36 Tony Robbins Time Management Tips and Quotes

Tony Robbins Tips for Better Time Management

There is often a real disconnect between how we treat time versus how we treat money.

We’ve all heard, “time is money” or “time is the most valuable thing” but do our day to day actions reflect this reality.

There’s some inner conflict.

We’ll easily squander 6 or 7 hours a day (49 hours a week), but God forbid we lose a $50.00 bill, our day would be ruined.

As Tony says in Tip #23, “It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.”

Let’s explore and rewire our relationship with time and learn how we can get more done in less. As Jim Rohn says, “It’s not the hours you put in, it’s what you put in the hours that makes all the difference.”

This is how a single man; Tony Robbins can own 31 companies and actively manage 12. He’s mastered time. If we want to improve in any area of life we should turn to those who’ve already done it.

There’s a lot of different strategies here, I’d advise picking a few to experiment with and see what works with you and your schedule.

Time Management Quotes Tony Robbins

“I always tell people, tell me your schedule, and they’ll go, well, you know, I go to work and I work from 9:00 to 5:00 and I come home I’m exhausted. And so, you know when am I going to start a business? I said, well, what about the other eight hour shift?”

In a lecture, Tony talks about what was required of him early in his career.

He liked working as a janitor because it gave him the freedom to listen to audio and feed his mind.

He turned that dead time into something productive.

Also, he got a job that paid him for the result – if he finished cleaning earlier he got paid as if he worked the full 10:00pm-2:00am.

In the talk Tony goes onto describe what’s sometimes necessary to achieve financial independence.

Here’s a transcript of how he describes what was required:

“But I worked 8:00am to 5:00pm and literally I’d come home, I get a bite to eat, and then I start my work at 6:00p.m or 6:30pm and I go until 2:00 a.m. I’d get another seven or eight hours in. And that’s how I built everything at the beginning. That’s honestly what’s required. And to not do that is to cheat yourself because in the end. What we get will never make us happy. How many stars in your chart, how many Academy Awards, how much money you make, what makes us happiest? Progress. Progress equals happiness if you’re not growing, you’re dying inside. […] So the mindset has to be – this is the way I live going forward. I am a learning machine. And that makes people fulfilled because you become more. You’re not just doing something because you have or because you’re trying to keep up.”

“The path to success is to take massive, determined action.” – Tony Robbins

“Massive action is the cure all. Take massive action and effectively execute.”

Jim Rohn says strike while the emotion is hot.

When you have an idea take massive action before the energy dissipates. He calls it The Law of Diminishing Intent, which states: “The longer you wait to do something you should do now, the greater the odds that you will never actually do it.”

Jim Rohn cites that we should accept that you will be terrible in the beginning, that’s okay. You’ll make up in numbers what you lack in skill. As you get better you can scale back. Now, you can work smarter not harder. A salesperson may need to call 100 people to get 1 client. But as he refines his approach, he can call 10 or 20 to get the one.

His ratio will get better overtime.

“Most people fail in life because they major in minor things.” – Tony Robbins

Another remnant of a Jim Rohn quote, don’t major in minor things. If you spend major time on minor things, you’ll get lousy results. Warren Buffett has commented on this as well, as he puts it, “that which is not worth doing at all is not worth doing well.”

“Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year – and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!” – Tony Robbins

“One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power.” – Tony Robbins

“The biggest key to mastering your time is focus because where focus goes, energy flows.” – Tony Robbins

“You have to put focus in it and you also have to measure it.”

Defining categories (can be in business, relationship, technical skill, whatever it is define it).

Think of these as areas you’re going to focus on. Reason we call them categories is we don’t want to just focus on them. These are areas that we want to continuously focus on and do things to improve them.

Now, if you don’t come up with an area and actually define it, life tends to grab your focus. So, for example, in your personal life what would be an area that you would need to continuously focus on and continuously improve if your life’s going to work? One area of your life would have to be your physical vitality and health.

If you don’t take care of that, if you don’t focus on it, does it get better automatically? You and I both know the answer is no. You have to put focus in it and you also have to measure it.

The same is true of your finances. Finances don’t get better by just hoping, finances don’t get better without focusing on it. If we don’t focus on our finances, things tend to stay where they are, get worse.

Same thing is true of friendships and personal relationships.

Unless you come up with those categories, your focus will go to the urgencies of the moment and you’ll be pulled out of the zone and you won’t get the results or the fulfillment you deserve.

Imma set specific goals in each of these areas. And when I go to plan my day, instead of saying what do I need to do, I’m going to say what’s most important for me to achieve.

“You cannot manage what you can’t measure. So you’ve got to stop and measure it.”

Context – Tony shares a lesson he learned early in life from a mentor which he has kept with him ever since.

Tony, whatever you do in your life, whenever you find you’re going to go someplace where there are some great ideas and great resources, he said, always make sure you take a pen and paper, because what you want to do is you want to be able to capture those ideas and cement them to paper so you can review them in the future.

“Keep a journal.

And I would highly encourage you by the time you come to the next management session or maybe even during a break today, if you wanted to. Get yourself a hardbound journal. Hardbound journal, meaning not a loose-leaf.

You’ll start to accumulate a wealth of knowledge and ability and skills and resources that not only will help you, but you can help other people as well. I think one is it gives you a chance to really see how much you’ve grown because how many of you have kids.”

Time to maximize what matters most to you. For most people….”Killing time is not murder, it’s suicide!”

The three questions of RPM system to direct your focus:

Ask yourself these three questions, before I tell you the three questions, let me tell you what anyone who succeeds knows. You find anyone successful in any area of life: business, finance, emotion, and they’re happy, they’re fulfilled.

A life of fulfillment is one in which we put urgency in its place and remember that the ultimate target is to spend our times doing the things that are most important to us.

Here’s the 3 parts to the RPM system.

1. They know what they really want. Most people don’t know what they really want. They don’t know what we call their outcome, their result. And we don’t know what your outcome is. We don’t know what you really want. Life can be really frustrating. Life becomes a bunch of things you have to do and it doesn’t give you any juice. You don’t have a clear direction for your life. And without a clear direction, very often you end up on the rocks of life. It just you just don’t have the guidance. You don’t have that sense of my life has some kind of meaning.

1. The second thing – people who succeed know not only what they want, but why they want it. Because the reasons are what drive us as human beings, that sense of purpose. That’s where the emotion is. That’s where the juice is, not just getting a target, but knowing why they want that target. That’s what will get you to have the energy to actually follow through.

1. Third question – What do I need to do to make that happen? And people that know what they really want and why they want it can usually figure out how to make it happen because they got enough drive and enough clarity about what they want.

“Everyone I know who succeeds their work has become play for them. They have really found a way to enjoy what they do because they found an empowering purpose.”

“The only difference between work and play is your purpose. A lot of people, when they’re playing, do things that are actually hard work, but they don’t call it hard work because they say it’s fun because they decided, I want to do this.

This is a cool thing.

This is competitive or this is creative, or this is strong.”

“Put the stakes in the ground to say these are the most important things in my life and I’m going to focus on them daily.”

“I don’t want your life to be about being a human doing. I want to be a human being where you experience what you really deserve, what you really want.”

Tony says, “If you focus on the to do list, guess what you get? More to do list, more lack of fulfillment, more things that have to do. I don’t want your life to be about being a human doing. I want to be a human being where you experience what you really deserve, what you really want.”

There’s one talk with Jordan Peterson where he talks about forming a schedule. In this talk Dr. Peterson tells his students to form a day that you can be proud of. Most people when they form a schedule just shoot themselves in foot by listing all the things they dread doing. Obviously, you’re an adult so there will be some things that take priority, you have to be responsible. But manage your schedule such that you can be happy with the result.

Whether you’re feeling fulfilled or whether you’re feeling frustrated to a great extent has to do with where do you spend your time, what zone, what dimension of mind, emotion and focus do you spend your time in?

For example, do you spend a lot of your time really looking for distraction, looking for a way to escape the stresses that are already there in your life?

Or do you spend more of your time getting seduced by things that really aren’t important? But they appear to be urgent, and you kind of delude yourself and saying, well, I got to do this right now and really, truly, you don’t have to do it right now, but you add that additional stress.

Or do you spend your time in drama, where you’re doing things that really are important and they’re really urgent. You’ve got all these deadlines that have to be met right now? Maybe some of the deadlines that are stressing you out now because things weren’t handled earlier on? Or have you managed to spend the majority of your time in your life and what I call the zone, the zone of fulfillment. That dimension where you were doing things that are really important but not really urgent.

Where do most people spend their time? It’s in escape. It’s doing things that are not urgent and they’re not important. I call this the dimension of distraction. Or for short, you can just call it the escape dimension. This is what happens for most people. They have all these goals and desires. They don’t know how to manage them all. So they look to escape, how? Drinks and alcohol, go hang out, go watch television, do something that for the moment is escape. Now is that all bad and all wrong, the answers no. But if you spend the majority of your time there, you won’t be fulfilled as a person and your stress will actually increase.

The dimension of delusion. That’s because this is the area where you start doing things that are urgent but they’re really not that important. And what fits in this category? Emails. I mean, these days, all somebodies got to do is type something and they can send it to 50 people with one keystroke.

– A lot of it is just things that seem important but really aren’t important at all. They’re just urgent because there’s this demand that says, handle me. I’m here on your screen. The more classic example is the telephone. I mean, the phone rings and you’re in the middle of something really important and now you run to grab it and break the pattern of your focus and your feelings.

17. Avoiding the dimension of demand. (3/4)

The dimension of demand. That’s where something says, we got to do this right now. You’re going have to spend time there. A good portion of your life, if you’re an achiever, spent there. But if you spend too much area, too much time, too much focus, too much emotion in the area called demand in that dimension, you’re going to be one stressed character. So you’ve got to have a certain percentage of time here, but not more than you need. Life will give you plenty of urgent and important things to deal with without you having to doing your part.

Where do you want to spend the majority of your time? You want to hit the bull’s eye as often as possible. That bullseye is the dimension of fulfillment. That’s when you’re doing things that are really important but they’re not urgent right now. An example of what fits that category is your health. Most people wait till they have a health problem and try and deal with it, and very often it’s too late. We’ve got to make that something that even though it’s not urgent, we make important. The secret here is to identify where do you spend your time?

“The higher your energy level, the more efficient your body. The more efficient your body, the better you feel, and the more you will use your talent to produce outstanding results.” – Tony Robbins

“Passion is the genesis of genius.” – Tony Robbins

If you have emotion (meaning your passionate) you can find away to be resourceful. It’s the beginning of genius. It’s like the Napoleon hill quote, “The starting point of all achievement is desire.”

“The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose.”

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.

“In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.”

“A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.”

When you determine what you want and have a clear purpose in mind, you can focus on that purpose so energy flows toward it.

Not all time is the same, depending on what types of activities we spend it on.

Just like money or calories, how we spend our time makes a huge difference in both the results we achieve and in how we experience life along the way. The secret to getting the best return on investment of your time is learning to balance urgency and importance.

Tony continues, “Urgency is an artificial mental construct that’s up to each of us to tame. When you’re doing the things that are most important, but not urgent, you’re in The Zone: The Dimension of Fulfillment.”

“Activity without purpose is the drain to a life of fulfillment.”

“Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant.”

“The only impossible journey is the one you never begin.”

“Success is doing what you want, when you want, where you want, with whom you want and as much as you want.”

Success, productivity, or time management is not about having your scheduled pack from 9am-9pm squeezing what you can out of every second of every moment.

Tony says, “when you really get a grip on time you own it.”

Jocko Willink has a book titled, “Discipline = freedom” which I believe emobdies this message perfectly. You wake up early because you choose to, not because you have to.

“If you talk about it, it’s a dream. If you envision it, it’s possible. If you schedule it, it’s real.”

“Deciding to commit yourself to long-term results rather than short-term fixes is as important as any decision you’ll make in your lifetime.”

“If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve.” – Tony Robbins

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.”

If Jim Rohn were still around, he would remind you that you’re not a tree. Good advice Jim! See humans unlike trees are capable of change. If you want to see what the next five years look like it’s not hard. Just look at the past five, i.e. unless you change or don’t change. It’s choice time.

“Your life changes the moment you make a new, congruent and committed decision.”

This last quote also reminds me of something Jim taught me.

You can make a decision to change or you can not. The choice is yours to make. But know the decisions you make will effect the rest of your life, not to think so is naïve.

Not making a decision is a decision, one which you will have to bear the consequences of.

He would also say, “what’s easy to do is also easy not to do”.