Robin Sharma Quote on Time Management and Prioritizing More Of What’s Important

“You must be ruthless with your time.  Learn to say no.  Having the courage to say no to the little things in life will give you the power to say yes to the big things.  Shut the door to your office when you need a few hours to work on that big case.  Don’t pick up the phone every time it rings.  It is there for your convenience, not the convenience of others.  Ironically, people will respect you more when they see that you are a person who values his time.  They will realize that your time is precious and they will value it.”

Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

Beyond the Quote (285/365)

The first thing you need to figure out is which things are “small” and which things are “big.” If you don’t know the hierarchy of your tasks, how can you prioritize? How can you know what to say “no” to and what to say “yes” to if you don’t know where anything stands as matters of importance? Let’s take a closer look at how you might figure it out.

One of the first examples that Sharma give us above is saying “yes” to the big case and saying “no” to the phone every time it rings. This is learning how to prioritize your deep work over urgent, but likely unimportant tasks. He reminds us that our phones are there for our convenience—not the convenience of others. Makes sense, right? And while that may be easy to agree with, very few people I know embody that idea and put it to practice. Their phones are CONSTANTLY ringing, buzzing, beeping, notifying, and calling, calling, calling for attention. How is that ever convenient?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG), the 107th Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who recently passed away, made an interesting remark on this topic. One of the first things many clerks heard from RBG when they came for a job/ internship is that the most important job requirement is that they treat her two secretaries well. ‘There was one law clerk applicant who came to interview with me—top rating at Harvard—who treated my secretaries with disdain,’ RBG recalled. ‘As if they were just minions. So that is one very important thing—how you deal with my secretaries. They are not hired help. As I tell my clerks, ‘if push came to shove, I could do your work—but I can’t do without my secretaries.’”

Sounds counterintuitive, right? Wouldn’t law clerks be of more value to RBG than secretaries? Evidently, no. Why? Because her secretaries protect her time. Her secretaries were the ones who would filter all of the matters that came in through the phone and office and would prioritize, organize, discard, and delegate all of that information appropriately for RBG later. This way, rather than getting constantly interrupted (which is the enemy of deep work) she would be able to focus on what’s most important to her—the deep, important work.

While you may not be fortunate enough to have a secretary yourself, the principle is all the same. What systems/ filters do you have in place to protect your time? Do you allow distractions to run rampant on your life or are you in control of your life and handle distractions on your own time? If you’re not in control of your time, you have to ask yourself, are you in control of your life? For, what is life but the result of how you spend your time?

It isn’t until our time is gone that we realize how valuable it really is. And it’s precisely when our time is gone that we look back and wish we had been more ruthless with it and learned to say “no” to more little things so that we could have said “yes” to more of the big things. What those things are, you have to figure out for yourself. Being accessible to every phone call might be a top priority for one person and absolutely not for another. The bottom line is to figure out how you can prioritize more time to do what’s important. And the best way to do that is to STOP doing things (or saying “yes” to things) that are less important.

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Read Next: Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix and How To Prioritize Your Tasks for a Better Life

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