How to Structure Your Time Management with the Tower Technique

If you want to achieve your goals, you need to know how to manage your time.

Time is the raw material from which you build your life. It’s given to all of us, free of charge.

You cannot buy more of what you have, you can only spend it (or waste it).

There’s a ton of effective time management strategies and systems out there teaching you how to make the most of your time. A lot of them repeat the same things we’ve been told as kids.

• Reduce interruption
• Don’t multitask
• Plan ahead of time
• “Focus”

But the thing is…you don’t need to be told these things.

You already know what to do to allocate your time better.

Whether or not you’ll do them…. that’s the real question.

I’m not going to add to the very long list of time management techniques out there.

Instead, I’m going to give you a mindset and philosophy to think about time.

If I’ve done my job right, at the end of this article you should have a better understanding of the nature of time in the modern world. This will give you a better ability to make better choices on how to spend your time. You’ll also learn:

• The causes of poor time management
• How to allocate and manage time effectively with the crucial mindset I’m discussing here

Let’s not waste any more time.

[toc]

Allocating Time and Building Towers

Think of every single one of your accomplishments as a tower that you have built.

In your tower, every brick and stone has its place.

If even one aspect of the tower is faulty, it will probably crumble to the ground and all that work will have been for nothing.

I want you to think of the hours, minutes, and seconds in your days as building blocks for the tower.

Every minute of your day is contributing towards building a certain kind of tower. You can create virtually anything you want…but you have to be deliberate and know WHY you’re building this tower.

Is this tower a goal of yours to build? Or did someone convince you it would be a SWELL idea to build it?

If you spend 8 hours of your day at a job you don’t like, you’re building a shitty tower.

If you come home and do nothing to change that, you’re building a shitty tower.

If you spend your free time scrooolllllllling down the Facebook news feed, you’re building a shitty tower.

We don’t want to build shitty towers.

Instead, think of what would happen if you were to spend your energy making an awesome tower.

What if you were able to spend time reading and growing in your base of knowledge?

What if you were able to spend the time on being more productive?

What if you were able to spend time getting a better body for your health (and your looks, don’t lie)?

Where would you be in 5 years? 10 years?

That’s the key time management question you have to ask yourself.

If you want more insight on how to make further tweaks on your time management, check out the podcast below:

Importance of Time Management and the Segmentation of Time

Any big goal you have can be broken down into smaller steps. Think of them as “Day-tight compartments”, as Dale Carnegie would say.

A goal of yours will take about a year to complete. Ok… what is a year? A series of months.

What is a month? A series of days.

What is a day? A series of hours. Minutes?…..Seconds????

When you think about it that way, it’s just not that bad.

At this point, a key question should arise in your mind:

“Am I doing shit that really matters?”

You think wasting a few minutes here and there doesn’t matter, but it really does add up. If you waste 15 minutes on watching pointless YouTube videos, that’s a quarter of an hour you’ll never get back.

That time could have been added up towards getting into a flow state and working on shit that really matters….

You can read all of the books and articles on time management…but until you grasp this truth, they are just words…words…words.

Poor Time Management and Your Favorite Excuses

Here’s some common excuses that people use to try and invalidate this theory.

“I don’t have enough time”

You have time. You just put it towards activities you deem “important”.

Here’s another one

“There’s just too much other stuff in the way”

This runs face-first into the Law of Forced Efficiency. As Brian Tracy puts it in his book The Absolutely 100 Unbreakable Laws of Business Success:

This is really the root problem of all this procrastination and indecision, I’d argue. Fear of failure is constrictive. It stifles creativity, problem-solving, and creates unnecessary anxiety.

Fear of failure is another topic in and of itself. In the meantime, ask yourself:

“what if I succeed”?

What then? Would you still be scared? If so, then you have a fear of success, which is also another gargantuan issue beyond the scope of petty “time management”.

Hint: A therapist would do some good.

How to Use the Tower Technique and Allocate Time Effectively

This is a series of steps on how to use this technique to your advantage and be a victor not a victim.

Where are you going?

You can’t hit a target you can’t see. That target are your goals. You’ll have no idea on what to spend your time on if you don’t know. It’s like driving a car to a destination. You need an end point.

My suggestion? Be as clear as possible. Write them out on paper and segment them into smaller steps.

Long Division

Following the train of thought started a couple paragraphs back…every year can be divided into seasons.

Every season can be divided into months and weeks. Every week into a day, and every day into an hour.

Think of an hour divided into four segments of 15 minutes. If you squander a majority of these 15 minute segments on meaningless activity, you have lost the hour.

Your goal is to “win” every hour and spend the majority of it towards something meaningful or productive.

If you spend a majority of your waking hours towards doing that has no end benefit, you have “lost” the day. Congratulations.

If you spend the majority towards a goal you have want to accomplish, you have crafted another brick that will be used to build an eventual tower.

In the back of your mind you should always ask: “does this task bring me closer directly or indirectly to a goal of mine?”

If the answer is no, change it to yes. What constitutes a “yes” (for you)?

Eliminate Bottlenecks

Following the train of thought above, there are little things that take a toll on our attention.

“Shit, I forgot to pay my [insert pending disaster here] bill”

“Oh man… I still gotta [do this long overdue something or other] today”

“My room is a fucking mess… I want to clean it up, but I don’t know how to start”

All of these little occurrences snowball into a massive thing you have to deal with. I call these “bottlenecks”. Until you get rid of these, your progress towards bigger goals will be slowed.

If you have to pay your bills on a certain date, automate it.

If your room is a mess…clean it and get it over with. You’ll feel so much better afterwards.

Your goal should be to reduce friction in the process of building one of these towers. The less bottlenecks you have, the less friction.

Progressive Overload?

Every activity you do should build on the last activity.

One step forward and two steps back is not normal, unless you fuck up somewhere.

Why would someone build a house and tear down a wall after it’s all said and done?

Answer: they fucked up somewhere.

When this idea comes to time management strategies, you should have a series of orderly steps leading to a goal.

Let’s say you set aside an hour block of deep work towards building a web site.

In this time block, you’re working on coding the website.

During a coding session, you can’t leave a certain section of code half-finished and go to the next.

If you do this, you’ll wind up with jumbled code and a page that makes no sense.

My suggestion? Focus on completing each hour block as well as you can.

Make each block as perfect as possible before moving onto the next block. You do that through doing tasks in a conscious manner. How’s that for a time management technique?

Think Before You Leap

The worst waste of time is spending it on something you shouldn’t be spending it on at all.

Again, ask yourself: “does this bring me closer directly or indirectly to a goal of mine?” Now can you see why goal-setting is so essential?

Use the Pareto Principle to extract the most out of your time in combination with deep work. You’ll get so much done, you’ll be building all kinds of towers. All kinds.

Conclusion + Wrapping Up

Now, I want you to take charge. Here’s some action steps for you:

1. Write down ten things you’d want to achieve in the next year.

2. Circle the most important one.

3. Focus the majority of your time and energy on fulfilling that goal as perfectly as possible.

4. Write down what needs to be done throughout the year, months, and weeks to make those goals a reality.

5. Make those goals a priority. If you want to lose weight or gain muscle, you should be working out first thing in the morning, so it doesn’t get lost in the mix of the day or fall victim to excuses.

That’s it. That’s all you’ve got to do. Easier said than done, but this will exponentially increase your results.

This is how you work “smarter, not harder”. This is how you actually move the needle and get more results in a year than most people can get in five years.

My main question for you is: will you do it?

And if you want a start-to-finish blueprint for productivity that you can use, check out the course Cornerstone. Productivity is a central module in the course and it’s chock full of strategies, tactics, and mindsets I haven’t shared here.

If you want to jumpstart your productivity, then hit the resource below.