One of the most powerful of all words in time management is the word no! Say it politely. Say it clearly so that there are no misunderstandings. Say no to anything that is not a high-value use of your time and your life.
Say it early and say it often. Remember that you have no spare time. Getting in requires getting out. Picking up means putting down. Creative procrastination is the act of thoughtfully and deliberately deciding upon the exact things you are not going to do right now, if ever. Procrastinate on Purpose Most people engage in unconscious procrastination. They procrastinate without thinking about it. You must avoid this common tendency at all costs.
Continually review your duties and responsibilities to identify time-consuming tasks and activities that you can abandon with no real loss. This is an ongoing responsibility for you that never ends. For example, a friend of mine was an avid golfer when he was single. He liked to golf three or four times a week, three to four hours each time.
Over a period of years, he started a business, got married, and had two children. Only by abandoning most of his golf games could he get his life back under control. Cut down on television watching and instead spend the time with your family, read, exercise, or do something else that enhances the quality of your life. Look at your work activities and identify the tasks that you could delegate or eliminate to free up more time for the work that really counts. Begin today to practice creative procrastination, to set posteriorities wherever and whenever you can.
This decision alone can enable you to get your time and your life under control. Examine each of your personal and work activities and evaluate it based on your current situation.
The more important and valuable a task is to you, the more likely you will be motivated to overcome procrastination and launch yourself into the job. Think on Paper The power of this technique lies in its simplicity. These items are the frogs of your life. Your A-1 task is your biggest, ugliest frog of all. But it has only mild consequences. These are the tadpoles of your work life.
Returning an unimportant telephone message or reviewing your e-mail would be a B task. The rule is that you should never do a B task when an A task is left undone. You should never be distracted by a tadpole when a big frog is sitting there waiting to be eaten. The rule is that you should delegate everything that someone else can do so that you can free up more time for the A tasks that only you can do.
This may be a task that was important at one time but is no longer relevant to you or anyone else. Often it is something you continue to do out of habit or because you enjoy it. But every minute that you spend on an E task is time taken away from a task or activity that can make a real difference in your life. After you have applied the ABCDE Method to your list, you will be completely organized and ready to get more important things done faster.
Use your willpower to get going and stay going on this one job, the most important single task you could possibly be doing. Your ability to think through and analyze your work list and determine your A-1 task is the springboard to higher levels of accomplishment and greater self-esteem, self-respect, and personal pride.
When you develop the habit of concentrating on your A-1, most important, activity—on eating your frog—you will start getting more done than any two or three people around you. Select your A-1 job or project and begin on it immediately. Discipline yourself to do nothing else until this one job is complete. After a month, you will have developed the habit of setting and working on your highest-priority tasks, and your future will be assured! As it happens, most people are not sure exactly why they are on the payroll.
But if you are not crystal clear about why you are on the payroll and what results you have been hired to accomplish, it is very hard for you to perform at your best, get paid more, and get promoted faster.
A key result area is an activity that is under your control. It produces an output that becomes an input or a contributing factor to the work of others.
Key result areas are similar to the vital functions of the body, such as those indicated by blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, and brain-wave activity. An absence of any one of these vital functions leads to the death of the organism.
By the same token, your failure to perform in a critical result area of your work can lead to the end of your job as well. These are the areas in which a manager must get results to succeed in his or her area of responsibility.
A weakness in any one of these areas can lead to under-achievement and failure as a manager. The key result areas of sales are prospecting, building rapport and trust, identifying needs, presenting persuasively, answering objections, closing the sale, and getting resales and referrals. Poor performance in any one of these key skills can lead to lower sales and sometimes the failure of a salesperson. Whatever you do, you must have certain essential skills for you to do your job in an excellent fashion.
These demands are constantly changing. But certain key results are central to your work and determine your success or failure in your job. What are they? Clarity Is Essential The starting point of high performance is for you to identify the key result areas of your work.
Discuss them with your boss. Make a list of your most important output responsibilities, and make sure that the people above you, on the same level as you, and below you are in agreement with it. This activity is the key to the entire sales process. Closing a sale is a key result area. When the sale is made, it triggers the activities of many other people to produce and deliver the product or service.
For a company owner or key executive, negotiating a bank loan may be a key result area. Where are you strong and where are you weak?
Where are you getting excellent results and where are you underperforming? Rule: Your weakest key result area sets the height at which you can use all your other skills and abilities. This rule says that although you could be exceptional in six out of your seven key result areas, poor performance in the seventh area will hold you back and determine how much you achieve with all your other skills. This weakness will act as a drag on your effectiveness and be a constant source of friction and frustration.
For example, delegating is a key result area for a manager. This skill is the key leverage point that enables a manager to manage, to get results through others. Poor delegation skills alone can lead to failure in the job. Poor Performance Produces Procrastination One of the major reasons for procrastination in the work-place is that people avoid jobs and activities in those areas where they have performed poorly in the past.
Instead of setting a goal and making a plan to improve in a particular area, most people avoid that area altogether, which just makes the situation worse. The reverse of this is that the better you become in a particular skill area, the more motivated you will be to perform that function, the less you will procrastinate, and the more determined you will be to get the job finished.
The fact is that everybody has both strengths and weaknesses. Refuse to rationalize, justify, or defend your areas of weakness. Instead, identify them clearly. Set a goal and make a plan to become very good in each of those areas. Just think! You may be only one critical skill away from top performance at your job.
Look into yourself for the answer. You probably know what it is. Ask your boss this question. Ask your coworkers. Ask your friends and your family.
The good news is that all business skills are learnable. If anyone else is excellent in that particular key result area, this is proof that you can become excellent as well, if you decide to.
One of the fastest and best ways to stop procrastinating and get more things done faster is for you to become absolutely excellent in your key result areas.
This can be as important as anything else you do in your life or your career. Identify the key result areas of your work. Write down the key results you have to get to do your job in an excellent fashion. Give yourself a grade from one to ten on each one.
And then determine the one key skill that, if you did it in an excellent manner, would help you the most in your work. Take this list to your boss and discuss it with him or her. Invite honest feedback and appraisal. You can get better only when you are open to the constructive input of other people. Talk them over with your spouse. Make a habit of doing this analysis regularly for the rest of your career.
Never stop improving. This decision alone can change your life. Your ability to accurately identify these three key tasks and then to focus on them most of the time is essential for you to perform at your best. Let me tell you a true story. This sounded completely unrealistic, but I was willing to give it a try.
I came up with seventeen tasks that I was responsible for. My problem was that I was completely overwhelmed with work. I was working ten to twelve hours per day, six days per week, and not spending enough time with my husband and my two young children. You said that fully 90 percent of the value that you contribute to your company is contained in those three tasks, whatever they are.
Everything else you do is either a support task or a complementary task that could probably be delegated, downsized, outsourced, or eliminated. This was on a Friday. I told him that I needed his help in delegating and outsourcing all my work except for those three key tasks. I felt that if I could work on those three tasks exclusively, all day long, I could more than double my contribution to the company.
Then I said to him that if I doubled my contribution, I would like to be paid twice as much. These are the three most important things that you do in this company—and the three things that you do the best. I will help you to delegate and downsize all these other minor tasks to free you up to work full-time on these three key tasks.
And if you double your contribution, I will pay you twice as much. He helped me delegate and assign my minor tasks so I could concentrate on my top three jobs. As a result, I doubled my output over the next thirty days, and he doubled my income. Not only that, but instead of working ten and twelve hour days, I work from to and spend time in the evenings and on the weekends with my husband and my children. Focusing on my key tasks has transformed my life.
If you want to increase your rewards, you must focus on increasing the value of what you do. You must dedicate yourself to contributing more results to your company. And three key tasks always contribute the most. The Quick List Method Here is an exercise that we use with our coaching clients very early in the process.
And this is as it should be. These are the three most important areas of life. If you give yourself a grade on a scale of one to ten in each of these three areas, you can immediately identify where you are doing well in life and where you need some improvement. Try it yourself and see.
The answers can be quite revealing. Later in our coaching program, we expand this exercise by asking the following questions: 1. What are your three most important business or career goals right now? What are your three most important family or relationship goals right now? What are your three most important financial goals right now? What are your three most important health goals right now? What are your three most important personal and professional development goals right now?
What are your three most important social and community goals right now? What are your three biggest problems or concerns in life right now? When you force yourself to ask and answer each of these questions in thirty seconds or less, you will often be amazed at the answers. Whatever your answers, they will usually be an accurate snapshot of your true situation in life at the moment.
These answers will tell you what is really important to you. While you are setting goals and priorities, getting organized, concentrating single-mindedly on one task at a time, and disciplining yourself to complete your most important tasks, you must never forget that your ultimate goal is to live a long, happy, and healthy life.
Time Management Is a Means to an End The main reason to develop time management skills is so that you can complete everything that is really important in your work and free up more and more time to do the things in your personal life that give you the greatest happiness and satisfaction.
The critical determinant of the quality of your relationships is the amount of time that you spend face-to-face with the people you love, and who love you in return. Rule: It is the quality of time at work that counts and the quantity of time at home that matters.
Work All the Time You Work To keep your life in balance, you should resolve to work all the time you work. When you go to work, put your head down and work the whole time.
Start a little earlier, stay a little later, and work a little harder. Every minute that you spend in idle chitchat with coworkers is time taken away from the work that you must accomplish if you want to keep your job. Even worse, time that you waste at work often has to be taken away from the members of your family.
You have to either stay late or take work home and work in the evenings. You have to do it all the time. You never reach a point where you have attained it perfectly. You have to work at it. The more time you spend face-to-face with the people you love, the happier you will be. Determine the three most important tasks that you do in your work. Identify your three most important goals in each area of your life.
Organize them by priority. Make plans for their accomplishment, and work on your plans every single day. You will be amazed at what you achieve in the months and years ahead. MCCAY One of the best ways for you to overcome procrastination and get more things done faster is to have everything you need at hand before you begin. When you are fully prepared, you are like a cocked gun or an archer with an arrow pulled back taut in the bow.
You just need one small mental push to get started on your highest value tasks. This is like getting everything ready to prepare a complete meal, such as a big frog. You set all the ingredients out on the counter in front of you and then begin putting the meal together, one step at a time. Gather all the information, reports, details, papers, and work materials that you will require to complete the job. Have them at hand so you can reach them without getting up or moving much. Be sure that you have all the writing materials, computer disks, access codes, e-mail addresses, and everything else you need to start working and continue working until the job is done.
Set up your work area so that it is comfortable, attractive, and conducive to working for long periods. Especially, make sure that you have a comfortable chair that supports your back and allows your feet to rest flat on the floor. Create a Comfortable Workspace The most productive people take the time to create a work area where they enjoy spending time.
One of the great techniques for overcoming procrastination eating frogs is for you to get everything that you need to work completely ready, in advance. When everything is laid out neatly and in sequence, you will feel much more like getting on with the job. Los Angeles attracts people from all over America who dream of writing a successful movie script and selling it to one of the studios.
They move to Los Angeles and work at low-level jobs for years while they dream of writing and selling a popular script. Launch toward Your Dreams Once you have completed your preparations, it is essential that you launch immediately toward your goals. Get started. Do the first thing, whatever it is. Be prepared to fail over and over before you get it right.
The biggest enemies we have to overcome on the road to success are not a lack of ability and a lack of opportunity but fears of failure and rejection and the doubts that they trigger. The way you develop the courage you need is to act as if you already had the courage and behave accordingly.
Take the First Step When you sit down with everything in front of you, ready to go, assume the body language of high performance. Sit up straight; sit forward and away from the back of the chair. One of the best ways to eat a large frog is for you to take it one bite at a time. By that time, the desert had been abandoned by the French for years, and the original refueling stations were empty and shuttered. More than 1, people had perished in the crossing of that stretch of the Sahara in previous years.
Often, drifting sands had obliterated the track across the desert, and the travelers had gotten lost in the night, never to be found again alive. To counter this lack of features in the terrain, the French had marked the track with black, fifty-five-gallon oil drums every five kilometers, which was exactly the distance to the horizon, formed by the curvature of the earth.
And that was all we needed to stay on course. All we had to do was to steer for the next oil barrel. Your job is to go as far as you can see. You will then see far enough to go further. Financial independence is achieved by saving a little money every single month, year after year.
Select any goal, task, or project in your life on which you have been procrastinating and make a list of all the steps you will need to take to eventually complete the task. Then take just one step immediately. Sometimes all you need to do to get started is to sit down and complete one item on the list. And then do one more, and so on.
You will be amazed at what you eventually accomplish. Learn what you need to learn so that you can do your work in an excellent fashion. The better you become at eating a particular type of frog, the more likely you are to just plunge in and get it done.
Continually upgrade your skills in your key result areas. Remember, however good you are today, your knowledge and skills are becoming obsolete at a rapid rate. Personal and professional improvement is one of the best time savers there is.
The better you are at a key task, the more motivated you are to launch into it. The better you are, the more energy and enthusiasm you have. Identify the most important things you do, and then make a plan to continually upgrade your skills in those areas. Refuse to allow a weakness or a lack of ability in any area to hold you back. Everything is learnable. And what others have learned, you can learn as well.
I soon realized that I had to learn to touch-type if I was ever going to write and rewrite a page book. So I bought a touch-typing program for my computer and practiced for twenty to thirty minutes every day for three months. With this additional skill, I have been able to write more than forty books that have now been published all over the world. You can become a touch typist if necessary. You can learn to speak in public.
These are all skills you can acquire as soon as you decide to and make them a priority. Get up a little earlier in the morning and read for thirty to sixty minutes in a book or magazine that contains information that can help you to be more effective and productive at what you do. Second, take every course and seminar available on the key skills that can help you. Attend the conventions and business meetings of your profession or occupation.
Go to the sessions and workshops. Sit up front and take notes. Purchase the audio recordings of the programs. Dedicate yourself to becoming one of the most knowledgeable and competent people in your field. Third, listen to audio programs in your car.
The average car owner sits behind the wheel to 1, hours each year while driving from place to place. Turn driving time into learning time. The better you become, the more capable you will be of doing even more in your field. The more you learn, the more you can learn. Just as you can build your physical muscles through physical exercise, you can build your mental muscles with mental exercises. And there is no limit to how far or how fast you can advance except for the limits you place on your own imagination.
Become a lifelong student of your craft. School is never out for the professional. Identify the key skills that can help you the most to achieve better and faster results. Whatever they are, set a goal, make a plan, and begin developing and increasing your ability in those areas. Decide to be the very best at what you do! There are frogs you can eat, or learn to eat, that can make you one of the most important people in your business or organization.
There are certain things that you can do, or learn to do, that can make you extraordinarily valuable to yourself and to others.
Your job is to identify your special areas of uniqueness and then to commit yourself to becoming very, very good in those areas.
Your ability to work enables you to bring tens of thousands of dollars into your life every year by simply applying your knowledge and skills to your world. This is your ability to eat specific frogs faster and better than others.
You could lose everything you own—your house, your car, your job, your bank account—but as long as you still had your earning ability, you could make it all back and more besides. Take stock of your unique talents and abilities on a regular basis. What is it that you do especially well? What are you good at? Looking back at your career, what has been most responsible for your success in life and work to date?
What have been the most significant frogs you have eaten in the past? What is it that you enjoy the most about your work? What kind of frogs do you most enjoy eating? The very fact that you enjoy something means that you probably have within yourself the capability to be excellent in that area.
One of your great responsibilities in life is for you to decide for yourself what you really love to do and then to throw your whole heart into doing that special thing very, very well. Look at your various tasks and responsibilities.
What is it that you do that gets you the most compliments and praise from other people? Successful people are invariably those who have taken the time to identify what they do well and most enjoy. You cannot do everything, but you can do those few things in which you excel, the few things that can really make a difference.
What do I enjoy the most about my work? What has been most responsible for my success in the past? If I could do any job at all, what job would it be? Develop a personal plan to prepare yourself to do your most important tasks in an excellent fashion. This is the key to unlocking your personal potential. Your job is to identify it clearly. What is holding you back? What sets the speed at which you achieve your goals? What determines how fast you move from where you are to where you want to go?
Whatever you have to do, there is always a limiting factor that determines how quickly and well you get it done. Your job is to study the task and identify the limiting factor or constraint within it. You must then focus all of your energies on alleviating that single choke point.
Identify the Limiting Factor In virtually every task, large or small, a single factor sets the speed at which you achieve the goal or complete the job. What is it? Concentrate your mental energies on that one key area. This can be the most productive use of your time and talents.
This constraint may be a person whose help or decision you need, a resource that you require, a weakness in some part of the organization, or something else.
But the limiting factor is always there, and it is always your job to find it. For example, the purpose of a business is to create and keep customers. It may be the marketing, the level of sales, or the sales force itself.
It may be the costs of operation or the methods of production. The success of the company may be determined by the competition, the customers, or the current marketplace. One of these factors, more than anything else, determines how quickly the company achieves its goals of growth and profitability. The accurate identification of the limiting factor in any process and the focus on that factor can usually bring about more progress in a shorter period than any other single activity.
This means that 80 percent of the constraints, the factors that are holding you back from achieving your goals, are internal. They are within yourself—within your own personal qualities, abilities, habits, disciplines, or competencies. Or they are contained within your own company or organization. Only 20 percent of the limiting factors are external to you or to your organization. Only 20 percent are on the outside in the form of competition, markets, governments, or other organizations.
Your key constraint can be something small and not particularly obvious. Sometimes you have to make a list of every step in a process and examine every activity to determine exactly what is holding you back.
Sometimes a single negative perception or objection on the part of customers can be slowing down the entire sales process. Sometimes the absence of a single feature can be holding back the growth of sales of a product or service line. Look into your company honestly. In your own life, you must have the honesty to look deeply into yourself for the limiting factor or limiting skill that sets the speed at which you achieve your own personal goals.
You can end up solving the wrong problem. A major corporation, a client of mine, was experiencing declining sales. They spent an enormous amount of money reorganizing the management and retraining the salespeople. They later found that the primary reason that sales were down was a mistake made by an accountant who had accidentally priced their products too high relative to their competition in the marketplace. Once the corporation revamped its pricing, its sales went back up and it returned to profitability.
It propels you into following through and completing the job. And there is always something. Often, alleviating a key constraint or limiting factor is the most important frog you could eat at that moment.
Identify your most important goal in life today. What one career accomplishment would have the greatest positive impact on your work life? Determine the one constraint, internal or external, that sets the speed at which you accomplish this goal. What is it in me that is holding me back? Do anything, but get started. The problem is that no one is coming to the rescue. These people are waiting for a bus on a street where no buses pass.
And that is what most people do. Only about 2 percent of people can work entirely without supervision. To reach your full potential, you must form the habit of putting the pressure on yourself and not waiting for someone else to come along and do it for you. You must choose your own frogs and then make yourself eat them in their order of importance.
Lead the Field See yourself as a role model for others. Raise the bar on yourself. The standards you set for your own work and behavior should be higher than anyone else could set for you. Make it a game with yourself to start a little earlier, work a little harder, and stay a little later. Always look for ways to go the extra mile, to do more than you are paid for. You increase your self-esteem whenever you go beyond the point where the average person would normally quit.
Create Imaginary Deadlines One of the best ways for you to overcome procrastination is by working as though you had only one day to get your most important jobs done. Imagine each day that you have just received an emergency message and that you will have to leave town tomorrow for a month.
If you had to leave town for a month, what would you make absolutely sure that you got done before you left? Whatever your answer, go to work on that task right now. Another way to put pressure on yourself is to imagine that you just received an all-expenses-paid one-week vacation at a beautiful resort as a prize, but you will have to leave tomorrow morning on the vacation or it will be given to someone else.
Whatever it is, start on that one job immediately. Successful people continually put the pressure on themselves to perform at high levels. Unsuccessful people have to be instructed and supervised and pressured by others.
Book excerpt: It's time to stop procrastinating and get more of the important things done! After all, successful people don't try to do everything. They focus on their most important tasks and get those done. They eat their frogs. There's an old saying that if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you're done with the worst thing you'll have to do all day.
Discipline yourself to take it just one step at a time. Your job is to go as far as you can see. You will then see far enough to go further. The next step will soon become clear to you. Make a list of all the steps you will need to take to complete the task. Then, just start and complete one item on the list. And then one more, and so on. You can achieve financial independence by saving every single month, year after year. You become healthier by eating a little less and exercising a little more, day after day.
Form the habit of putting the pressure on yourself, and not waiting for someone else to come along and do it for you. Choose your own frogs and then make yourself eat them in their order of importance. The standards you set for your own work and behavior should be higher than anyone else could set for you. If you had to leave town for a month, what would you absolutely make sure got done before you left?
Whatever it is, go to work on that task right now. Set deadlines and sub-deadlines on every task. Write out every step of a major job or project before you begin. Then determine how many minutes and hours you will need to complete each phase.
Schedule blocks on your daily and weekly calendars to work only on these tasks. The raw materials of personal performance are your physical, mental and emotional energies. To be productive and happy, guard and nurture your energy levels at all times. To perform at your best, you must become your own personal cheerleader. You must develop a routine of coaching yourself and encouraging yourself to play at the top of your game.
It is not what happens to you but your perception that determines how you feel. Continually visualize your goals and talk to yourself in a positive way.
Creative procrastination is putting off eating smaller or less ugly frogs. Since you must procrastinate anyway, decide today to procrastinate on low-value activities. Say it early and say it often see Essentialism. Practice zero-based thinking on every part of your life. Work at scheduled times on large tasks. Important work requires large chunks of unbroken time to complete see Deep Work. Plan your day in advance and schedule blocks of time to work on a particular task.
They are like work appointments with yourself. Discipline yourself to keep them. During this block, turn off your phone, cut all distractions and work non-stop. Make every minute count. Use travel and transition time to complete small chunks of larger tasks. Successful people get themselves into this state far more often than the average. Resolve today to develop a sense of urgency in everything you do. If you a tendency to procrastinate in one area, make a decision to develop the habit of fast action in that area.
When you see an opportunity or a problem, take action immediately. When given a task or responsibility, do it quickly and report back fast. Persistence is actually self-discipline in action.
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