3 Core Principles of Time Managment
There are three core principles of time management that form the foundation of an empowering mindset that puts you back in the driver’s seat of your life:
- Everything is energy
- Patience pays dividends
- Truth is subjective
But before expanding on these principles, it's important to first understand what time management principles are and why they're important.
What Are Principles?
In general, principles are guidelines that direct someone’s choices and behaviors, like a compass.
Ray Dalio, founder of Bridewater Associates (one of the largest hedge funds in the world), invests heavily in his concept of principles. In fact, he wrote a whole book about the principles he’s developed and refined over a lifetime.
Explaining how they help in nearly every situation, Ray says:
“Principles are concepts that can be applied over and over again in similar circumstances as distinct from narrow answers to specific questions. Every game has principles that successful players master to achieve winning results. So does life.”
But not all principles are created equally. Some principles apply to very specific circumstances, and every circumstance has been manifested from a set of principles whether they are natural or man-made.
Take gravity, for example… this is a powerful principle of physics relative only to Earth’s atmosphere; a principle that governs all objects on the planet.
Ray adds, “Different principles apply to different aspects of life—e.g., there are ‘skiing principles’ for skiing, ‘parenting principles’ for parenting, ‘management principles’ for managing, ‘investment principles’ for investing, etc—and there are over-arching ‘life principles’ that influence our approaches to all things.
If the standard formula for productivity measures results against the resources used to achieve said results, then there must be principles that govern that equation.
Certain principles will be more more effective, more sustaining, more useful than others, thus giving the practitioners of such principles an upper hand in the domain to which they're applied.
Undoubtedly, better principles lead to better results and better use of resources. As Ray says, "different people subscribe to different principles that they believe work best.”
The following core principles of time management are designed to influence your approach to achieving results, whether that’s cleaning the kitchen or managing a 6-month development project.
Principle #1 - Everything is Energy
Time, money, mental energy (attention or focus), physical energy (moving or doing)—these are all different resources we use to navigate the world around us.
Like a car uses gas to move from one place to another, each of us use different sources of energy to achieve results, however, which source we use usually depends on the situation.
For example, in the time trade work environment, employees trade their time for money: two different resources being exchanged in unique quantities with relative value. One employee gets paid $20 per hour, another gets paid $50 per hour, and another gets paid $1,250 per week regardless of how many hours he works in a week.
So in the productivity formula, time is merely one of many resources that can be used to achieve a desired result. The characteristic of being “resourceful” is typically assigned to one who gets results using a variety of resources.
At first, this principle may seem underwhelming, but it serves to stabilize the mind in strenuous circumstances the same way roots stabilize a tree during a hurricane.
Let’s do a quick exercise…
Look down at your hand. What do you see?
A hand, obviously. Look closer…
You see the hair raising from the skin. Look closer and you might see the pores from which the hair emerges, or even the wrinkles in the skin that surround the pores.
Take a microscope to the hand and you start to see all different kinds of things like cell structures.
Magnify the microscope and keep magnifying until all you can see are the swirling energy of atoms that make up less than 1% of the total mass of your hand… the other 99% is empty space.
At our very core, even we are energy, though it may not appear that way to the naked eye.
Cash and coin are made of the same building blocks. These are the tangible forms of energy.
There are also intangible forms of energy, like time or concentrated mental effort. If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “time is money,” then the seed of this principle has already been planted.
If the desired result is to buy groceries for the week, or to write an essay for class, one can achieve the result using time and effort. Driving to the grocery store, filling the cart, paying the cashier... or sitting down at the desk, turning on airplane mode, writing and researching for several hours...
Likewise, one can achieve the same result using a different kind of energy—money—by using TaskRabbit or hiring an assistant to run groceries, or simply limit grocery shopping to online availability. Equally, a student could pay her friend $50 to write the essay for her.
Same results, different resources used.
It doesn't really matter what resource you're using, be it time, money, or effort, so long as you understand that each are different forms of energy and that some type of energy must be utilized to achieve a desired result.
Starting from this initial premise that everything is energy, the next question becomes, “What is the best way to utilize this energy?"
Principle #2 - Patience Pays Dividends
The next principle is about patience. This means looking through what I call the "long-term lens" and weighing your decisions against a 10-year backdrop instead of a 1-year or 1-week or 1-day backdrop.
A man can use the resource of money in various ways:
- He can spend it
- He can invest it
- He can choose to do neither, and instead save it
You think Warren Buffet became one of the most prolific investors in the world by focusing on short-term trades? No, he sized up companies and pursued investment opportunities through a long-term lens. He’s mastered the game of money because of the money principles that guide his behavior.
Similarly, a man can use the resource of time in various ways:
- He can spend it
- He can invest it
- He can choose to do neither
The key difference, however, is that time cannot be saved (though it can be savored)
Imagine for a second that you earn $1 every minute of the day...
At 12:00am each day, you essentially get a check deposited into your bank for $1,440. The only catch is that you can't save any of it. Whatever is leftover at 11:59pm is withdrawn, never to be seen again. No transfers, no rollovers, no do-overs.
So how would you use it?
Would you spend all of it in one place?
Would you build a diversified investment portfolio?
In his book, Cashflow Quadrant, Robert Kiyosaki distinguishes between the mindset of the rich vs. the poor with a story that, when he first heard it, informed his investment decisions for the rest of his life. The principle that guides him when making money decisions is one of broad, long-term perspective: invest in assets.
On the other hand, many people look through the lens of short-term gratification when navigating their daily lives regardless of whether it’s their money or time. They prefer smaller, more immediate payoffs over bigger payoffs that come later down the road.
When it comes to increasing productivity, time management hacks are short-term expenditures of time. You can use the next best app or learn about a quicker way to get something done but these payoffs are relatively small and singular, meaning the “return” on that expenditure only happens once.
Developing a winning mindset and skillset, however, is a long-term investment strategy that pays dividends over the course of a lifetime. Rather than getting paid once, you keep getting paid over and over which ultimately adds up to a much larger sum.
Looking through the long-term lens with a mind of patience is a principle that's used by many of the world’s most successful people. The effects are grounded in science and proven in human behavior (see: the marshmallow experiment).
Adopting this time management principle is a gift only you can give to yourself. It changes the way you see things and begins to influence nearly every decision you make.
As Wayne Dyer said, “when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
Principle #3 - Truth is Subjective
Having first understood that time is energy, and that there are different ways to use this energy, a third principle comes into play: not all energy is created equal.
This means that the same measures of energy can be assigned different values. One particular investment of time may yield a large return for one person but a small return for someone else.
In other words: what's true for me is not necessarily true for you.
In our time transactions, the value created and exchanged is subjective to each person. That's why one consultant can charge $100/hour and another can charge $500/hour for providing the same service.
Accepting this principle shifts the locus of control from the external to the internal and underscores the importance of meaning in our lives…
Take books, for example; the contents of a book contain the same words, yet different people interpret the words differently. Some people will give the book a 5-star rating on Amazon while others give it a 2- or 3-star rating.
When you stay at a hotel as a guest, you’re staying in the same room with access to the same amenities, yet the joy derived from your stay is completely internal. The value you place on the overall stay is dependent on your individual experience of that stay. It is your subjective truth—not objective reality—that determines whether or not you'll return to that hotel.
Subjectivity is a circular feedback system.
Our individual experience supplies us with meaning. We then use meaning to create and re-create our experiences. Different people assign different meaning to the same, seemingly objective things...
Two people walk by a barking dog. They both see and hear the dog and, externally, neither of them are in greater danger than the other. The fence surrounding the yard prevents the dog from reaching these people. Yet one person feels terrified while the other person smiles.
Why is this?
The truth of one person—the one who is terrified—is that dogs are savages, terrible animals designed to hurt humans. This meaning was assigned because that person had a traumatic experience as a child when she was attacked by a dog. Her subjective reality about dogs was transformed forever by this one experience.
The truth of the other person—the one who smiled—is that dogs are primitive, yet loving, animals live with a great deal of ignorance. She looks at the same dog with compassion and thinks back to a dog she used to have years ago, remembering the joy they shared together.
In Vipassana meditation, one learns to shift the focus from external stimulation to internal sensation.
So regardless of what’s happening on the outside, one can maintain a level of awareness and equanimity on the inside which creates room for a calm, balanced response. When focused solely on the external, one reacts out of the nature of emotion. As we know, highly-charged emotional reactions don't often end well.
A winning mindset requires accepting truth as subjective.
And this does not happen overnight. But to start shifting the locus of control from the external to the internal is enough to catalyze a transformation in mindset.
Conclusion: Principles Provide Power
Operating from a set of principles gives you the power to control any and every situation that arises. The control is internal, not external, although strong adherence to effective principles may influence the external.
If life gives you lemons, make lemonade, right?
But what if you don't want lemons?
Principles give you the power to say no to lemons and, instead, walk your happy ass to the farmer's market to pick out whatever fruit you so desire.
You can use these three core principles of time management to master the game of time:
- Time is energy, merely one of many sources of energy.
- There are different ways to use this energy, some better than others.
- The value returned in exchange for this energy is subjective.
And as you put each one of these into practice, you’ll soon learn that they permeate every area of life—from school to work, health and wellness, and even your relationships.
These are beliefs that, if adopted as truth and implemented frequently, will change how you operate as an individual.
You won’t just see things differently, you’ll do things differently... and you’ll have a sturdy "why" behind the reason for doing them.
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