Summary: How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life

Review and Analysis of Lakein's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9782806243126
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Time Management

The must-read summary of Alan Lakein's book “How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life: How to Achieve More Than You Ever Thought Possible”

This complete summary of the ideas from Alan Lakein's book “How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life” highlights that to waste your time is to waste your life, but conversely to master your time is to master your life. Providing you with the keys to manage your time more efficiently in both your personal and professional life, this summary will help you make the most of your life.    

Added value of this summary: 
• Save time
• Understand the key concepts 
• Improve your time management skills

To learn more, read `Get Control Of Your Time And Your Life` and discover how to make the most of your life! 

Summary of Get Control Of Your Time And Your Life (Alan Lakein)

Section 1
Time Management

Main Idea

An effective time management system incorporates two key elements:

1. A viable way to plan the best use of your time.
2. A way to control how your time actually gets used.

Supporting Ideas

Element #1 -- Planning

The biggest payoff in mastering your time is you gain freedom -- to pursue whatever you consider to be of more importance than anything else. In the final analysis, it’s your life, and you alone decide how your time should be spent. Other people may make demands, make suggestions, offer advice or even provide incentives, but those are only peripheral considerations.

There’s really no such thing as a lack of time. Every person alive has the same 168 hours in a week that everyone else has. Therefore, the real question becomes how can you make certain that you are applying your available time in those areas that will deliver the greatest benefits?

Time management is quite an individual choice. Some people are comfortable letting life meander along without direction and stability. Others like to be firmly in control, making conscious decisions about everything they do. Again, there’s no absolute right or wrong approach -- just a matter of personal preference.

The best time control systems are well balanced. If time management is too tight, people can become compulsive and obsessive about the way they spend their time. By contrast, a time management system that is loose leads to apathy, indifference and frustration as nothing meaningful is accomplished. Balance is a critical quality for a good time management system.

There are three types of time conscious people that should be avoided as far as possible:

1. Over-organizers -- People who are always fooling around with lists of things to do. They end up spending so much time considering all the angles that frequently they become paralyzed and forget to get into action. These people plan things to the finest detail. They feel a sense of accomplishment just by being organized -- so much so, in fact, that what’s achieved gets lost in the shuffle. Over-organizers are blind to new opportunities, ongoing changes and the changing need of people they interact with.
2. Hyperactive -- People who mistake activity for achievement. In their rush to fill every minute with activity, they never take the time to evaluate the worth of whatever they are doing. In other words, they’re so busy clamoring up the tree they don’t even notice they should be climbing another tree altogether.
3. Time Nuts -- People who are overwhelmingly preoccupied with never wasting a fraction of a minute. These people constantly set for themselves an impossible schedule. They are always in a rush trying to catch up to where they think they should be. The telltale sign of a Time Nut is they keep detailed records, going back months or years, of how every minute was spent.

Each of these groups of people have taken a potentially valuable trait and turned it into a liability simply by placing an undue emphasis on it. Effective time management is far more balanced than that. Ideally, a good time management system will aid rather than impede productivity. It will be responsive to changing needs, flexible enough to allow some breathing space and powerful enough to take into account all the dimensions of a person’s life.

Planning how to use your time effectively is a two-step process:

1. Make a list of all available possibilities.
   This step is usually quite straightforward. Do this in writing if you want it to be useful. Take a blank pie...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Book Presentation
• Summary of Get Control Of Your Time And Your Life (Alan Lakein)
• About the Summary Publisher
• Copyright