Garland Coulson - Stop Wasting Time: End Procrastination in 5 Weeks with Proven Productivity Techniques

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CONTENTS

Why a Five-Week Program?

Lets be honest. This probably isnt the first book youve read on productivity or procrastination. Thats okayIm not offended that Im not your first. The truth is that all of us, even the most successful, are interested in learning how to be more productive.

Youve probably read a lot of books with great-sounding ideas that never resulted in the productivity breakthroughs you were looking for. That is why, instead of writing another ineffective book that will just sit on your shelf collecting dust, I developed a five-week program that you can actually implement and follow through on. Instead of just talking about how you could improve, this guide provides clear, step-by-step instructions to stop wasting time.

So, what business do I have writing about procrastination and why should you take my advice? These days, I work as a time management consultant, but I havent always been an expert on these matters. My time management journey started in my early twenties when I worked in a busy banking environment. I was a young, gung ho, low-level manager, fairly competent and hardworking but with mediocre time management skills. My time management wasnt so poor that it kept me from getting the job done, but my inability to make the most of my working hours prevented me from excelling.

Then, one Christmas, my manager gave me a lovely red leather day planner as a gift. As I assembled the pages in the binder, I was blown away by the brilliance and elegance of the planning system. In addition to a daily calendar with appointment slots, the calendar pages also had space for keeping track of calls to make, expenses, and tasks. There were even entire sections dedicated to goal-setting, client notes, meeting notes, and more. The level of organization this simple tool provided me was astounding, and it opened my mind to a whole new level of thinking about how I worked and how I organized my time.

From that moment, I was hooked. I became obsessed with learning about time management, and I voraciously devoured every book, article, and training program I could find on the subject. I listened to audio courses on time management in my car while commuting to work every day. I started helping my colleagues get organized and showed them how to use their time more effectively.

As my understanding deepened, my colleagues started coming to me for advice, and I eventually learned the lesson many other masters do: To truly understand something, you have to teach it. Teaching a topic requires breaking it down and distilling it into its purest, most powerful form so that you can help others understand the topic clearly and master it efficiently. I found that teaching others helped me incorporate the principles of time management into my life even faster. I soon began running in-house training workshops for companies I worked for and eventually started my own business teaching time management. Now I speak in front of and train thousands of people each year, and Im proud to say that I am affectionately known to my students and clients as Captain Time.

The techniques and strategies in this book arent just things Ive made up to sound catchy or seem clever. They are drawn from cutting-edge thinking in mindfulness practices and psychology. Everything I recommend here has been tested by researchers and proven to work. Further, I have personally tested and proven many of these techniques on my willing students and clients. Thousands of people have benefitted from these strategies, and their experiences have helped me refine how I use them.

Think of this five-week program as your own personal time management GPS. Your destination is a procrastination-free lifestyle, and Im going to give you the step-by-step driving directions to reach this goal. You will need to partner with me on this. The program wont magically cure you if you dont put in the work. But the beauty of this program is that theres not much to figure outI will tell you what to do and when to do it, and your main job will be setting aside time in your schedule to work on the program.

To find success, youll need about 20 minutes a day to complete the exercises and action steps included in the program. This may sound like a lot, but this time will largely be spent making to-do lists and building your daily scheduleproductive work you already need to do. This daily time investment will pay off, as it will save you much more than 20 minutes a day once you have your new productivity strategies in place and are using them as a regular part of your routine.