These are my notes from the book “Organize Tomorrow Today” by Jason Selk. It was a nice and inspiring book to read.
Why I read it?
I like reading about time management. Regularly checking for new books on this topic is somehow my passion.
About the Book and Author
The book is written by Dr. Jason Selk. You can visit his website by clicking this link.
Excerpts
“There is no magic success pill. Success requires strong and consistent effort, and the act of evaluating yourself on that effort. Most people believe that it takes their best effort on everything, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Highly successful people give tremendous attention to the most important activities daily and then do fairly well with the rest. Remember from the earlier chapters: it’s key to have focused attention on your “3 Most Important” and “1 Must.” It’s definitely a different mindset than most people have, but once you try it, you’ll discover something that will give you all the motivation you need: when you give your best effort to your top priorities, the success that comes to you will be deserved.”
“That may sound simple, but it’s really very profound. When you define success by your effort, anything is truly achievable. And when you consistently work toward your goals—and honestly evaluate that effort—you will begin to deserve the success that comes.”
“Greatness is predicated on consistently doing things others can’t or won’t do. Simply put, success is not about being brilliant. It is about being consistent.
Greatness is predicated on consistently doing things others can’t or won’t do. Simply put, success is not about being brilliant. It is about being consistent.”
“With any well-intentioned diet, workout routine, or organizational plan, it’s easy to sit in the calm times and plot out the “ideal” way to do things. But, as Mike Tyson famously said about boxing, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.1”
“Start every meeting on time. No matter who is meandering in late, reward those who showed up early by beginning on time. The more consistent you are with this rule, the more respect you will earn, and the more people will begin showing up on time for meetings.”
“Carve the meeting down to its three main elements—an opening, the main purpose, and the closing. In the opening, get right into the meat of what you want to accomplish by asking if anything important has changed since the last meeting.”
“It starts with a simple question: What unit of time do you think in right now? In basic terms, the more successful you become, the smaller the unit of time you need to think in. Let us explain what that means.
In basic terms, the more successful you become, the smaller the unit of time you need to think in.”
“We’ve all been trained to believe that we can do vastly more at one time than we really can. This notion is instilled in us in many ways: by school, by the books we read, by what we watch on television, and even by the devices we carry around with us. We’ll bet that many of you reading this book are “available” at least five more hours per day than you were ten years ago, simply because you have the ability to answer emails and text messages anytime—whether you’re sitting at breakfast with your family or getting ready to shut things down for the night.
In many ways, that accessibility has built artificial, unattainable expectations. If information moves twenty-four hours a day, you have to be ready to act on it twenty-four hours a day—or at least that is how it seems. When expectations change—and you hold yourself to that relentless, multitasking standard—you’re destined to fail, and you will likely be hard on yourself when you do.
That’s the first step in the perfectionist cycle. It’s a trap, and most people have found themselves stuck in it at some point. You try to[…]”
“If you are a leader in your organization and are spearheading these meetings, you’re not just paying for the conference space, hotel rooms, and catering: you’re slowing your staff from doing their jobs. It can be a gigantic waste of time and money if you aren’t giving people something that they can, with confidence, use to make a positive, measurable change. By overloading people with information you are essentially causing them to overcommit. If you are working for an organization and attending the meetings, two of the crucial skills you probably aren’t learning are how to prioritize the information being poured into you and how to understand the point of equilibrium when it becomes actionable.
Technology makes some things better, but when it comes to this subject, it often makes things worse. We have the physical ability to “receive” way more information in the literal sense—thousands of emails in a folder, tens of thousands of documents on hard drive—than in the old days. But the technology doesn’t do much to prioritize that information or steer it where it needs to go. It’s like having an enormous fire hose at your disposal—one twenty times bigger than the[…]”
“Is it the end of the world if it happens once? Of course not. But does it ever happen just once? The reality is that we’re always answering phones, looking at text messages, sending emails, or dividing our attention by surfing the web while we talk on the phone to a client. We’re surrounded by distractions. The fact that multitasking is difficult for our brains doesn’t mean you won’t be able to juggle the balls and accomplish those other tasks. It just means that, if you constantly divide your attention, trying to do more than one thing at the same time, you’re going to use a lot more energy and time to get things done than you need to. You’re going to compromise your attention and miss some of the finer details.
You don’t have to look very far to find examples to illustrate the same point at the organizational level. We see it all the time. A company will call a big meeting—often off-site—to get everybody together so the top execs can reveal what the new corporate strategy is. Then, the group gets presented with a laundry list of goals for the coming quarter or[…]”
“Busy” isn’t what gets rewarded long-term in the marketplace. “Productive” is.
You’ll certainly be challenged on a day-to-day basis by the “noise of the urgent,” but having this tool in place will help you make the decisions that will separate you from the average.”
“To set yourself on the right track, ask yourself those two critical questions: (1) What are the three most important things I need to get done tomorrow? and (2) What is the single most important task I must get done? The questions work within your brain’s “channel capacity” to give you direction and prioritization in manageable doses. When you start your day, you know the three most important things”
“Highly successful people never get it all done in any one given day—but they always get the most important things done each day.
It doesn’t matter how organized, efficient, and energized you are. You will never get everything done every single day. That’s just too high a bar to set. But you can resolve to always get to your most important tasks and conversations.”
“In our experience, those who enjoy the most success are the ones who do the best job prioritizing the day’s activities and accomplishing the most important tasks—not the greatest number of tasks.”