Know Thy Time: Peter Drucker’s Strategy to Become More Effective - Darius Foroux

“Do you know thy time?”

If you don’t measure your time, it’s tough to stop procrastination or improve your productivity. Because if you want to manage your time better, you have to know where it goes first.

How do you know your time? Keep an activity log - the specific method you use doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you want to keep a record for at least two weeks. Preferably, you want a whole month of recorded activities.

“Go through all the recurring activities in your log one by one. What would happen if you would stop doing them?”

If the answer is: “All hell breaks loose.” Don’t change anything.

But if your answer is: “Nothing would happen.” You’ve hit gold.

We all do activities that have ZERO return. I call those activities time-wasters.

Know where your time goes. Identify the critical tasks from the trivial tasks in your life. And cut the trivial, time-wasting, tasks.

If you want to be a super-effective person, you regularly keep a log. You don’t have to keep a log for 365 days a year. Instead, do two stretches of two-three weeks a year. That’s enough to keep track of your time and identify new time-wasterit forces you to think about your daily routine.