I wrote this book by accident. It started one morning, early in 2022, when I was jotting down some ideas about things I wanted to change over the next twelve months. It was a new year, and I had just turned 50 a couple weeks earlier, so this seemed like a good time to get my life in order. But what started as a few written goals ended up expanding into an entire book.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of people took a look in the mirror and reassessed what was really important to them. And many of them concluded that life’s too short to spend in a job you hate, that they want to spend less time working and more time living, and that family should be their number one priority. I’m one of those people, and that’s part of the reason I’m writing this book.
I wrote this book for myself.
Let’s get this out of the way: the pandemic has been horrible. COVID-19 has killed millions of people around the world, including a million here in the United States. Millions more have gotten sick, and a lot of them are suffering from “long COVID.” It’s robbed people of valuable time and caused children to miss important milestones, something that could have a lasting impact. It’s also caused divisions in society as people disagree on the best way to end the pandemic and debate how much of our freedoms we should sacrifice for the good of society.
With all of that said, some good will come out of the COVID-19 pandemic. That normally happens when there’s some sort of tragedy or natural disaster. We bounce back and make improvements as a result. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
The question is how do you get from A to B? This book should help with that, though the path will be different for different people since the starting points and the end points will vary.
Have you ever noticed how every self-improvement book is pretty much like every other self-improvement book? There’s a reason for that. It’s because most ideas aren’t new, they’re recycled. They’ve been around forever. People learn the ideas and then apply them in their own lives. Sometimes they read about them in self-improvement books, make some adjustments, and make them their own. Then they write about them.
Even the “original” ideas the authors write about have been written about before. That’s because many of the ideas are logical. They’re common sense. So even without being told about them, many of us figure them out on our own…eventually. But we also forget the ideas sometimes, and when we do we need to be reminded about them.
This book is full of my ideas for saving time, getting organized, and getting things done. Most of them are my own thoughts, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been influenced by the books that I’ve read along the way. There are a lot of great authors out there who have written books that have helped a lot of people, including me. Some of my favorites are Brian Tracy, __, and __.
Still, I won’t quote most of these authors in this book because I’m writing the majority of it off the top of my head, based on some of the principles I’ve applied in my own life and some I have thought of but have yet to apply.
Like most of you, I struggle to stay organized, keep up with my to-do list, prioritize, and spend my time well. But, like most of you, I’m continually striving to get better, so this book is as much for me as it is for the reader.
They say that if you want to learn something, you should teach it. So that’s what I’m doing. And, as I go, I’m applying these principles and telling you how they’ve helped me. I hope they’ll help you too. My goal is to lead by example.
One more thing: Because this book is about saving time, it’s deliberately short. I don’t want you to spend a lot of time reading it; I’d rather you use the time to apply what you learn.
I wrote this book, went and tried all the initial ideas, then rewrote the book once I’d figured out what worked and what didn’t.