Major Satisfactors = Major Success
A Unique New Way to Look at How We All Spend, Use and Waste Time that Leads to Greater Personal and Professional Success, Fulfillment, and Happiness
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This book has been “in progress” for nearly 20 years of my life, even though the concept for the book didn’t really become clear to me until just a couple of years ago. I myself had always been a time and project management “technician”, and sometimes became a bit too enamored with “the process” to appreciate the bigger picture of what time management was really supposed to be – a tool to help me live a life of purpose.
After many years of being “good” at time management, but not necessarily great at living a life of purpose, I decided to do something both a bit crazy and also absolutely necessary, and that was to walk away from my stable and sane career and take a swing for the fences. I left a fairly successful marketing and management career to do something completely different – start my own training and consulting company and work on writing a book.
Now, this wasn’t a total change of pace for me. As I was building my marketing/management career, I had this little side passion – time management – that took on a life of its own. Very early in my professional career, I had taken an intensive training program from time management guru David Allen, and found myself hooked on the topic. I shared this new passion with the people that I worked with, was invited to develop a little internal training program, had a successful first session, and then just never stopped giving programs. For the last 15 years.
I continued to study this topic – Dave Allen’s course was just the beginning. I began to read just about anything that I could grab on the topic – Stephen Covey, Spencer Johnson, Ken Blanchard, Alan Lakein, Tony Robbins, and more. In addition to my normal marketing/management responsibilities, I gave internal time management programs “on the side” for the companies I had worked for – The Fetzer Institute, Procter & Gamble, Michigan State University. I continued to add to and modify my training program on time management. And yet I still didn’t “get it”.
I was doing everything right – getting a lot done, towing the corporate line, playing the politics game, and developing a solid and reasonably successful career. But I was never really happy. The work was often empty to me. Except when I was giving my training programs. And then, to make things even more interesting, my wife and I had a child – a beautiful baby girl.
In that moment, I finally “got it”. I looked at her and realized that for her to have a chance to live a life of purpose, I needed to live a life of purpose too. Productive was no longer good enough – it had to mean something to me. And I looked back over my entire career, and my entire life for that matter. I thought about all of the truly successful people that I had worked for and with – the people that really “got it” – as well as the super successful people that I had studied and admired from afar. The keys to a successful life and effective time management from a more holistic perspective began to become very clear to me.
They had successful, fulfilling lives because every day they got up and did a whole bunch of what they loved (or at least liked a whole lot). And they didn’t spend their time doing a bunch of stuff that they didn’t enjoy, or that didn’t create real value. And I decided – for the first time in my 37 years of existence – to do the same.
I took these learnings and observations and created a new theory on how to think about and use time. I built it into my training programs, which really helped to elevate my programs into something both different and commercially viable. I started writing the theory, as well as teaching it to many different audiences. And my life of purpose began to take much sharper form. That is what is presented here.
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About the Book
Major Satisfactors = Major Success allows readers to make dramatic positive changes in their lives through a common-sense method for reviewing and revising how they use their time on a regular basis. This method explains the four basic ways we use our time, helping each of us make simple yet powerful distinctions in our time use, leading to greater personal success, fulfillment, and happiness.
George Beshara, author of the popular Managing My Life: Managing Change and Managing Stress series, had this to say,
“Randall Dean has simplified time management to some basic and essential concepts which we can all remember and can therefore use. This inspirational book will become a classic in the world of time and life management.”
About the Author
Randy Dean, author of Major Satisfactors = Major Success, is a leading expert in the field of time management training and consulting. Dean has 15 years of experience both using and teaching sophisticated time management strategies and related technology systems, from smaller entrepreneurial concerns to leading academic institutions to major corporations. He has taught programs on time management, advanced PDA usage, leading effective meetings, and managing information overload for organizations including Procter & Gamble, The Fetzer Institute, The Michigan Society of Association Executives, The Michigan Pharmacists Association, and the graduate business programs at Ohio State University, Purdue University, Michigan State University, and the University of Pittsburgh. More can be found on Randy and his training programs at http://www.randalldean.com.