In 1993, I was introduced to the Franklin Planner system. This beautiful leather-bound time management system contained everything needed to run your day on two pages.

What made the Franklin Planner system so practical was its layout: a to-do list on the right, a daily calendar next to it, and a space for notes. It was all there, neatly organised and ready to use.

Yet, I didn’t really learn to use it properly until I was sent on a course. Over two days, I attended the Franklin Covey Time Management workshop, where I learned the principles of time management.

Before I attended the course, I had an impressive-looking diary. It looked cool and impressed people, but all I did was write out the things I thought I needed to do and put my appointments in. It was just a very expensive to-do list and diary.

After attending the course, my life changed. From the moment I returned home, I set about developing my governing values — most of which I still follow today thirty years later! — I began the daily practice of “planning and solitude,” planning the week on a Sunday and keeping all my project support materials in the projects section at the back of the planner.

After about a year, I began to trust the system and myself to record everything in my planner.

Yet, it took me around six months to learn to use my planner properly. There was the development of my governing values — an exercise you cannot do in five minutes — building the habit of doing the fifteen minutes of planning and solitude every morning and managing my monthly index (around thirty minutes every week).

From this period of my life, I learned that while tools help, they do not make you better at managing time or being more productive. There’s a lot more to it than that.

Trusting your system is the most important thing, but you won’t trust your system if you are uncertain that what you spend time doing today is what you should be doing. You will only know that after you have established what is important to you as an individual.

This was why one of the first online courses I created was my Time And Life Mastery course. While it has changed quite a bit since the first version in 2017, I realised that to help people master the art of time management and productivity; it had to start with you. What you wanted and what was important to you.

Forty years ago, Hyrum Smith and Stephen Covey set out the basic principles of modern time management. They are timeless, and they still apply today. Ignoring them and thinking all you need is the coolest new toy on the market and everything will work is a catastrophic error in judgment.

Fashions change. Principles don’t.

Homework.

Review your areas of focus. Are you living to the standards you set for yourself? If not, what can you do over the next few weeks to realign yourself with those standards?

(In Your Time Your Way, there is a whole chapter on building your areas of focus with multiple different examples to help you)

Further help.

This blog post on areas of focus will guide you in building your areas.

You can also download the free Areas of Focus Workbook here. This will give you a framework for developing your values.

If you want step-by-step help developing a system you trust and that will support you for many years to come, I strongly suggest you enrol in the Time and Life Mastery course. This is the modern-day equivalent of the workshop I attended in 1994, which completely changed my life.

There are still some places left in September’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop. These are going fast.

This workshop will introduce you to the principles, show you how to apply them to your daily life, and help you end the year with a time management and productivity system to prevent backlogs and overwhelm.