15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management: The Productivity Habits of 7 Billionaires, 13 Olympic Athletes, 29 Straight-A Students, and 239 Entrepreneurs

The first secret #1: Time is your most valuable and scarcest resource.By acknowledging this, we can start to count down the minutes from the moment we wake up. Every minute counts when you are spending time every hour of the day.Secret #2: Identify Your Most Important Task and then work on it first thing before anything else.It’s about focusing on your priority tasks, your MITs. As Kevin states, this is a key task-based action plan for defining what is the most important thing, and then getting into it first thing in the morning.Secret #3: Work from your computer and not a To-Do-List -- Schedule your important tasks using time blocks. You should schedule important items as early in the day as possible.Secret #4: Procrastination can be beaten when you figure out how to beat your future self.This chapter delivers great content. Why do we procrastinate? We are fixated on doing things in the future that never get done. By focusing on our present self, we can make choices in the present moment that impacts our future. As Kevin points out, procrastination isn’t about laziness. It is about underestimating the power of the present moment emotions vs. the future emotions.Secret #5: Accept the fact there will always be more work to do and more that can be done.So the concept in this chapter is simple. Leave work at 5pm every day. You can work harder but there is always more to do and there will always be something that needs doing.Secret #6: Always Carry a Notebook.This chapter talks about the importance of writing down everything in a notebook. This concept isn’t anything knew but, writing ideas down solidifies them in the mind. It makes them more real. Thomas Edison, George Lucas and John Rockefeller all had notebooks where they kept everything.Secret #7: Email is a great way for other people to put their priorities into your life.The 321 system is amazing. This chapter is critical in saving time and giving you back a large part of the day that is otherwise wasted. How much time do we spend on email [reading, writing and sending] a day? How about 2.5 hours. That is a lot of time. By getting your email inbox to zero, you can stop wasting time going through email that is redundant.Secret #8: Schedule and attend meetings as a last resort.Who doesn’t love [hate] meetings? This chapter gets down to truth about how so much of our time is wasted on useless meeting time and just filling in the day with meetings because that is what we are supposed to do in companies. Here we get good strategies on eliminating the unnecessary meetings, or at the very least, shortening them.Secret #9: This is all about knowing [and learning] to say NO to most of the things that occupy your time. If it doesn’t support your goals, say NO and move on. I love this concept.Secret #10: The Powerful Pareto principal. For anyone who is into Time Management this is a principle that cannot be ignored. The author does a great job of showing us how to apply the 80/20 rule to our lifestyle and business. This chapter has other great takeaways such as:• Develop your skills to be exceptional in a few areas• Do the most important things exceptionally well• You can work less, stress less and enjoy more happiness by figuring out the 20% of things that are most important to you.Secret #11: the 3 Harvard Questions that Save 8 Hours a Week: In this chapter you can outsource the work you don’t have to do and save time by delegating what you can.Secret #12: Why Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey Themes His days. This is a great idea…theme your days to target a specific area of your business. The author provides great examples from John Lee Dumas and Dan Sullivan.Secret #13: Don’t Touch [Until You’re Ready]. When sorting out email or papers, the golden rule is, touch it once. If it needs to be touched more than that you are wasting time. Either take action on it, file it or throw it away.Secret #14 is waking up early and getting a kick-start in your day by drinking water, doing exercise or reciting incantations. Kevin uses several key examples from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tim Ferris, Anthony Robbins and John Lee Dumos. This is definitely my favourite technique in the book. Waking up early and taking action gives you the best use of your time and clears your mind for the rest of the day.The last time management principle, that isn’t really about time management at all, is boosting your energy so you feel better and you can accomplish more in the same amount of time. The book wraps up nicely with 20 additional time saving techniques and strategies.Getting Down To the Nitty-Gritty on this book:There are a lot of great time saving concepts in this book. Kevin Kruse does a great job at delivering the content in a simple approach that you can put these strategies into practice right away. I especially love his approach to the “1440” method that reminds us we have only 1440 minutes a day.You could read this book in less time than that and start to save time while feeling great about the extra energy and motivation. Well-written and an excellent resource for getting more out of your day and your life, check it out and stop wasting time…and your life.One last thing is, this book comes with a set of fantastic resources for readers to download with convenient links at the end of each chapter as reminders. I love the FREE resources provided.

I had a problem reading this book. It's the composition of voices of so many different people plus author's voice, so the book has no voice of its own. I found it distubing. In the first half of the book I found the quotes from contributors a bit distracting. On the second half, where their advice was more comprehensive I caught myself on skipping trough the narrator's parts. But it's probably my own peculiarity. I'm a novel reader at my core and I love the one uniform voice for a book.The 15 secrets are of course no secrets. I don't think there are any more secrets in our information driven world. What differes the people who contributed to this book from you and me is that they don't just know what to do, they actually do it on regular basis, so they get apropriate results.One of my big takeaways was using calendar instead of a to-do list. I found a to-do list exactly as overwhelming as Kevin described. Gradually I drifted from using them into defining just a few goals for each day and visual cues. I have a big wall calendar and a blackboard in my home office and I jot down on them whatever needs my attention but cannot be done at the current moment.I think the strongest point of 15 Secrets is not the content itself. As I said, this kind of information is can be found in multitude of other sources. Nonetheless I found fascinating how uniform in their responses high achievers were. It's not like there is one silver time-management bullet which suits all. But it also isn't that there are infinitive number of options for effective time management. People of success practice just a handful of techniques which are responsible for 80% of their results. If you study those techniques separately, you can get the idea that they are of similar weight. Kevin put them together and his respondents clarified which are really important and whic are just fountains and whistles.Among the simplest and easiest to implement are:-use a calendar-define top priority (max 3 of them) every day-say no to people and things which don't contribute to your goals-rest and relax are important parts of productivity-time management is in fact energy managementIt's a solid book and I recommend it to anyone interested in getting more done in less time.