Subject: Time Management 101 (for PU)
Author: Blackdragon

Time management is a life essential skill, not just a skill for PU. Without time management skills, the only thing you can hope to accomplish in your life is one of two possibilities:

1. Be really, really good in one area, and have the rest of your life suck. This describes most men.

Or

2. Be mediocre at lots of different things and be great at nothing. This describes most women. And many younger men.

If you want to be good in multiple areas, you must learn and master time management.

Time management is part of what I teach in my day job as a consultant, so I lucked out here. Because of time management, I am able to run a successful business that pays me good money (in which I consult, write, and do occasional public speaking), spend time with my kids, and have five hot, regular to semi-regular MLTR’s/FB’s. When I don’t have this many regular women, I place that “woman time” into sarging (which for me means online and daygame).

Many books have been written on time management…I’m just going to pull those basic techniques that can be applied specifically to PU and, for those of you who do this and I know it’s not many, MLTR’s.

1. You must have a calendar, that must refer to and update at least every one to three days. If you don’t have some kind of calendar system, you are hopeless. Get one and start using it, right now. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care if it’s written in a day planner or on your computer or on your Blackberry. Pick a system that seems compatible with your personally and start using it.

Now, some people have a calendar, but never look at it. They whip it out, put down some appointments, and then don’t look at it for a week. Not gonna fly. If you’re busy like me, you’re referring to your calendar probably two or three times a day. If you’re not as busy, you can get away with referring to it once every three days. Longer than three days is not effective.

2. Decide what you are going to eliminate. One of the keys to personal effectiveness is to decide in advance what you are NOT going to do. What you are NOT going to be good at. What you are going to GIVE UP. This is very tough, but it must be done. You cannot do it all, and you cannot have it all. Ever. To be good at some exciting things, you must choose to eliminate other exciting things from you life. I know it sucks. Suck it up and do it.

For example, I make a lot of money, and I fuck lots of very hot women, and I have two children who love me very much. But I have virtually zero friends. And I have virtually zero regular hobbies. And I’m overweight (though that’s slowly getting better). Now, I’m a Myers Briggs INTJ personality type, so this setup is all OK with me, but you see my point here.

If I wanted to make a lot of money AND fuck lots of hot chicks AND have a really cool social life with friends AND be a good father AND have lots of fun hobbies AND have 8% body fat with ripped muscles, then I guarantee you one of two things:

A. I would make far, far less money than I currently make.

B. I would be no where NEAR as good at PU as I am now.

Under those conditions of trying to do everything, I would be mediocre at lots of things, instead of really good at two things (money and women) and pretty good at one thing (being a dad).

As I read posts from some of the younger guys, I get the distinct feeling that they are following the path of “mediocre at lots of things”. This is not, can cannot be, the path to mastery. In PU, or anything else.

3. Decide upon your time categories. Once you’ve eliminated the cool stuff you aren’t going to focus on, you must categorize the ways in which you need to spend your time to reach your objectives in the areas you DO want. I’ll give you my categories from my life, but yours are going to be different. As a matter of fact, if you don’t run your own business, you’ll probably have less categories than I have, which helps.

I spend my time in one of 9 ways (in no particular order, because they are all equally important):

Marketing (marketing my business)
Children (face-time with my kids)
Women (either sarging or face-time with dates, MLTR’s, or FB’s)
Client Work (working for my clients)
Writing (writing articles and books I sell in my consulting industry)
Financial Management (bookkeeping, balancing the checkbook, reviewing my budget, dealing with taxes, etc)
Cleaning (this can mean clearing off my desk, cleaning my kitchen or deleting old crap off my computer)
Reading (fiction, non-fiction for my business, or self-improvement…mASF included)
Fitness (exercise, which for me is only about for about 30 minutes 4 or 5 times a week)

Those are all the areas, and the only areas, in which I should be spending my time. I know that if I’m spending time outside of any of these areas, I am wasting time. For example, notice “Watching TV” isn’t in there anywhere. I literally have no TV signal coming into my house. Why? Watching TV takes time away from my objectives, so I don’t do it. That’s also why there are no categories like “working on the car” or “karate” or “going to concerts” or “hanging out with friends”. I would much rather make piles of money and fuck HB9’s than do any of these things. But that’s me.

Now again, you’re not me, so if you consider hanging out with friends very important to you, that’s fine. Then by all means, have a “Friends” category. This just means you must eliminate something else. See how these things all wrap together?

As I’ve said, likely you don’t run your own business, so you won’t have things like “Marketing” or “Writing”. But you will have a category called “Job”. At least, shit, I hope you do.

So the advantage in having categories is twofold: A) It tells you where to spend your time, and B) it defines for you exactly what “wasting time” means to you. Both of these are very valuable.

4. Schedule your categories in your calendar at least once every three days or so. Whip out your calendar, and start blocking out time for each of your categories. The first categories you put down in your calendar should be your job, followed by any scheduled appointments (like a doctor’s appointment). Whenever you have a scheduled appointment, try to attach that appointment to one of your categories. For example, if you have to pick your kids up from your ex at Friday at 5pm, that would be in the “Children” category. If you need to help your buddy move his old TV to the dump on Saturday at 2pm, that would be in the “Friends” category. A doctor’s appointment would be in no category, and thus technically is wasted time, but unavoidable wasted time (we’ll get to that in a minute).

Once you put down the scheduled stuff, you will then have large blocks of time in your schedule for everything else. Start filling up those blocks of time with all the rest of your categories. Make sure to block out time for EVERY SINGLE category, because every category is important. My personal goal is to address every single one of my categories at least once every 3 days (some are addressed more than once, like “Women”, some are addressed only once per 3 days, like “Financial Management”).

THINK before you schedule these things, because once you put it down, you are making an appointment with yourself, and you’re going to keep that fucking appointment no matter what. Treat it as if it’s an appointment with your boss. (Because it is.) If you put down something you’re not sure you’re going to “make”, then put it down for a different time.

Be sure to leave gaps in your schedule. Don’t schedule your categories wall-to-wall from 6am to 11pm. You need gaps to deal with emergences, unexpected occurrences, things taking longer than you planned, etc.

Of course, one of your categories had better be “Women” or “PUA” or whatever you want to call it. Schedule this in. If you’re already seeing a woman (or women), put that down in your schedule. If you’re a club game guy, schedule club gaming time. If you’re a daygame guy, schedule that. When I’m in sarging mode you can be damn sure I’m scheduling my online sarging time.

5. Follow your schedule. Make sure you refer to it often. Learn to make your schedule your master, not your whims or the whims of other people. This is one of the hardest habits to learn in life, but one of the most important. (And you’ll never be 100% perfect with it. That’s OK.)

6. What if “shit comes up”? It will. If what “comes up” is in one of your categories, that’s OK, take time and address it, or whip out your schedule and schedule a time to deal with it later.

If things are coming up routinely that are outside of your categories, that means your life is out of control. You need to man-up, and get control back. Do whatever you need to do, but do not let things regularly “come up” that are not in your categories! Non-category things that “come up” are only OK if they happen infrequently (like a doctor’s appointment). If they’re happening often, you’ve got big life problems that you need to deal with, or you’re never getting anywhere.

7. Never waste time unless it’s planned. Even the most disciplined, productive, successful people waste a little time now and then. It’s normal and human. But the successful people waste when they plan it in advance, on their terms.

I’ll use myself as an example again. For me, watching TV is a serious waste of time. It accomplishes nothing I want in life. So I don’t do it. But, I’m human, so I do allow myself to waste a little time now and then. I happen to love the TV show “Lost”. So, there are times, when all my work is done, and all my PU work is done, during one of my “gaps” in my schedule, I’ll hop on the internet and watch an episode of Lost. I’m wasting time, but I’m doing so on MY terms.

See how this is different then just coming home from work, plopping on the couch, and watching reruns of Seinfeld and Two and A Half Men for five hours like most Americans do?

8. Say NO. Whenever anyone asks you to do something in your work, in your family life, in your personal life, say NO. Be a prick, and say no. Everyone is constantly trying to give you shit to do. But it’s not your shit, it’s THEIR shit, and they’re trying to make it YOUR shit. You don’t need more shit. You have enough shit. People who say yes to everything never accomplish a damn thing in life. One of the biggest time management skills is the ability to learn to say NO.

9. Batch your tasks. All similar tasks should be done at the same time. This has direct application to PU which I’ll get to in a minute.

Example: How do most people open their mail? Here’s what they do:

A. Every single day, pull the mail out of their mailbox.
B. Standing at their mailbox, thumb through the letters.
C. If they get a letter they are really excited about, open it right there.
D. Take the big stack into the house.
E. Go through the stack of mail a second time, throwing away anything that is clearly crap.
F. Plop the big pile on their kitchen counter.
G. Pick up the first letter.
H. Open the envelope.
I. Throw away the stuff that’s clearly crap.
J. Read the letter (or bill, or whatever).
K. Do something with it (file it, hand it to someone else, whatever)
L. Pick up the next unopened letter on the pile
M. Go back to step H and repeat the process.

This is horribly inefficient and a huge waste of time. Let me show you how I open my mail:

A. Once every two weeks, or more, pull the stack of mail from my mailbox.
B. Take entire stack into the house without looking through it.
C. Stand over the trash can and toss anything that is clearly crap.
D. With a sharp letter opener, quickly slice through and open ALL the letters in the stack without looking to see what’s inside.
E. Quickly withdraw the contents of every envelope without looking at or evaluating the contents, trashing envelopes and anything that is clearly trash.
F. Now, one at a time, look at the contents of my mail and sort into piles based on what I need to do with them.

See how most people spend literally hundreds of hours fucking around with their mail, while I don’t? Because I batch each task. I don’t check my mail every day, I batch it once every other week. I don’t open each letter then read it. I open ALL the letters, then read ALL the letters.

This batching system should be applied to everything in your life. Appointments, email, phone calls, filing, cleaning, working, driving, running errands, you name it.

As a PU example, when I’m in full sarging mode, I can easily be working on 30 or more women at a time. I have women I need to email, some I need to call, some I need to text, some I need to send Facebook messages to, etc. So I will go into my email software and email all the women all the women I need to email, then I’ll pick up my phone and send 6 texts right there to all the women I need to text, etc. If I need to make four phone calls, I call all four women, one after the next. And I’m doing all of this during my scheduled “Woman” time. I am NOT doing this just because a woman has just called and left a VM that says “OMG, call me right back!”. No darling, unless it’s a medical emergency, you’re waiting until I can batch you with other phone calls to other women.

10. Buy, read, internalize, and practice, the following books:

Getting Things Done by David Allen (CRITICAL)

The Power of Less by Leo Babauta (CRITICAL)

7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey (an old book, and a harder read, but still CRITICAL)

The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (Not 100% on time management, but important)

While we’re at it, I’ve read hundreds of books on personal effectiveness and success, and have an extensive library. If I were to pick out the BEST, top three books I have ever read, the top three nonfiction books that have most defined my life, they would be:

Maximum Achievement by Brian Tracy

Winning Through Intimidation by Robert Ringer

How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World by Harry Browne

Those three books are life-changing. If you are a business owner, or plan to be, I would add one more:

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber

(One note: I just remembered, the Harry Browne book is no longer in print but still available used and as an ebook)

Anyway, I could write pages and pages more about the topic of time management, but these are the basics that should get you started.

-Blackdragon