracking your money in detail keeps you from wasting it – tracking your time will raise your awareness so you don’t waste as much time as well.  And as you get accustomed to noticing you’re drifting away from the circle of intent, you’ll begin to find that you snap yourself back into line a lot more often than you would have if you weren’t tracking things.

Wait a minute …

Ok, at this point, you’re probably thinking that tracking your time doesn’t sound very painless – it seems like a pain to have to do that.  Well, that’s just an excuse to get out of doing the work, because the payoff on this activity in the beginning is so damned high, and it’s honestly so little effort.  It’s not like you’d have to stop what you’re doing every 10 minutes to write on a piece of paper – it’s more like you only write when you stop what you’re doing, so that you become more conscious of the fact you just stopped doing something (and maybe because you’re getting distracted or off track).

The truth is, it becomes more painless every day because when you start doing this, you’re going to realize that by day three that you’ve freed up at least an hour or two a day of productivity because you’re more centered and focused, all because you took 5 minutes total throughout the day to scribble on a sheet of paper or update a spreadsheet.  And tapping into all that additional time takes the sting out of keeping yourself accountable.

Skill #3 – Funneling

The third skill to master is the art of funneling.  You master this skill, and you will knock out 50% of your feelings of overwhelm and stress and nothing will ever fall through the cracks, ever again.  Ever.

Funneling is a simple concept, you’ve probably heard of it before but you just haven’t seriously put it into practice.  It’s all about managing the flow of incoming activities in your life, those things you put on your to-do lists.  You’ve got a million things you have to do – a million little commitments you’ve decided you want make happen.

Now, I call them commitments instead of to dos because face it – to-dos just pile up, while commitments get done, don’t they?  You tend to be more likely to make yourself follow through on commitments, so let’s start reframing all your actions that way.

So you’ve got all these commitments coming at you every day from a lot of different sources.  You get emails that generate new commitments for you.  You get phone calls, you get new commitments.  Mail comes in, bringing more commitments with it.  Conversations with other people generate more commitments.  You scribble stuff on post it notes, on the back of envelopes.  You think of stuff you need to do in the car, at work, in the shower, and everywhere in your life you’re adding more and more of these items to whatever to-do list manager you’re using right now – if you write it down at all.

The problem with all of this is for most people, they have no consistent way to manage all of these commitments. Post it notes get lost.  Emails get buried under other emails.  Mail gets stacked and stacked some more.  Scraps of paper with to-dos on them get lost.  Conversations get forgotten.  Stuff falls through the cracks, and you end up living in the circle of reaction, jumping to whatever seems most urgent at the moment.  Its how most people live, and it kills your productivity.  You already know from experience how much time you’ve lost in the past because of this.

It’s Funnel Time

This is where funnels come in – you create these funnels, which are really just specific ways to capture new commitments.  Maybe it’s a notebook when you’re on the go, or a special folder in your email, or a little voice recorder – whatever works for the spot you’re in.  You’re already doing this to some extent, but the key to taking it to a level where it really works 100% of the time is when you decide on a specific system to handle incoming stuff ahead of time.  You set up multiple funnels so you’re not just noting it some reactionary way like on an envelope or in your head.

When you do funneling right, you set up an elegant, effective way to capture all your incoming commitments and then you set aside a few minutes on a regular basis to dump all of these funnels into one place, like a special notebook or a spreadsheet, and you manage all your commitments from that one spot.

Once it gets into there you clean your funnels – you cross it out of your notebook, you delete it from your email, you erase the voice recording, because you don’t need it anymore … you can manage it all in one place, in the style that works best for you.

It may sound less than painless to get organized about how you capture incoming commitments but let me tell you it pays off like crazy.  You get this great peace of mind seeing everything in one place and it makes it so much easier to prioritize what you want to do.  Instead of having everything swimming in your head you’ll have it in one place, ready to take action on.

And you’ll never have to look for a misplaced piece of paper again.  Things won’t fall through the cracks and your productivity will shoot way up.  And it’s painless in the long run because it eliminates the pain of stress, the pain of worry and the pain of overload.  So if you don’t have a funnel system set up yet, start figuring out how you’re going to create one.

Skill #4 – Keeping Accountable

It’s one thing to set goals, but it’s quite another thing to actually hold yourself accountable for following through on them.  Accountability is key to getting things done, and getting them done quickly and with as little wasted time as possible.  Let’s talk about that for a moment.

Any serious goal that actually gets accomplished goes through a number of stages.  First, you set the goal – let’s say, you want to start a business and make $50,000 over the next 12 months.  That’s great, but making that decision is just the first step.  What you’ve got to do after that is the second step, which is flesh it all out into a series of steps, you know, a project plan.  So many people don’t do this, they figure they’ll just wing it, and then they wonder why they never get the goal accomplished.  Or maybe they eventually get it accomplished, but it took years longer than they expected it to.  So getting the project planned out is the second step.

The third step is to start breaking the project down into milestones – you know, saying, ok, in 3 months I’ll be this far along, in 6 months I’ll have these other things done, and so on and so on.  Basically, you’re creating a roadmap that tells you how far you should be from quarter to quarter, or month to month, or week to week, whatever makes sense for your project.  But here’s where it gets sticky for most people.  Once you do this, then you actually have a bunch of deadlines to meet.  You have specific measurable things to accomplish.  You can’t hide behind the “I’d like to get this done, sometime …” no, you’ve milestoned it, so now it’s something you have to deliver on.

A lot of people freeze up at that idea, because it means they have to be accountable. They can’t be sloppy with their time anymore.  They have to get focused and organized, so they don’t do it.  But remember, this is not how you roll – just by reading this far, you’re confirming to yourself that you want to raise your standards.  You nail this and you’ll see how freeing it can be to know exactly what you have to accomplish from week to week to stay on track, and you’ll start making more of your goals a reality.

You won’t have to stress out about all the things that are yet to be accomplished – you’ll know exactly what you have to do, so you can focus like crazy on getting it done fast.

As you work at keeping accountable, you’ll learn to to quickly and easily break your major goals down into sub-projects and get them milestoned.  Then once they’re milestoned, you can simply make a tracking template to make it painless to chart the progress you’re making as you go through the week.

This is the critical part, where you go through the week asking yourself, “what have I done so far to support my most important priorities?”  The tracking template you use (whick , honestly, can be a 3×5 index card if that works for you)  will keep everything visible in one place, so you can see how all your projects are getting worked on in a balanced way.  It’s gonna be nice, it’s going to help you get focused and take a lot of stress off of you.  And making it easier is what we’re all about, right?

So let’s turn our eyes to the fifth critical skill of painless time management – wiping out weaknesses.

Skill #5 – Wiping Out Weaknesses

So far we’ve talked about strategic things – how to set yourself up to win in the larger, big picture sense.  But now we’re going to move into the down and dirty, day to day challenges you have that are sucking your time away.  This is a critical thing to nail down because it’s what takes you out of treading water or standing still and gets you steadily moving in a direction that makes you stronger, that gets you better results.

Most of us know we have weaknesses, but we don’t sit down and figure out a systematic way to eliminate them.  We take it for granted that we can get by with them, or maybe we just think that there’s no way we’ll ever overcome them.  But that’s not how you roll, because you’re raising yourself to a higher standard.  If you’ve done your reality check for any length of time, you’ll be getting a really good idea about what your time management weaknesses are.

So you’re going to want to create a battle plan – a specific guide to how you are going to knock them out, one at a time, so instead of wishing you had more time in the day you’ll be living a life where you have the time you need.

Later in this series I’ll guide you through how to make your battle plan and how to carry it out in a way that’s as easy and painless as possible.  Some of these weaknesses relate to the final five skills we’re about to go over.  Just keep in mind that if you don’t nail this, if you don’t have a battle plan, it’s like looking at the bad habits that steal your time and continue to keep key goals that you want to achieve out of your reach and saying “No problem guys, you just stick around.  You’re safe here.”

You’ve got to make a plan so you have something to take action on.  And the time you spend on developing and working your battle plan will pay you back over and over.  So don’t skip investing the time to get started on this critical skill of painless time management.

Skill #6 – Overcoming Procrastination

Just like there’s good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, good stress and bad stress, there’s a good kind of procrastination to go along with the bad.  Think about it – procrastination is simply putting something off until later.  That can be really valuable if you’re leveraging the good kind of procrastination – putting off anything but the best actions until later.  You’re going to learn to leverage good procrastination as you move through this series of articles.

Procrastination is a monster-sized killer of your time, and it directly affects how much time you spend in the circles of reaction and regret – time that you could have been spending getting important things done that made you money and enriched your life.  But procrastination flushes all that down the toilet.  It slows your productivity down considerably – and in a lot of cases, destroys your productivity completely.  You do NOT want to be here.

So let’s talk about how to overcome procrastination.  It’s simpler than you think.  People tend to think of getting past procrastination as an exercise in willpower, a kind of mental toughness that lets you push through it all, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  All procrastination is really just based around how we represent a task to ourselves – what it means, how hard it is, how uncomfortable it is to deal with it.

All these are just feelings in our heads, and the only thing that gets us past it and into taking action is learning how to defuse these feelings and reframe things in a way that makes us want to get them done – and to get them done fast, with energy and motivation, instead of dragging them out forever.

To really master the art of overcoming procrastination, and to make it as easy and painless as possible, you need to understand the specific causes of procrastination.  As you begin to recognize the different mental frames that allow procrastination to flourish, you will be able to match those symptoms to specific, key tactics that will defuse procrastination’s hold on you.  We’ll discuss those later in the series (or you can download them now if you don’t want to wait).

You see, when procrastination takes root, it’s sort of like a combination lock. You can spin that dial all over the place and get nowhere – or, you can learn the specific numbers that are part of that combination and unlock it. Once you learn to recognize those combinations, and you practice using them, you’ll be able to break through the things that are causing you to procrastinate.

And look at it this way – how many times have you procrastinated on something because you built it up to be this great big thing in your mind, and had all this stress about it and when you finally dealt with it it was over with quickly, and it wasn’t really that bad at all?  As you  developing this critical skill of painless time management, you’ll consistently be able to get to that “done and over with” point a whole lot more quickly.

Skill #7 -Bulletproofing Focus

Now we come to the seventh critical skill of painless time management – Bulletproofing Focus.  Without focus, you cut your productivity in half at the very least, so bulletproofing your focus is something you definitely need to take seriously.  When you have a bulletproof focus, an amazing thing happens.  You start tackling your work with a force multiplier – doubling your productivity, tripling it, or even more.  It’s another way to tap into that flow state where time loses meaning and you are so totally immersed in what you are doing that it brings out the best work that you are capable of.

And the funny thing about focus is that it’s not so much about keeping your mind on what it is that you’re supposed to be doing, but about keeping your mind off of everything – and I mean everything else.  For an achiever personality, this is a tall order, because we’ve always got our goals bouncing around in our heads.  We’ve always got tons of stuff swimming around in our heads.  But if you want to unleash the raw power that comes with an unbreakable focus, you’ve got to get all the kids out of the pool.  No more swimming around in that head of yours.

The good news is that focus is definitely a learnable skill.  It’s not something that only a select few people get to master.  It’s yours for the taking.  But you have to develop a system to keep your mind off of everything else so it has no other option than to be right where it needs to be, fully present, fully engaged, fully ready to give everything to the task at hand.

In other words, if you want more focus, it’s not about trying hard, it’s about knowing the right things to do ahead of time to safeguard your focus and the right things to do real-time, when something threatens to take your focus away.  Developing focus is like lifting weights – you’ll quickly see results and you’ll be stronger to the degree you practice it.  And that’s a nice situation to be in.

Skill #8 – Managing Interruptions

So let’s bump on over to the eighth critical skill of painless time management – managing interruptions.  This is a big one, because interruptions kill your productivity in two destructive ways.

First off, any time someone interrupts you, you have automatically shifted away from the circle of intent – where you were working on the things that were important to you – and drifted to the circle of reaction. Your progress on the things that matter most stops dead in the water.  With the number of distractions that typically come most people’s way, it’s no wonder that the days, weeks and months creep by with us not making the progress we want on our major goals.

So when interruptions come, you’ve got to know how to push back on them – either by deferring the work until later or just choosing a small part of the task to tackle now.  Many interruptions can get the 80/20 treatment, where you do the most important 20% of the task and get 80% of your results.

You want to leverage this any way you can, and later in this blog series I’ll teach you simple tactics for making the process as painless as possible – for you and the person who’s interrupting your flow of action.  This way you can pop right back into the circle of intent and do stuff that matters instead of just doing stuff.

Now, the second way interruptions kill your productivity and steal time from your day is they take you back to a cold start.  You know how when you get started on something, it takes a little bit of warm up time to get focused and get totally engaged in giving your all to knock out whatever it is you’re working on.  Well, whenever you get interrupted, guess what – you’ve got to do that all over again.  And when you’re interrupted a lot during the day, that can literally eat up hours of your time.

And remember, it’s not how much time you spend working on something that gets you results – it’s how much high quality, focused time you spend on it.  Every time you permit an interruption to get in your way, you drop straight down into low productivity time for generally five to fifteen minutes at a time.  Now, if you’re interrupted a dozen times a day by things like phone calls, emails or other people, you can see how that can add up to an hour or more.

But that’s not how you roll, at least not anymore.  You’re going to learn how to prevent most of your interruptions from happening in the first place with a few simple tactics as you go through the managing interruptions coaching session.  And you’re going to take those hours back, so that you can get important stuff done with them.

Skill #9 – Giving 200%

Now let’s get to know a little about the ninth critical skill of painless time management – and that’s Giving 200%.  A lot of people talk about giving your all, giving 100%, but that’s not going to get you the massive results that you want – it will just get you the same results you’re capable of with the skill levels you have.

And giving 110% isn’t much of a help either, because that’s basically just taking the same wall you’ve been banging your head against and banging harder.  It may get you a little farther than you’ve gotten in the past, but it’s not going to take you to the next level.

No, giving 200% is all about aggressively pushing past your productivity limits, of taking steps that significantly change the way you’re doing things now – but in a good way, and in an easy way to implement. It’s not about swinging the ax harder – or even sharpening it -  it’s about heading out to the store and getting a chainsaw.

It’s about stepping back and looking at the way you do things and finding out what small changes you can make and manage right now, right where you are, that will keep you totally immersed in what you’re doing, totally on fire even you don’t particularly care for the task you have to do.

It sounds like I’m talking about motivation, but it’s more than that.  It’s a simple procss for getting yourself into a state where you’ll push past your limits and actually enjoy the experience.  It’s about learning how to summon up all these personal resources that you’re currently not taking advantage of and using them to take your performance and productivity through the roof.  It’s about making the pain of hard work – a lot more painless.  We’re going to have fun with this one, you and I.  This is one of my favorite topics, and I think you’ll really enjoy it as well.

So wow, that brings us to the final critical skill of painless time management.  You’ve read this far and I’m impressed, because that means that you’re one of the select few who stick it out, who finish what they start, who win the race.  I like the way you roll.  So let’s roll into this tenth skill and finish this up so you can get cracking.

Skill #10 -Maintaining Energy

This tenth and final skill is the art of Maintaining Energy.  Most people find their energy comes and goes in spikes and valleys.  They feel tired at times, wiped out, and it’s hard to get motivated or to give 200%, or even focus for that matter at times like those.  I’ve been there and I know you have, too.  But if you really want to get more of what really matters packed into your day you’ve got to master the art of summoning up and holding onto a consistent supply of physical or mental energy.

Now, I’m not talking about getting all hyped up and bouncing off the walls, or keeping some dreamy-eyed positive thinking grin on your face all day.  I’m not talking about adopting a crazy diet or popping pills.  I’m simply talking about taking command of simple strategies that help give you the energy to act, to do what you have to do with intensity and purpose, without being held back by feelings of being tired out.

Sometimes you get in this state of total energy, that place where you were just able to keep hammering at the things you had to, and you didn’t get tired – or maybe you did get tired, exhausted even – but you summoned up the energy and commitment to push past any tired feelings and keep going. It’s like those people who can run a marathon – they may get to the end sweating and exhausted, but they followed through on every step and never missed a beat.

And managing your energy has everything in the world to do with time management because face it, in reality you’re not actually managing your time after all.  You’re managing your results, the things you get done that really matter, that really move you forward rather than simply filling your days.  And you’ll only get things done to the degree that you have the energy to do it, just like a car is only going to go as far as its gas tank will take it.

When I go into this topic during this blog series, I’m going to help you isolate the exact causes, the exact things that are sucking your energy away, and it’s going to show you how to start turning the tide – even if you only have two minutes a day to devote to it.  It’s one of the most powerful parts of this series, because it gives you the power you need to consistently take action on the things you say are most important to you.

Whew.  You did it.

Well, you finally did it – you got to the end of this non-stop, 6500-word article and now you’ve got the ten critical skills of painless time management fresh in your mind.  You can jump back to the table of contents to see how far the series has developed.

(If you’re new to this site, what’s going on here is I’m taking my 11-CD time management program and turning into free blog articles.  So be patient with me – this is a lot of material to translate into article format.  If you don’t want to wait on my schedule, you can download all the MP3s and PDFs right now, right here).

Until we meet again, this is Dave Navarro saying, It’s your life – so take total control of it!

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