Don't Manage Your Time-Manage Your Life

Lesson 13 from Leadership Gold

John C. Maxwell

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781400275465
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Personal Success
• Index: Business

Smart leaders learn from their own mistakes. Smarter ones learn from others’ mistakes—and successes.  

John C. Maxwell wants to help you become the smartest leader you can be by sharing Chapter 13, Don't Manage Your Time-Manage Your Life, of Leadership Gold with you. After nearly forty years of leading, Maxwell has mined the gold so you don’t have to. Each chapter contains detailed application exercises and a “Mentoring Moment” for leaders who desire to mentor others using the book. 

Gaining leadership insight is a lot like mining for gold. You don’t set out to look for the dirt. You look for the nuggets. You’ll find them here.

DON’T MANAGE YOUR TIME—
MANAGE YOUR LIFE

Early in my leadership years, I realized that my ability to maximize my time would be essential to my productivity and my effectiveness as a leader. As Peter Drucker said, “Nothing else distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.”

Because I knew I needed to improve in this area, I attended a time-management seminar. I learned many valuable lessons that day. One of the things that struck me and that has stuck with me for more than thirty years was the analogy the presenter used to describe time. He said that our days are like identical suitcases. Even though they are all the same size, some people are able to pack more into them than others. The reason? They know what to pack. We spent most of that day learning about what to pack in the time allotted to us.

CHANGE IN PERSPECTIVE

I left that seminar with two impressions: First, time is an equal-opportunity employer; everybody gets twenty-four hours a day—no more, no less—but not everybody gets the same return on their twenty-four hours. Second, there really is no such thing as “time management.” The term is an oxymoron. Time cannot be managed. It cannot be controlled in any way. It marches on no matter what you do, the way the meter in a taxi keeps running, whether you are moving forward or standing still. Everyone gets the same number of hours and minutes every day. Nobody—no matter how shrewd—can save minutes from one day to spend on another. No scientist—no matter how smart—is capable of creating new minutes. Even with all his wealth, someone like Bill Gates can’t buy additional hours for his day. And even though people talk about trying to “find time,” they need to quit looking. There isn’t any extra lying around. Twenty-four hours is the best any of us is going to get.

You can’t manage your time. So what can you do? Manage yourself! Nothing separates successful people ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• DON'T MANAGE YOUR TIME-MANAGE YOUR LIFE
• NOTES
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR