How These 7 Successful People Manage Their Time And What You Can Learn

If there is one problem common to most people, it is how to get the most out of our time.

If there is one habit common to all successful people, it's that they manage their time like a boss.

They take charge of their time and get the best out of it.

They understand how the usage of time dictates the level of their success.

When the unsuccessful people are busy spending their time on trivial matters, the successful ones prevent that by all means. They make time available for their most important tasks and choke the less important ones.

There are many things we can learn from successful people and the most vital one is time management.

In this post, I'll be talking about how these successful people manage their time to get the best out of it and what we can learn from it.

Brian Tracy

Brian Tracy is a motivational speaker, writer and life coach who teaches people how to achieve the best they can.

He believes that time management is crucial to achieving success and living a fulfilled life.

Brian Tracy said: “Time is the most precious resource. It is the most valuable thing you have. It is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved.”

He also believes that to get the best out of your time, you must be able to define your most important tasks for the day.

When you define your most important tasks, he advises that you group them into buckets A, B, C, D, and E with the most important tasks in A and in descending order.

To get the best out of your time, you carry out your most important tasks first. He used the analogy of eating frogs in his book Eat The Frog to depict the most important and hardest tasks of the day.

He said: “If you have two frogs, eat the ugliest one first.”

To manage your time effectively, Brian Tracy says you must ask these 3 important questions:

• What is really important to me?
• What are my highest value activities?
• What is the most valuable use of my time right now?

The right answers to these questions will usually define how you spend your time and it will give you the best results for your time.

Brian believes you can get the best out of your time by having these 3 targets:

• Increasing productivity through your personal goals
• Making clear business and career goals
• Having personal development goals

He proposed the 10/90 rule. “one of the most important rules of personal effectiveness is the 10/90 rule,” he said.

The 10/90 rule states that the first 10% of time that you spend planning and organizing your work before you begin will save you as much as 90% of the time in getting the job done once you get started.

Brian Tracy stresses that time management is not just a skill to develop by the side but something to be taken seriously to have the best achievements possible.

He said: “I learned that time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core skill upon which everything else in life depends.”

Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins is a motivational speaker, writer, and life coach. He is the author of the popular book, Awaken the Giant Within.

Tony Robbins recommends 3 time management tips for anyone who wants to get the best out of their time:

• Rapid Planning Method

To implement the rapid planning method, you must ask some questions about your goals. What do you want? Why do you want what you want? What steps are needed to achieve the goal?

The key to defining what you want is not just to have a vague goal, but have specific goals with metrics you can use to define it.

For instance, saying you just want to graduate with good grades is vague. How do you measure the good grades? Your CGPA could be one way or the awards you win.

You should also be able to define why you want these good grades. Is it just to boost your ego? Or make a statement to your friends? Or use the good grades as a stepping stone to build a successful career in your field?

Through this, you also have plans to take care of your family and help them achieve their goals too. These are emotional and personal reasons that make your goals worthwhile.

The last part of the R. P. M. is to determine how you're going to achieve these goals. The action plan is integral to your goals as you can achieve nothing without taking the right actions.

• Chunking

Tony Robbins believes you can have too many tasks to perform which is overwhelming. Chucking these tasks into areas of your life gives you a more organized schedule.

You can chunk tasks into different areas like finance, family and relationships, personal fitness, etc.

After chunking, you decide the most important tasks in each area of your life and work on them. This makes sure that no area of your life lags behind as you're able to carry out tasks in all areas of your life.

• Utilize N. E. T. Time

The N. E. T. Time means No Extra Time Time. It deals more with how you use your mind during the course of a day. Most times, it is easy for our minds to wander while our hands are carrying out a task.

To manage your time more efficiently, you focus your mind on the best thoughts and information that will aid you in achieving your goals. Your mind can also be a source of inspiration to you to achieve your other goals.

This time, instead of being a waste, will lead to better motivation and more achievements of your goals.

This is one quote from Tony Robbins that highlights the importance of time management:

“Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year - and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!”

Bill Gates

Bill Gates is the co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft.

He is one of the people who led the computing revolution to make the computer accessible to most of the world's population.

He is now busy most of the time with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation aims to improve education by empowering teachers, reducing malnutrition and providing vaccination, especially in poor countries. Bill Gates had this to say about his time:

“I had every minute packed and I thought that was the only way to do things,” Gates told Charlie Rose. “The fact that he (Warren Buffet) is so careful about his time. You control your time and that sitting and thinking may be a much higher priority than a normal CEO who always have to go and see people who demand their time. It’s not the proxy of your seriousness that you’ve filled every minute in your schedule.”

Bill Gates. Source: Wikipedia

For someone as popular and influential as Bill Gates, he has to deal with many emails. He usually gets about 100 emails daily, after the less important ones have been screened out. He said about emails:

“We’re at the point now where the challenge isn't how to communicate effectively with e-mail, it's ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most. I use tools like “in-box rules” and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance.”

Regarding his work at Microsoft and his foundation, he said:

“20 years ago I would stay in the office for days at a time and not think twice about it, so I had energy and naivete on my side.”

That has now changed with his foundation work and his new role of Advisor at Microsoft. “My time will be about two-thirds foundation and one-third Microsoft. I will focus on product work mostly.”

Although this may not be available to everyone, Gates also uses his private jet to save time.

“I do get to a lot of places for Foundation work I wouldn't be able to go to without it,” he said.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk is a revolutionary. And a celebrity as a result of this.

With his two companies, Tesla and SpaceX, he aims to revolutionize car transportation and space travel.

Through space travel, he also aims to make man an interplanetary being. In fact, he wants to retire on Mars. At Tesla, he has founded a company that builds fully electric cars. This will reduce the amount of harmful emission compared to cars that use fuel.

With OpenAI, he wants to make sure that we build an artificial intelligence that will be safe for the human population in the future.

Musk spends an average of 42 hours of his week at Tesla, 40 at SpaceX, 5 at Neuralink, 2 at The Boring Co and 2 at OpenAI. He spends his Mondays and Fridays at SpaceX while he works at Tesla on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

Elon Musk. Source: Wikipedia

Elon Musk spends an average of about 12.1 hours daily to work, 6 hours to sleep, and 5.9 hours for non-work related activities.

When you consider that an average American spends 6.3 hours at work, 7.8 hours to sleep, and 9.9 hours on non-work related activities, it is clear that Musk gets more work out of his time to be able to manage his two biggest companies and three other initiatives on the side.

Musk takes his sleep seriously.

“The right number for me is around 6 to 6.5 hours per night,” he said in an interview. “Sleep is really great. I find if I don’t get enough sleep I’m quite grumpy… I could drop below a certain threshold of sleep, although I would be awake more hours I would get less done because my mental acuity would be affected.”

Musk also admits that he works more on product development than other parts of his companies.

“A lot of people think I must spend my time with media or on businessy things,” Musk said. “almost all my time, like 80% of it is spent on engineering and design. My time is almost entirely with the engineering team working on improving the Falcon 9. At Tesla, it's working on the model 3.”

Elon Musk meets his 5 sons on 4 days of the week and they sometimes go to his companies.

Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio is the manager of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates. Ray Dalio has grown this fund by spending his time to make the right decisions for his business.

Ray Dalio believes you should spend more time on the big problems.

“Distinguish big problems from small ones,” he said in his book, Principles. “You only have so much time and energy; make sure you're investing them in exploring the problems that if fixed, will yield you the biggest returns. But at the same time, make sure you spend enough time with the small problems to make sure they're not symptoms of larger ones.”

Ray Dalio also has an advice about thinking of a game plan to save time.

Ray Dalio. Source: Fortune

“Don't act before thinking. Take the time to come up with a game plan,” he said. “The time you spend on thinking through your plan will be virtually nothing in relation to the amount of time that will be spent doing, and it will make the doing radically more effective.”

Ray knows that most people want more time that they can't have. How can they get more out of their limited time?

“Some people spend a lot of time and effort accomplishing very little while others do a lot in the same amount of time,” he wrote. “What differentiates people who can do a lot from those who can't is creativity, character, and wisdom.”

He advises that getting more rest is important as it allows you to get more done while awake.

“Allow time for rest and renovation,” he said. “If you just keep doing, you will burn out and grind to a halt. Build downtime into your schedule just as you would make time for all the other stuff that needs to be done.”

Stephen King

Stephen King is a popular author. He's also one of the best selling authors in history.

When Stephen King is working on a novel, he has a schedule that helps him to write in the morning. He also has a minimum word count that he must produce at his writing session.

One thing King also does with his time is read. In fact, he stressed in his memoir, On Writing, that any writer who doesn’t have time to read doesn't have the time or tools to write.

Stephen King has a straightforward schedule when he’s working on a book.

Stephen King. Source: stephenking.com

“My own schedule is pretty clear-cut,” King said in his memoir. “Mornings belong to whatever is new -  the current composition. Afternoons are for naps and letters. Evenings are for reading, family, Red Sox games on TV, and any revisions that just cannot wait. Basically, mornings are my prime writing time.”

King usually gets to the end of a project without many breaks.

“Once I start work on a project, I don't stop and I don't slow down unless I absolutely have to,” he said.

When King is writing, he writes every day.

“The truth is that when I'm writing, I write every day, workaholic dweeb or not. That includes Christmas, the Fourth, and my birthday,” he wrote.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey is a media mogul and one of the richest women in the world. She is the founder and CEO of the Oprah Winfrey Network (aka OWN) television channel and is worth about $2.7 billion.

She is also the founder and publisher of O, The Oprah Magazine, which boasts a circulation of 2.5 million.

Oprah likes to focus on whatever she is doing and is not a fan of multitasking.

Oprah Winfrey. Source: Wikipedia

“I have learned that your full-on attention for any activity you choose to experience comes with a level of intensity and truth,” she said. “It’s about living a present life, moment to moment - not worrying about what’s going to happen at 3 o’clock and what’s going to happen at 7 o’clock.”

“That whole thing about multitasking? That’s a joke for me,” she said. “When I try to do that, I don’t do anything well.”

Conclusion

As with most things, no two people manage their time the same way.

But what you can see is that these successful people manage their time to get their most important tasks done as fast as possible.

There are also some trends that are common to most of these people. For instance, many of them believe you should always take some time off for rest as this will make you more effective while awake.

Another trend I noticed is that most of the successful people tackle their most important tasks in the morning when they are still fresh and have their brains working at optimum capacity.

What work (or job) are you involved in? What are the most important tasks you can perform that will lead to progress in your work?

You must structure your time to be able to perform these important tasks and stop feeding your time to the trivial things. To the time bins that turn your time to waste.

Take a leaf from these people’s books and know that how you choose to spend your time will determine what you will achieve.

It’s in your hands. Spend your time wisely and reap the gains. What have you learned from successful people about time management? Leave your comments.

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