About time management, self-development and money

I want to talk about why the approaches that people start to apply after reading this or that book from the field of time-management or financial management do not work separately.

The whole point is that these books often provide only a ready-made tool, which, however, is not for everyone. And in order to apply the tool, you first need to learn the basics of the business you are going to undertake.

For example, driving a car. First, a person changes his habits, attitudes, brings simple actions to automatism. Then he takes an exam, and only then he leaves the road and begins to gain real experience, during which he becomes a master.
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And when we talk about time management, the following often happens. A man read one book, one day he tried to keep timekeeping - he quit, lazily. I wrote a plan for the week, month, year, and never opened them. The next day, he wrote a plan for the first three days, and then abandoned it - because he did not have time for anything.

Or with money.

The situation is the following: a person read a book, began to write down his daily expenses. And a week later he abandoned. The budget did not fit. and abandoned.

And so - in all the majority. There is no time, it does not work the first time, they tried and got tired, it does not work and so on - I heard all this many times.

What is the reason why some people succeed in this and others do not? The answer is simple: your brain. Yes, he is. It contains your habits, your character, your desires, experiences, views on life, attitudes to different things, and so on. And this whole machine is afraid of changes in everything, and does not allow you to introduce them into your life, and is the root of laziness and most of your failures. And it turns out because some people initially all the components are set up for the development of new activities.

But everyone can develop themselves to such an extent that change is easy.

I want to share a few ideas and empirical schemes that I apply everywhere, as well as a specific description of what I have done right now.

Brain Ideas:

• A person is either responsible for any aspect of his life (appearance, health, well-being, mood, emotions, personal life, career, wealth, etc.), or not. If he answers, he consciously keeps the aspect under control and brings it to the required level, or automates it, developing the necessary habits in himself. If he is not responsible, then automatically the responsibility goes to the external level, and other people, circumstances, etc. begin to control this aspect of life. In psychology, look at Psychology - this is called the position of the Author and the position of the Sacrifice.
  
• The subconscious is a real force that everyone should use. Opportunities - solving problems with many variables, changing their habits, intuition.
  
• Desire is the basis of everything. And action is the basis of everything. Thoughts, thoughts, and so on, not based on experience and practice, does not carry value in 90% of cases. If a person has a real desire - no one will stop him. If there is no desire, or it is there, but imaginary, imposed on itself - the person will find any argument to stop.
  
• Only habits and personal characteristics of the person are the basis of success and failure in life. External circumstances do not exist in 90% of situations in life when a person is disappointed. Own false expectations, delusions and so on - this is the cause of negative emotions. The best question you can ask yourself to realize your joint is “What did I do to make this situation in my favor?”. But at the same time, it’s not to DEFINE yourself, but to rationally isolate your mistakes and separate from the external, independent of the person (however, carefully: “the train was canceled, and I was late” - this is not external, but the inability to manage risks and lack of punctuality).
  
• "The map is not a territory," as they say in NLP. Any of the elements in the brain - thoughts, facts, opinions about people, an opinion about its strength, character, and so on - is not a reality, but a certain model of reality. Sometimes VERY distinguishing from reality. Therefore, you need to constantly check for truth.
  
• The brain can be either in the past, or in the present, or in the future. Only the present is real, and only then is it the most productive.
  

Ideas in general:

• Knowledge is power. And even more precisely - the constant self-study in various areas, the knowledge of new areas, getting new experience.
  
• Comprehensive development and knowledge is good because you can operate with a large amount of information from different spheres and generate unusual ideas that no one will guess. For example, there is an approach when you can apply the findings and techniques from one area to another and achieve amazing results. So, in project management in IT, Lean, Kanban, etc. methodologies that came from the automotive industry are successfully applied. I personally use time-management programming approaches such as SPOT, KISS, and an iterative approach in general.
  
• Positive attitude towards life helps. You can look at any question from 2+ sides, some will be negative, others - positive. In the case of negative we have a health disorder, in the case of positive - a bonus in the form of good mood and vigor. Moreover, a sense of humor can develop any. And it helps! But there is an exception - the so-called negative motivation. That is, some people are better motivated to set up activities like “I’ll do this, if only they don’t consider me a sucker,” than a sweet carrot.
  
• Often ideas are written with the same words. In fact, if you read the psychologist, Tim Ferris, some chapters of the Bible, professional psychologists, you can see a lot of common theses (some of which I outlined above). You need to be able to index knowledge, as one intelligent person wrote - to highlight similar points and strive to learn only new ones. For example, yesterday I read Rework, and reached out to reread Ferris. And found about 20 general ideas, written in different words. At the same time, in the 37signals book, I also found a huge amount of remarkable new finds for me, for example, instead of “race for arms” with competitors, to focus on the simplicity of my product.
  
• Nothing is impossible, the whole question is how to approach the issue. And you should always approach from several sides and research in any business, from brushing your teeth (start brushing with your left hand to develop the right hemisphere, or read professional dentists and find out that the cost of the paste is not important, at least 30 rubles, just to foam) cleaning the room (using the time-boxing technique, you can easily learn how to get out in 15 minutes every 2 weeks, instead of postponing all the weekends and feeling frustration).
  
• Evolution is an ingenious process. Be sure to watch the movie "BBC: Secret life of chaos". The basic ideas are as follows (from each thought you can come up with many practical solutions in any field - suffice it to say that all robotics are built on TAU - the theory of automatic control, systems with feedback - by the way, strongly developed already before the discoveries were made, speech about which in the movies). Super-complex things can be obtained from simple components simply by having a feedback system. Evolution is a system with feedback, where random variations are thrown into a certain environment, and screening based on the principle of adaptability to the environment as a feedback. In nature, almost any form can be described using the fractal approach. The fact is that most of the things - the structure of the vessels in the human body, the trees, the structure of the rivers and their turns - work on the recursive principle of copying themselves on a reduced scale.
  

Specific finance solutions that I apply.

• Money is a tool for achieving goals. If the goals are not marked, the money goes from you to others who know better how to manage them. Therefore, compiling a list of what to buy, for a day, a week and a month is the first thing to start with. A simple notepad on springs and three columns are perfect: WHAT, PLAN, FACT (I use this template everywhere). At the top of each table we write that this is, for example, “Budget”, and the date, for example, “October 2010”, plus the amount of how much money we have. We write there everything you need to buy a list. Summing up. Then we apply the iteration approach and the idea from Rework about prioritization. Specifically, we review the list again, look for exactly what we can do without, and cross out. It does not work - we take this idea, subtract 10,000 rubles from the amount at the top of the list, and we think that we would buy with this money (and 10,000 are presented as already given, say, to a bank for a deposit from which it cannot be withdrawn).
  
• We use iteration to correct our costs. Any problem is solved in three steps in many iterations: identifying the essence (find, and admit to yourself that it exists), analyze and choose a solution, implement a solution. We start stupidly writing in a notebook (we apply the principle of functional grouping, we get a notebook for finance and a notebook for tasks and ideas - I always have 2+ with me, sometimes I also have a dictionary for Italian words, for example, written out on the road from the player’s dictation). Once a day we count expenses, with an accuracy of 5 rubles.
  
• Over time, spending begins to be grouped, and budgets are determined at intervals. I now plan budgets for the week ahead and keep daily records of expenses (see page template above). The money is distributed over four virtual accounts, on which I write out daily in the form of a table (standard items of expenditure are shown in brackets): economic (rent, electricity, Internet, mobile, train for a month, metro for a month), weekly (food in canteens - meals , dinners, shop food, cafe), backlash (unallocated funds), wallet (something that I put in my wallet every day).
  
• The basic principle of how to save money is to spend less than you get. In practice, you can make an account in a reliable bank (I have a Sberbank), and there you can simply put 10% -20% of the amount immediately before ANY planning. The account must be such that it cannot be withdrawn from it at all, only to close it. The second and other accounts can be made for different purposes - vacation, type accumulation on a car or other expenses, an account for cards. The principle is simple - money works in the perspective of 6 months plus. Putting aside only 5,000 rubles a month, after half a year, 30,000 rubles are already in the account - not a bad amount, is it?
  
• In the process of working on money, one should not forget that they are a tool, not an end in themselves. How to associate them with tasks in the next section. Constantly trying, you will develop your own forms of reports, tables, to monitor cash flows and direct them in the right direction.
  

Specific solutions for the tasks that I apply.

• Notepad is always with you. I already wrote why I use them. Until speech recognition and handwriting costing less than 3,000 rubles with printing in place have been invented, the notebook will not be equal in a bunch of spheres.
  
• Two-level classification - direction (work, hobby, personal life) and tasks (of different levels of detail).
  
• Constant looking through the day of tasks. And the task list for the day is always at hand.
  
• You need an iterative approach to find a range of performance. My whole time management webinar is about this. Now I have an iteration equal to one day, and the number of tasks is one. Yes, there is always one main task for work per day, brought to the release state. How to learn how to get rid of other tasks, again I say, the whole hour of the webinar took off. But then everyone has to go through it the hard way. And if anyone wants to object - yes, there are days when I group a lot of small tasks into one jerk. But there can be no more than three tasks per day and no more than two directions - otherwise the quality suffers. How to achieve? Learn to filter, focus on the ability not to do the task, to develop yourself, in short, to work on it (start to apply the Pareto principle everywhere, finding the basics of your jambs and the root causes of personal success, and you will be working on self-development for several months). And again, I took the idea from Kanban, limiting the number of tasks per unit time in work.
  
• The tasks of the global plan should be half a year ahead, they are like a vector, and they should be reviewed and evaluated once a month. What are these tasks? These are values. Tasks must carry personal value; they must be pursued, for reasons that you personally understand. I have, for example, learning Italian to listen to opera; posing voice to sing long and comfortable; reading books and articles to constantly evolve. And if you need money for a goal - write the budget, how to finance the goals. And based on this, making up a budget for a week or a month (again, iterations, you see, they are everywhere!), Remember the main goals and allocate to them a certain percentage of the main cash flow.
  

Here, I shared my personal experience, I urge you to share your own in the comments. Sharing other people's experiences is the best learning. And yes, who have not read Rework yet - I highly recommend it!