[YDL 2.0 EXCERPT 4] 'You Don't Manage Time, You Manage Yourself'

Here's another excerpt from my forthcoming book, Your Digital Life 2.0. 

You can find out more by clicking here. 

Your Digitial Life will be available from Monday 11 December on Amazon, iBooks and directly from my website. 

“You don’t manage time, you manage yourself.

You will no doubt have noticed some people have amazing ability to achieve a lot each day, they seem to meet their deadlines and still have a full social life. How do they do that? Why can’t you do that?

When I researched this I discovered something really special. The most productive people I’ve learned about—Sir Richard Branson, Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming and Margaret Thatcher to name but a few—always had a set structure to their day. They woke up and went to bed at the same time every day and stuck to a rigid routine they rarely, if ever, altered. Even on holiday Margaret Thatcher stuck to her normal routine of waking up at 7 AM and going to bed around 2AM (she famously survived on four hours of sleep every day—not something I would recommend) Winston Churchill always took a nap between 3:30 PM and 5:00 PM everyday so he could work late into the night. And Ian Fleming would close all the windows and doors of his study in his Jamaican home, Goldeneye, every day between 9:00 AM and 12:00 PM and he would write undisturbed. These habits were rigidly stuck to and everyone around them knew they could not be changed or disturbed.

Routine and structure seem to be the golden thread running through amazingly productive people’s lives. If you have no structure, no discipline and no routine, somebody else will dictate what happens to you and this is very rarely a good thing—trust me on that one. You are the captain of your own ship and if you are not in control, the winds and seas of this world will take you far away from where you want to be. Understanding that you cannot borrow time from today to add to tomorrow is the best starting point to establishing a daily routine. Knowing that all you have is 24 hours to work with, all you need decide now is how you will make use of those precious 24 hours.
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