How would your life be if you could tackle problems and challenges as they arise? What would it feel like to engage in conceptual thinking whenever you wanted or needed to? What would you feel like if you had a sense of control and ease about each day? The short answer: You would be living in real time. Handling phone calls as they come in and finishing the task at hand are small but worthwhile achievements and these acts of living in real time are within your reach.

Examine the following 12 components of living in real time, with the realization that each of these is within your grasp.

1. Leave home in the morning with grace and ease. You can manage the details beforehand. Take care of as many things as possible the night before so that in the morning you have only to get bodies out the door.


2. Focus on the important issues facing your organization, your department or division, and your job or career. When you take care of the important things, the others fall into place.


3. Handle and deal with the day’s mail upon arrival, keep piles from forming on your desk, and handle phone calls within 24 hours. No need to be inundated by the mail; no piles accumulate on your desk; there’s no snarl of phone calls to get back to.


4. Enjoy a leisurely lunch. You know the importance of completing tasks so that when you go to lunch, you’re at lunch. You actually enjoy your lunch, digest your food better, do better back on the job, and have a vastly improved gastrointestinal outlook. Can you beat it?


5. End work at a reasonable time, and feel good about what you accomplish each day. Leaving work on time and feeling complete is the single most important step you can take toward permanently winning back your time.


6. Have sufficient and up-to-date health, life, disability, and automobile insurance coverage. If you want to live in real time, this is part of the overall picture.


7. File your annual (and any quarterly) income taxes on time. Recognize that taxes are a necessary evil and will always be levied. You set up a tax log at the start of each year with room for each legitimate deduction, where you can file receipts and documentation. Buy and use tax return software.


8. Take time to be with friends and relatives. People, not things, count most in this life.


9. Stay in shape and at your desired weight. Health and fitness experts say that working out for as little as 30 minutes a day four times a week can keep you comfortably fit. If you’re too busy to stay in shape, you’re too busy!


10. Make time for hobbies. Revisit that stamp collection, garden, hiking club, or whatever you let slide. Managing your time means enjoying your most rewarding hobbies and pastimes regularly.


11. Participate monthly in a worthy cause. When you pick the one or two that matter most to you and take action, you feel good about yourself and about how you’re spending your time.


12. Drop back at any time, take a long deep breath, collect your thoughts, and renew your spirit.

Once you realize what it means to manage your time – and how far you’ve strayed from the mark – there are several things you can do to begin to catch up with today (or at least this week). Many are deceptively simple, but don’t let that obscure the powerful results they offer.

Clarity in Idle Moments

As I travel around the country speaking to organizations, I am struck by the number of people in my audiences who seem perpetually overwhelmed. The irony is that these people could take breaks throughout their days and weeks, but they don’t. The biggest obstacle to winning back your time is the unwillingness to allow yourself a break.

I spoke to one group of executives and their spouses, and learned from many spouses that their executive husbands or wives simply do not allow themselves to take a break.

Paradoxically, increasing evidence indicates that executives will be more effective if they pause for an extra minute a couple of times each day. This can be done every morning and afternoon–when returning from the water cooler or restroom, before leaving for lunch, or when returning from lunch. And that’s just the short list.

Seven hours and 50 minutes of work plus 10 one-minute intervals of rest or reflection in a work day makes you more productive than does eight solid hours of work.

To insist on proceeding full-speed through the day without allowing yourself 10 minutes to clear your mind all but guarantees you’ll be less effective than those who do. Even the people who already perceive this need do not let themselves meet it.

You’d think that entrepreneurs, running their own businesses and managing themselves, would be more inclined to take strategic pauses throughout the day–after all, they’re in charge of their own schedules. Too often, it isn’t necessarily so; the temptation to overwork can be ferocious. Conversely, if you work for others, perhaps a large organization, you may erroneously believe that pausing for the total of 10 strategic minutes throughout a work day could somehow jeopardize your standing. This misconception is unfounded.

Chuckling at Life

How many times do you actually let out a good laugh during the day, especially during the work day? Five-year-olds reportedly laugh 113 times a day, on average. However, 44-year-olds laugh only 11 times per day. Something happens between the ages of 5 and 44 to reduce the chuckle factor.

Once you reach retirement, fortunately, you tend to laugh again. The trick is to live and work at a comfortable pace and have a lot of laughs along the way–at every age. When you proceed through the workday without humor, the days tend to be long and difficult. Part of taking control of your life is being able to step back and look at the big picture, being able to see the lighter side of things. Some of your worst gaffes eventually evolve into your best ideas.

Reclaiming Your Time, Now and Later

You can pause more often when you day is not jam packed. The Pareto Principle (the “80/20” rule) states that 80 percent of your activities contribute to only 20 percent of your results. The remaining 20 percent of your activities contribute to the other 80 percent of your results. Take a hardware store for example: About 20 percent of its stock accounts for 80 percent of the revenues; the remaining 80 percent of the stock accounts for only 20 percent of the revenues.

The key to successful retailing is identifying the 20 percent producing the bulk of the revenues. A smart store manager knows to place that 20 percent where it’s most accessible, and put the rest where it won’t get in the way. You need to identify which activities at work (and in your personal life) support you and bring you the best results. Have the strength to abandon activities that don’t benefit you–get rid of that unproductive 80 percent.

What the Gurus Say

You may wish to know what some of the authors have said about managing your time. Here is a brief summary of some of the longer term surviving texts.

How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, the classic book by Alan Lakein, is considered the classic in the field of time management. The information presented in this 1970 book is sound in that even to this day many can benefit from reading it. Lakein offers masterful tips for overcoming procrastination and there is much worth knowing in this text. Lakein wrote his book, however, when the world population was a little more than half of what it is today. Understandably, he didn’t address the changing structure of the family, including the problems of the two-career family and rearing children. Also, there is little coverage of the impact of technology on the use of time.

Acknowledging that today’s readers require new approaches to managing more, Lakein recently came out with another book called Give Me a Moment and I’ll Change Your Life: Tools for Moment Management. This book was designed to update the results-oriented approach of his earlier book and explains how to pay attention to moments as they come along and treat time as a limited resource

First Things First by Stephen R. Covey, Roger Merrill, and Rebecca Merrill shows readers how to analyze their use of time and create a balance between their personal and professional responsibilities. The book encourages readers to “put first things first” and act upon them. The authors teach an effective organizing process that helps the reader categorize tasks so that he or she can focus on what is important, not merely what is urgent. The book presents profound insights, such as, “Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things,” and the real human needs are “to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy.”

The quintessential advice is to first categorize your life in four quadrants labeled urgent, not urgent, important, and unimportant. A task may have a deadline but not much importance; or, a task may be important but require preparation and planning. The authors say you should stop doing what’s unimportant and lacks urgency. Rather, expend the majority of your energies where the important and the urgent intersect. Assuming that urgency announces itself, the real question is knowing what’s important. The authors draw from a variety of sources to guide you toward determining the relative importance of tasks.

The Time Trap by R. Alec MacKenzie was first published decades ago. It offers time tactics, interviews, and traditional time management tools. Based on the theory that self-management is the key to handling time crunch, it focuses on the author’s 20 biggest time wasters, such as telephone interruptions, the inability to say “no,” and personal disorganization.

The book offers instructions on how to combat such unnecessary distractions. It also includes information on time problems caused by technology, downsizing, and self-employment. The book’s underlying premise is that readers can be taught “how to squeeze the optimal efficiency–and satisfaction–out of their workday.”

Time Tactics of Very Successful People by Eugene Griessman presents often-cited time management tips, but then reaches beyond that and adds personal insights from well-known and successful people, including business leaders, Nobel laureates, and peak performers. This is a solid book on time strategies, although many cannot emulate some of the practices cited herein. If Ted Turner saves time by flying his own private aircraft, are you going to buy an airplane?

The time management tactics from those who have achieved successful, balanced lives are presented in short “bites.” These tips are designed to inspire today’s time-starved readers, whether they’re overworked managers, working moms, entrepreneurs on the go, or anyone in need of more time.

Take a Cue from Other Cultures

Some customs in societies throughout the world are worth emulating when it comes to finding the time to relax.

• In France, it is the legendary two-hour lunch.
• In Latin countries, it is the mid-day siesta.
• In England, it is tea and crumpets at 4 p.m.
• In Japan, it is wearing only slippers once you come home.
• In the Aleutian Islands, it is carving ice sculptures.
• In Italy, it is having a candlelight dinner, serenaded by musicians.
• In the U.S., it is meeting your team for the softball game.
• In Australia, it is putting another shrimp on the “barbie.”

And what about you? Can you withdraw from the maddening crowd? I’m talking having a life during your life, going whole weekends without doing anything, taking true vacations, and spending evenings sitting on the porch, as the late John Lennon said, “watching the wheels go round and round.” These are not lost arts.

Here are suggestions for periodically abandoning the rat race, starting with small steps:

1. Give yourself permission to go a whole weekend without reading anything.


2. Put your home phone answering machine on “answer,” flip the ringer off, and don’t play back any messages until the next day.


3. Collect all the magazines piling up around your house, and give them away to a retirement community, library, or school.


4. Schedule that spa treatment you’ve been meaning to take.


5. Exchange photos with a friend you haven’t seen in years.


6. Banish the beeper.


7. Get schedules of your favorite professional or amateur teams, and mark on your calendar the appropriate dates to sit back and enjoy the games.


8. Visit a botanical garden to enjoy the variety of flowers; let your sense of smell, rather than your eyes and ears, dominate.


9. Attend the graduation ceremonies of your local high school. Recapture the spirit of what it’s like to complete an important passage in life.


10. Pick up a bouquet of fresh flowers at the grocery store or flower shop and display them somewhere in your home.


11. Walk around your yard barefoot. Feel the grass between your toes. Stick your feet in dirt or in a puddle.


12. Visit a historical monument and let yourself become immersed in the challenges that people of that era faced.


13. Attend a free lecture some evening about a topic outside your professional interests.


14. Sleep late.

Now is a Good Time

Marlee Matlin won the Academy Award for Best Actress at age 21; the late Jessica Tandy won it at age 80. The U.S. Constitution was written by men who were, on average, 40 years of age – when the life expectancy was barely 40. Sure, there were some old-timers like Ben Franklin, but most of the founding fathers were young by today’s standards. Regardless of your age or how much time you have left in this life, anytime is a good one to practice measures for winning back your time. You may even find it rewarding to revel in your current age – it holds so much potential.

The key to accepting your age and your life is to realize that people shift into high gear at different times. It’s hard to predict who’s going to take off when.

James Michener didn’t write his first novel until age 42. He produced one best-seller after another until his death at age 90.

Alice Cornyn-Selby, a prolific author and speaker from Portland, Oregon, uses two powerful key phrases with her audiences:

1. “I have now come to the end of my life and I’m disappointed that I didn’t…” How did you finish that sentence? Whatever came up first is probably something you want to do right away. No use putting it off any longer, because it bubbled up to the surface immediately.

2. “I have now come to the end of my life and I’m glad that I…” What did you come up with this time? Was it the same issue that you addressed in the first statement? Was it something you’ve already accomplished? When you begin to look at the opportunities that await and those you can create, all the rushing about that came before and the times you felt you were missing your life can begin to melt away as you head in the direction that will give you deep satisfaction.

Whether you’re 20, 80, or somewhere in between, it’s time to start looking at your life as if the best years are yet to come, for indeed they can be coming. Sure, you’ll get a little slower with each advancing year, but you have the ability to draw upon the wisdom you’ve learned in each decade. Perhaps you’ll be even more prudent with your time.

To Summarize:

• Take time to be with and enjoy friends and relatives, and to re-engage in your hobbies.
• Devise a realistic action plan that ensures you will master one of the important measures of living in real time. Then take on the rest.
• To reinforce your quest to maintain control of your time peruse the works of others.
• You can choose to see the totality and completion of your life up to this minute, anytime you want.
• While you’ll get older and slower, the best is yet to come because you’ll be able to draw upon your wisdom to steer your life faithfully in the desired direction.