Table Of ContentDr. Charles R. Hobbs
\
PERENNIAL LtaRARY
LLJ
Harper & Row, Publishers, New York
Grand Rapids, Philadelphia, St. Louis, San Francisco
London, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto
TIME POWER is a registered trademark of the Charles R. Hobbs Corporation.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Day·Timers, Inc., for permission to reprint the
following sample pages from the Day-Timers Junior Desk Reference Edition: monthly
filler pages, monthly calendar, and Services Performed Today add·in sheet.
A hardcover edition of this book is published by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
TIME POWER. Copyright © 1987 by Charles R. Hobbs. All rights reserved. Printed in
the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row,
Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously
in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.
First PERENNIAL LIBRARY edition published 1988
Designed by Sidney Feinberg
Library of Congress Cataloging-in·Publication Data
Hobbs, Charles R.
Time power.
"Perennial Library."
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Time management.
HD69.T54H62 1988
I. Title.
650.1
ISBN 0·06-091490-4 (pbk.)
95 96 97 RJU) 10 9
86-46072
To my beloved wife, Nola,
for more than thirty years
my closest link with time
Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
1. Making Choices and Taking Charge 1
2. Looking Beneath the Surface of Time Management 7
Vital versus Urgent
4. Self-Unification in Principle
5. Self-Unification in Practice
6. Continuity in Goal Planning
7. Personal-Life Goals
8. Goals with the Company
9. The Time Power System with Datebook Organizer
10. Within the Organization
14
21
41
58
67
97
11. Know Where Your Time Goes 102
12. Two Time Wasters: Preoccupation and Negativism 113
13. Delegation 121
14.
Meetings That Never End, Visitors Who Never Leave, and
Telephones That Never Stop Ringing
126
15. Fingertip Management 135
16. How to Procrastinate Effectively 142
17. Summary for Action 148
18. One Hundred One Time Management Goals 154
19. Making Your Plan Work 160
Glossary of Time Power Terms
165
Appendix A:
The Unifying Principles of Individuals
Appendix B:
167
Unifying Principles and the Corporate Culture 181
Annotated Reading List 185
Index 201
- ,· -
Acknowledgments
Dr. Mitch Tuchman did much for this book as editor in bringing it to
its present polished state. To Mitch and Carol Cohen, my editor at Harper
and Row, I am indebted.
My wife, Nola, and our three children, Chris, Mark, and Jan, have all
been instrumental in development of the Time Power System and the
preparation of the book. The research and editing by Chris has been most
helpful. Nola has been an exceptional sounding board, counselor, and
stabilizing support in this work.
Glen Hogan attended my Time Power seminar. He became one of our
best students and advocates. I am grateful for his introducing my com
pleted manuscript to Harper and Row, which led to this publication.
Dr. Ernest Eberhard, Gary Gillespie, and Robert C. Dorney offered
editorial suggestions in earlier drafts.
Our cadre of professional seminar leaders and staff in our company
have given helpful backup support: Jeannene Barham has been one of our
leading players in marketing and operations for several years; Stanna
Daniels and Sharon Brinker did most of the typing of the original manu
script. To all of the above, I thank you.
ix
1
Making Choices and Taking Charge
How often do you have the kind of day when you feel you hold the
world on a string? It's the kind of feeling you would probably like to enjoy
more often. The moment when you feel this way is the moment when you
are most in control of the events in your life: most in control of what you
are doing, most in control in your relationships with others. As your ability
to control events increases, those exalted moments become more frequent.
There is no way you can control all the events in your life, everything
that is going on around you, but there is one fact you must never overlook:
you do have choices and you can Jearn to be in charge. One happy
outgrowth of being in charge is high self-esteem. As you come to control
more of the events in your life, your self-esteem rises. What you will
experience in the following pages is a how-to-do-it approach to achieving
high self-esteem through personal productivity. The ideas in this book,
when put into practice, will give you the ability to make good choices.
While the primary emphasis is on you on thejob, these ideas apply equally
to your personal life because the Time Power System deals with you: not
on the basis of your 40-hour work week, but on the basis of your full
168-hour-a-week, fifty-two-week-a-year, total life perspective.
The purpose of this book is to help ineffective managers of time
become more effective and to help already effective managers of time
excel and, in some instances, achieve preeminence in their fields. Everyone
has attained some level of preeminence in life. I really believe that. But no
matter how great you are, you can always do better. To paraphrase the
1
2 • T I M E P O W E R
British biologist Thomas Huxley, the Time Power System helps you do the
thing that needs to be done when it needs to be done in the way it needs
to be done whether you like it or not.
The Time Power System increases your awareness of the value of
managing your time more effectively. It helps you save hours every week.
It gives you a relevant, rational basis for setting goals. It helps you be on
time for meetings; eliminate trivialities; instantly retrieve necessary data;
more important, it helps you accomplish your most vital priorities. But the
most satisfying result of all is higher self-esteem. This does not mean that
you will never again have a challenging moment. The world throws a
curveball at even the best managers of time once in a while, but effective
time managers are better equipped than others to cope because they are
in control.
The Time Power System is built on three key concepts.
First, time management is the act of controlling events.
For centuries philosophers have associated events with time. Augustine, Kant, and Leibniz, among others, used events to describe time. Einstein proposed that time has no independent existence apart from the
order of events by which we measure it. Therefore time is the occurrence
of events one after the other.
Management is the act of controlling. If you manage something, you
control it. If you don't manage it, you don't control it. If you bring yourself
to establish appropriate control over appropriate events, you are managing time well. If you really want to establish control in an appropriate
framework, you must come to an understanding of the nature of the events
going on around you.
The events of your day are like the individual members of a symphony
orchestra, with you as the conductor. You stand on the podium before that
orchestra, and when you bring your arm down, everybody plays in unison,
filling out the composition just as the composer planned. Are things going
like that for you? You raise your arm high above your head; you indicate
a crescendo, and the players give it all they've got. Does that describe your
day? Maybe not quite that way. Finally you signal for a rest, and everybody
takes a break. Everybody leaves at once, heading off in different directions.
If there's anything that really describes us as employees, as managers, as
homemakers, as people living, it is that we are often out of control of
events.
We are not going to look at time management from an academic point
of view. We are going to look at it from the practical standpoint of what
