1. Determine Your Values
Living your life consistent with your deepest values is essential for you to enjoy high self-esteem. People who are clear about what they believe in and value, and who refuse to compromise their values like and respect themselves far more than people who are unclear about what is really important to them.
This immediately brings up the question, “How much do you value your life?” People who truly value their lives are people who highly value themselves. People who value themselves highly use their time well. They know that their time is their life.
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The “Law of Reversibility,” says that feelings and actions interact on each other. If you feel a certain way, you will act in a manner consistent you’re your feeling. However, the reverse is also true. If you act in a certain way, your actions will create within you the feelings that are consistent with them.
This means that when you act as if your time was extremely valuable, the action causes you to feel like a more valuable and important person. By managing your time well, you actually increase your self-esteem, and by extension, you become better at whatever you are doing.
The very act of living your life consistent with your values, and using your time effectively and well, improves your self-image, builds your self-esteem and self-confidence, and increases your self-respect.
2. Strive for Mastery
The second factor that affects your self-esteem is your sense of being in control of your life and work, your feeling of mastery in whatever you do.
Everything that you learn about time management, and then apply in your work, causes you to feel more in control of yourself and your life. As a result, you feel more effective and efficient. You feel more productive and powerful. Every increase in your feeling of effectiveness and productivity increases your self-esteem and improves your sense of personal well-being.
3. Know What You Want
The third factor that directly affects your self-esteem is your current goals, and the activities that you take to achieve those goals. The more your goals 24
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and your activities are congruent with your values, the better you feel. When you are working at something that you believe in, and which is consistent with your natural talents and abilities, like yourself more, and you do your work better. We will talk about goals in greater depth in the next chapter.
Three Steps to Performance Improvement
These then are the three keys to the “Psychology of Time Management.”
First, you determine your values, and then you resolve to live your life consistent with those values. Second, you dedicate yourself to mastery, to becoming absolutely excellent at what you do. Third, you make sure that your goals and activities are congruent with your true values and convictions.
When you do these three things, and manage your time well in the pursuit of value-based goals, you feel terrific about yourself all day long. You will have more energy and enthusiasm. You will be more confident and committed. You will be more competent and creative. You will become more persistent and determined.
When you manage your time well, you will get more done, and of a higher quality. You will enjoy higher levels of self-esteem and self-respect. You will have a greater sense of personal pride. Practicing good time management techniques will even have positive effect on your personality and your relationships.
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The quality of your life is largely determined by the quality of your time management. The better and more effective you are at managing the minutes and hours of your day, which are the building blocks of your life, the more you will like and respect yourself, and the better will be every aspect of your inner and outer life.
Twelve Proven Principles for Peak Performance
Here are twelve proven principles you can practice every day to get more out of yourself and improve your results in everything you do.
Principle Number One: Time management enables you to increase the value of your contribution. Self-esteem comes from the knowledge that you are putting more in to your life and work than you are taking out, that you are contributing more to your work than you are getting back. The greater the contribution you feel that you are making to your company and to your family, the greater will be your self-esteem. Good time management enables you to greatly improve your ability to contribute more and more value to whatever you are doing.
Principle Number Two: Your rewards, both tangible and intangible, will always be equal to the value of your service to other people. The more you put in, the more you get out. By the Law of Sowing and Reaping, time management enables you to sow more and better, and therefore to reap more and better in every area of your life. If you want to increase the quality and quantity of your rewards, you need only seek ways to increase the value of your service. This is very much under your control.
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Principle Number Three: Good time management requires that you see yourself as a “factory.” A factory has three phases of production. First of all, it has inputs of raw materials, time, labor, money and resources. These are the “factors of production” that are necessary to create the end product.
Second, inside the factory there are activities that take place. These are the production activities or work that are necessary to produce the product or service. The efficiency of operations within the factory determines the productivity of the factory, and the productivity of each person involved in the production process.
Third, what emerges from the factory are the outputs or production of the factory. The value of the factory is determined by the quality and quantity of its outputs relative to its inputs. The central purpose of the management of the factory is to increase the quality and quantity of outputs.
One main difference between highly effective people and people who seem to produce very little is that top performers always focus on outputs or results. Average performers focus on inputs. Top performers focus on accomplishments; medium or low performers focus on activities.
Good time management requires that you continually ask yourself, “What outputs are expected of me? What am I expected to produce? Why exactly am I on the payroll?”
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The more you focus on the required outputs of your position, the better and more effective you will become. As a result, you will create greater value and make a more important contribution. You will become more productive and therefore more valuable to yourself and to your company.
Principle Number Four: Everything you accomplish, or fail to accomplish, depends upon your ability to use your time to its best advantage. Your levels of achievement and performance, in every area, are determined by your ability to think through and to apply the very best time management techniques available to you. You can only increase the quality and quantity of your results by increasing your ability to use your time effectively.
Principle Number Five: Time is the scarcest resource of accomplishment.
In America today, the biggest problem most people have is “time poverty.”
People may have money and material success, but they don’t have enough time to enjoy them. We are short of time in almost every area of our lives.
Time is inelastic; it cannot be stretched. Time is indispensable; all work and accomplishment requires it. Time is irreplaceable; there is no substitute for it. And time is perishable; it cannot be saved, preserved or stored. Once it is gone, it is gone forever.
Principle Number Six: The practice of time management skills develops judgment, foresight, self-reliance and self-discipline. These are the qualities of leadership and character. It is time management that enables you to get things done, and your ability to accomplish the tasks that are assigned to you is the chief measure of your value to your company, and to your world.
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Principle Number Seven: A focus on time management forces you to be intensely result-oriented. Result-orientation is the key quality of men and women. Your ability to focus single-mindedly on the most important results required of you is the fastest and surest way to get paid more, promoted faster and to eventually achieve financial independence.
Principle Number Eight: Time management enables you to work smarter, not just harder. Many people who are failures actually work harder than successful people. But they produce less in the hours they work because of poor personal and time management skills.
Principle Number Nine: Good time management is a source of energy, enthusiasm and a positive mental attitude. The more productive you become, the more positive you feel about yourself. As you see yourself accomplishing large quantities of work, you actually experience a continuous inflow of additional energy that enables you to accomplish even more.