How the Wealthy Plan Their Time
Ultimately failure in life is different than failure in a project.
It’s important to anticipate the chances for failure and success.
If 100 people are on a previously deserted island and each person has only 100 apples to their name, and nothing else to sell, then
no one will “succeed” at selling apples to the others. On the island, the 100 apples becomes important for your survival for the next couple
of weeks but the possession of those apples aren’t going to help grow the economy.
Thus the people will need to perform services for other new island
residents in order to build any kind of wealth or success. Whether all 100 people will or could be “successful residents” of the island is a
story we’ll look at next week.
It’s important to understand how far more people can be successful than you might guess. But for today, the person has an immediate problem.
The idea would have been to manage their time to sell apples but now their original thought(s) have been eradicated and we have a failure.
The failure is not something someone did wrong, they all simply discovered that they don’t have a plan to generate income of some kind by being of service.
Now that they know they have to develop a strategy to generate income to survive, they will have to have a plan on how to implement that strategy.
For example, one person might want to use seeds from the apples to grow an orchard of trees over the coming years. But implementing that plan requires a sequence of steps and a great deal of time. Another person will want to fish the waters around the island to have a protein source.
Problem!? If they don’t know how to fish they will have to develop that skill in addition to learning how to catch, clean , preserve and serve
fish for meals.
No matter what strategy they come up with to survive and PLAN will be critical to begin implementing daily tasks to be able to accomplish
their strategy and generate a sustainable livelihood in the near and long term. The same is true for you as well.
You’ll absolutely need a daily, weekly, monthly and annual plan that is laid over your basic strategy (learn to catch, clean, preserve and serve
fish.) When do you fish? When do you clean? How do you learn which fish are good for food and which are poisonous? How do you serve fish? Etc.
In your life you can choose thousands of possible life strategies but the truth is most people look out into the world and think,
“I’m an engineer” and the idea of doing anything but what they learned about when they were in school is very stress inducing.
Why? Because they are familiar with the daily tasks of being an engineer. They make no mistakes in getting to work, punching in, utilizing the same skills they do every day and experiencing almost no failure ever.
The idea of doing anything else is going to be uncomfortable because they aren’t familiar with it. They will have to learn what tasks to do daily to generate income and build a long term successful project.
And of course because they rarely fail in life in their old line of work, they will now experience making mistakes, having different income levels in different months. They will have different levels of success in different periods of the year, different parts of the month, different days of the week and even different hours of the day.
Thus a well considered then well tested PLAN becomes critical. You can see that luck and positive thinking aren’t going to play into the equation in the traditional sense of the words.
Instead strategy, plan implementation and adjustment. “Success” can certainly be a reference to a job well done today. So can “failure.”
Success and failure are generally best served as words describing a project that you have worked to completion. Did the apple orchards eventually grow and produce fruit for sale? Success. No? Failure. Simple.
You control many variables in success and failure of projects. You don’t control the weather. In the island scenario of course you can’t move to a climate that favors your success and reduces your probability of failure.
The more variables you can control or adapt to, the greater your chances of success on each project you do in life.
Last week you learned about the value of Sunday as that day to do important things that shouldn’t be plugged into a Monday or Tuesday schedule.
This week I want to look at how a day might look on a calendar for someone living alone or independently from having to take care of children or a spouse for example.
A Salesperson’s Monday
8 AM Wake up
8:45 AM – 1 PM See clients all morning
1 PM – 1:30 PM Lunch break including Facebook check.
1:30 PM – 1:45 PM Correspondence from urgent matters.
1:45 PM – 6 PM See clients all afternoon then return home.
6 PM – 7:30 PM Shower, clean living room, have dinner.
7:30 PM – 10 PM Confirm clients for the next day. Lay ground work on other projects.
10 PM – midnight. Binge watch a few episodes of a television show.
Midnight. Bed time.
An Entpreneur’s Monday
(That doesn’t rely on direct sales but perhaps online generation of business.)
8 AM Wake up
8:45 AM – 9:15 AM Correspond with clients that wrote overnight.
9:15 AM – 1:30 PM (or until done) Complete a major part of a project
in marketing, selling or content creation of some kind.
1:30 PM lunch
2:00 PM – 5:00 PM Appointments with current clients via Skype of Facebook.
5:00 PM – 7:00 PM Detail work to update copy, video marketing videos, work
with partners.
7:00 PM – 7:30 PM Dinner
7:30 PM – 10:00 PM Confirm client work or generating future clients
from correspondence received throughout the day.
10 PM – mdnight. Binge watch a couple of episodes of a favorite television show.
Midnight Bed Time.
The examples above are fairly normal for someone who has no children or responsibility of caring for dependents. As you can imagine having the responsibility for caring for dependents and having an interdependent relationship like marriage will require adjustments in either of the above schedules.
Recognizing this is critical as is the eventual recreation or a new strategy that includes kids, a wife/husband, taking care of other family members.
You can now see that having long detailed conversations with a life partner and the children becomes critical. No one can plan their own schedule without the understanding, support and demands to adhere to scheduling from the other people in their life. Everyone who lives in the home must not just be “on the same page” but they must also be demanding the same things.
There is a time for play. There is a time for creative work, there is a time for selling, marketing, taxes and so forth and everyone must WANT the same things for the benefits that are derived from focus.
For example, both of my kids came home at the end of every day and see at least one parent in the house. That’s a pretty big benefit and worth a great deal. Typically kids learned the value and rewards of time planning as well as the discipline that is developed from adhering to a SELF GENERATED SCHEDULE.
Next week I’ll show you how to put together complex schedules for controlling time and we’ll solve the problem of DISRUPTION and unexpected problems.
See you here next week.
