Brian Tracy on Time Management

Brian Tracy is a popular personal and business development writer and speaker. Two of his very popular books, Goals and Eat the Frog! deal extensively with time management. This article summarises and assesses the main points of Tracy on time management.

The starting point for Tracy on time management is that you will never have enough time! There will always be too many jobs to do in the time available, so some jobs are not going to get done. The person who is committed to their own success has to choose which jobs those are.

Tracy makes the former point very clearly in Eat that Frog!

“There is never enough time to do everything you have to do.  You are literally swamped with work and personal responsibilities, projects, stacks of magazines to read and piles of books you intend to get to one of these days as soon  as you get caught up. But the fact is that you are never going to get caught up.”

“(Your)… ability to select your most important task at each moment…” is the fundamental starting point. Tracy teaches a prioritisation system that is a detailed process based on a general principle. The general principle is the well known 80/20 principle which is that most of your effective work comes from 20% of what you do, so the smart approach is to identify and work exclusively on that 20%.

One way towards identifying the most valuable 20% is by grading your tasks according to consequence. This is the system that Tracy recommends in both the books referred to above:

A – important with serious consequences for completion or non completion
B – should do and has mild consequences for completion or non completion
C – nice to do and has no consequences for completion or non completion
D – can be delegated to someone else
E – a task that can be eliminated with no consequences at all

So, operating from a master list that has absolutely everything on it, you grade the tasks using this ABCDE system. You now know from the tasks which you have labelled ‘A’ which jobs you need to do first. Tracy’s further advice is to refine your A list in terms of A1 (most important) and so on. In Eat that Frog! Tracy acknowledges that the most important job is the one we are most likely to procrastinate on, so treat it like an  ugly frog you have to eat, and do it first and do it fast!

Brian Tracy’s system works very effectively to improve your productivity. However, like many effective drugs, it may come with undesirable side effects. As an illustration, of this and the attitude implicit in his approach Tracy tells this story:

“You can only get your time and your life under control to the degree to which you discontinue lower value activities. A friend of mine, when he was single, was an avid golfer. He liked to golf three and four times a week, three to four hours each time. Over a period of years, he started a business, got married and had two children. But he still played golf three to five times a week until he finally realized that his time on the golf course was causing him enormous stress at home and at the office. It was only by abandoning most of his golf games that he could get his life back under control.”

Perhaps the question should be, what is the purpose of financial success? What gets lost with this kind of attitude? Tracy further writes, “ You make work appointments with yourself and then discipline yourself to keep them, developing a ‘sense of urgency’. “ There seems to be an underlying ethos of struggle and sacrifice. Life is a struggle for the disciplined to win, there is little sense of well-being or self care having any importance for Brian Tracy. He writes, “discipline yourself to keep working on the most valuable use of your time, whatever it may be at the moment and you will be successful… Whenever you find yourself slowing down or experiencing the urge to procrastinate or delay, repeat to yourself, ‘Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!”

It is a case of using your own common sense; if this strong approach appeals,  test it and decide if it is a fit for you. If you are looking for a more holistic approach, however, Brian Tracy’s methods may be still be useful in regard to the process of grading your tasks using the ABCDE method. Time management techniques need to be part of life, not a bolt on ‘widget’ that doesn’t really fit with the rest. So rather than taking on any one specific approach lock stock and barrel, it may be more valuable to be an intelligent and discriminating seeker and take methods for a test drive to determine how they fit with your life as a whole.