When it comes to time management, there are two things that are key pieces to being successful: planning and time perspective. People who take the longest time period into consideration when making their day-to-day decisions are those who are the most successful.
That information came from a study done by Dr. Edward Banfield at Harvard in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. The study looked at the factors that contributed to overall financial success and concluded that one primary factor took precedence over all of the others. Banfield called it “time perspective”. The study found that the higher a person rises in society, the longer the time perspective of that person.
Brian Tracy has this to say about time perspectives:
Long Time Perspectives
People with long term perspectives are willing to pay the price of success for a long, long time before they achieve it. They think about the consequences of their choices and decisions in terms of what they might mean in five, ten, fifteen, and even twenty years from now.
Short Time Perspectives
People at the lowest levels of society have the shortest time perspectives. They focus primarily on immediate gratification and often engage in behaviors that are virtually guaranteed to lead to negative consequences in the long term. At the very bottom of the social ladder, you find hopeless alcoholics and drug addicts. These people think in terms of the next drink or the next fix. Their time perspective is often less than one hour.
The best practice for managing your time is to be in the habit of planning ahead, which means looking at the week before you either at the end of your day on Friday or on Sunday and also looking at each day the night before to plan or make any necessary changes in your upcoming day. The more time and consideration you put into your days, the more you get accomplished and ultimately, the more successful you are.
So, what’s your perspective on time? Do you think about the consequences of your choices and the long term impact, or are you only planning and thinking in terms of the next urgent and important task?