Guard Your Prime Time

Guard your prime time: it's key to creating and managing mental energy.

Legendary business consultant Peter Drucker once said that if there is any one ‘secret’ of effectiveness it is concentration. Successful people he said do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

The importance of managing your time, is echoed in Bob Arnot’s The Biology of Success. In fact, he rephrases Drucker’s advice: “if you create too much chaos in your life, you can’t concentrate on being really creative (effective) in your work.” Making money included.

According to Arnot and others, there are three key aspects to guarding your prime time: Routinize work that requires less creativity, prioritize tasks for your high peak time when you are most alert and creative, and combine/organize work into "stacks".

Arnot adds that, “to be truly successful, you must follow a ritual. Be as regular as a Swiss clock, ritualize the routines of your everyday life, and you will allow yourself to do what seems impossible . . . (be) wildly creative (and successful) in your work.”

“Dr. Jim Loehr, who runs LGE Performance Systems, Inc, says that the most accomplished high-stress performers all have defined specific rituals in all areas of their life. Dr. Loehr emphasizes that in every single area of high stress whether in sports, the military, medicine, or business, the more demanding the performance, the more people rely on ritual to do the job.”

“Endlessly fishing for a pleasant surprise – lots of phone calls, popping into the hallway in search of a quick conversation, shifting from opening our mail to checking or calendar – all that can make us pretty productive in terms of busywork, but it’s not going to lead to a Nobel Prize . . . you need to have concentrated stretches of time when you can focus on the major tasks that make the biggest difference. I call this ‘prime’ time when you perform your most creative work, as opposed to ‘off-peak’ time when you are performing more mundane but still necessary tasks.”

“Stacking,” Arnot says, is another key strategy for managing prime work time. “Many of us already subconsciously organize activities to feel good, but by carefully orchestrating the right ‘stacks’ of activities at the right times, we can create the perfectly successful day with high mental energy and high efficiency . . . tactically ‘stack’ your activities for success.”

A good place to look to find time management tools (e.g., guidebooks, pen & paper planners, and electronic planners) is the personal productivity company Franklin Covey.

Guarding your prime time and using it well is key to making money your way.

A critical last link in the sequence of eat well, supplement, play hard, and guard prime time, is . . .