141 Life Management Tips

Contents

1. Your Time Management Style
2. Hold Regular Meeting
3. ACTION PLAN
4. Planning to Avoid Management by Crisis
5. Goal Setting and Time Management
6. Where Is Your Comfort Zone?
7. The Computer – Friend or Foe?
8. What Does Your Workplace Look Like?
9. Meetings- Start and Stop on Time
10. Valuing Your Time
11. Action Plan
12. Take Responsibility
13. Proper Time Management Means Investing Time To Get Time
14. Your A, B And C's
15. Action Plan
16. No Appointment- No Reward
17. The Art of Saying No
18. Standing Up Helps
19. Accomplishing More in Less Time
20. Set Written Deadlines
21. Starting Large Tasks
22. Schedule Interruptions
23. Controlling Your Time Reduces Your Stress And Allows You to Accomplish More
24. Out Of Your Head, Into The System, Onto The Paper
25. Start A Reading File
26. To Do List, it’s a Start
27. Action Plan
28. Remove the Chairs
29. POWER ARTICLE: Power Time Management Irrefutables - The Five W's
30. Change Gears
31. Power Hour
32. Operating From a Position of Strength
33. Identifying What You Hate To Do
34. Stress is a Massive Time Waster
35. Action Plan
36. The Telephone, It's Okay To Not Answer It
37. The Power of Purpose
38. Conference Calls
39. It Does Not Always Have To Be Perfect
40. E-Mails
41. Think Twice- Act Once
42. POWER ARTICLE: Think Twice- Act Once
43. When To Schedule Meetings
44. Time Management is About Personal Change
45. Action Plan
46. "Don’t Make Excuses – Make Good.“ Elbert Hubbard
47. How Do You Eat an Elephant
48. Squash Those Nagging Thoughts
49. Breaking Bad Habits
50. Be Aware Of The Bulging Briefcase
51. Your Computer
52. “You Will Never Find Time for Anything, If You Want Time, You Must Make It “
53. Nothing Wrong With Restarting the Game
54. Prioritizing
55. Action Plan
56. Electronic Data
57. Bunch Appointments
58. Be A Driver Not A Passenger
59. Determining What Your Priorities Are
60. Make Deadline Commitments To Others
61. Cell Phones
62. Time Activate It
63. Action Plan
64. Time Management Isn’t A Destination, It’s a Journey
65. Make a Power Living Life List (PLLL)
66. Action Plan
67. Make Action A Way Of Life
68. Time is a non-renewable Resource
69. All Roads Lead to Rome
70. POWER ARTICLE: Time Management - All Roads Lead To Rome
71. Stress and Managing Your Time
72. Take a Working Day Off
73. POWER ARTICLE: Take A Working Day Off
74. Are You The Bug, Or The Windshield?
75. POWER ARTICLE: Are You A Bug Or A Windshield?
76. Action Plan
77. Can “Lost“ Time Be Found?
78. Your Turf
79. Just Leave
80. The Weekly Meeting With Yourself
81. Have A Do Not Do List
82. POWER ARTICLE: Have a Do Not Do List
83. You Should NEVER Have To Ask, "What’s Next?"
84. DBMP’s (Don’t Bring Me Problems)
85. BMS’s (Bring Me Solutions)
86. Your Power Living Life List (PLLL) Makes You A Driver
87. Time Activity Funnel
88. Attend Only The Portion Of The Meeting That Deals With You
89. Will You Lead, Or Be Led?
90. Controlling Time Means Reaping The Maximum Value Out Of Life
91. Small Steps, Big Impact
92. The Best Offence Is A Good Defense
93. Stress Is Like Having Cancer
94. Yesterday Has Gone
95. The Now Is Here
96. POWER ARTICLE: Power Time Management Irrefutables Will Force you to Make Tough Decisions
97. Listen Just Long Enough
98. He Did Not Plan To Fail, He Just Failed To Plan
99. O.H.I.O.
100. Stress Will Destroy Your Productivity
101. Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan
102. You Have To Have The Patience To Hone Your Skills
103. Increased Productivity is All About Getting the Biggest Bang for Your Buck
104. Time Management is for Your Personal Life Too
105. No Telephone/Telephones in Meeting Rooms
106. Nice Guys Finish Without The Use Of Their Own Time
107. Monthly-Deep Sort
108. Drive Your Agenda
109. Action Plan
110. Time Management And Productivity; Joined At The Hip
111. POWER ARTICLE: Time Management And Productivity
112. Listen Just Long Enough
113. He Did Not Plan To Fail, He Just Failed To Plan
114. O.H.I.O.
115. Stress Will Destroy Your Productivity
116. Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan
117. You Have To Have The Patience To Hone Your Skills
118. Increased Productivity Is All About Getting The Biggest Bang For Your Buck
119. Time Management is for Your Personal Life Too
120. No Telephone/Telephones in Meeting Rooms
121. Nice Guys Finish Without The Use Of Their Own Time
122. Is This Meeting Really Necessary?
123. Work Smarter- Not Harder
124. Your Power Living Life List (PLLL) Is An "In-Box" For The Rest Of Your Life
125. You Have To Have Confidence
126. The Real Purpose Of The Power Time System
127. Action Plan
128. Get Good, And then Get Wired
129. Remove Yourself From Mailing Lists
130. It's Not Enough Too Be Busy
131. Action Plan
132. Start Thinking About Creating Your Own Culture
133. Worrying Is Very Hard Work And A Huge Time Waster
134. Is It Important Or Is It Just Urgent?
135. What Will Happen In Your Life 5 Years From Now?
136. POWER ARTICLE: From A Humble Beginning
137. Get Serious - Get Real
138. Clock In Meeting Room, Clocks Everywhere
139. Delegate
140. Your Power Living Life List (PLLL) Is A Brain Dumpster
141. Time Management Takes Time
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- "There is no knowledge that is not power."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Welcome!
Our time is a precious non-renewable resource, once a segment of time has passed, that time is lost forever. You are about to invest some of your time in reading this document. There are over 200 individual Time Management tips here. Utilizing these tips in your day to day activities I know will save you time, make you more organized, allow you to get more done in less time and ultimately make you a happier person.
In the end, isn’t that what life’s all about?

Enjoy,
Bryan Beckstead
Founder,
Power Empowerment Group

1.
Your Time Management Style

How do you operate? How do you organize your day? Are you in fact organized? These questions and others like them are ones you should ask yourself and address. The Power Time System has a definite approach to Time Management. Many people have been through our System and have done very well with it. Some people have not. It is important that your style, or lack of one, meshes with ours. You will be working with us over a period of time. This time you spend working with us and our System is valuable personal time, as all time is. You want to make the most of this time and the best way to do this is to be in harmony with how we are approaching time management. We will, in effect, be managing your time for a while and you will reap the most rewards if you feel comfortable working with us and feeling comfortable with our style.

2.
Hold Regular Meetings

Hold Regular Meetings with yourself is the full concept we want to offer here. It sounds funny but you should hold a meeting with yourself on a daily basis. It is a time when you go through the day and look at what you did, did not do and what you could have done differently to get better results. This is done without the computer on, without taking notes; it's informal, all done in your head. This is one time where we suggest you get it off the page and back in your head. I usually do it in the car on the way home or when I’m watching TV. Or out for a walk or working out or when I’m doing a task that does not require a lot of brainpower. As you can see, it can be done pretty well anytime. The main focus of my meetings with myself is to question how effective I was in controlling my day. I compare what I wanted to get done and what I did, in fact, get done. I’m at the point where I know what I should have gotten done and I clearly know that, within a small range of being right or wrong, what my top A priorities are. Knowing if I was on target or not each day is a fairly easy task. This is not a beat yourself up session, but you should hold yourself to task, sometimes. Other times, when you did well in a day, saying so is not a bad way to go. You want to accomplish something in these meetings. What went well, why it went well and repeat the reason it went well. The same goes in reverse. Why did you not accomplish your goals that day? What were the reasons and what will we do to not repeat the same mistakes. These meetings are as short or as long as you want or need. I find I have several short ones through out the day. They’re helpful and aid in keeping your eye on the ball.

3.
Action Plan

This is a simple tool to use right off the bat. Pick a time in the day that you can set aside and hold a personal meeting with yourself. Set your own agenda, one that will help you start to implement the tools and Systems you will find here. The alternative is, as you are going through this document, pick THREE tools you want to implement into your daily routine to start with. Use these three tools as your agenda for your daily meeting. Each day, assess how well you are doing with implementing them into your schedule, ways to improve and ways to maximize their benefit to you.

4.
Planning to Avoid Management by Crisis

This sounds obvious but this issue creeps up on us all too often. It would be unrealistic to say that there are not things that pop up that we have to deal with on the spot, management by crisis in other words. These situations are not the real problem, the real problems are the situations that we could have controlled but didn’t. The situations we knew about and did nothing to plan for and organize. The situations that we are aware of and do nothing about until they are on top of us are the ones that stress us out the most. Deep down inside we know we should have, could have planned better and we didn’t. It is these repeat offenders that wear on us the most. Not being better prepared for potential management by crises puts additional unwarranted stress and strain on us daily. Be on the lookout for crisis situations that occur on a regular basis and address these in your Time Activation and Prioritizing schedule.

5.
Goal Setting and Time Management

You cannot deal with one properly without also including the other. Trying to organize and control your time is futile activity unless you first have a clear idea of what your goals are. Knowing what your goals are will now give you the frame work to work within. It’s like starting a journey without knowing the destination or how you are going to get there. There are a number of steps that you need to follow in order to establish a relevant set of goals for your self. I recommend a number of tools you should use to help make this happen. You need to create your own Power Living life List, this is the start point of getting your Goals in life into a form that will make sense to you and will enable you to work those goals into your Time Management System. For advice on creating your own Power Living Life List, PLLL, click here, www.powerlivinglifelist.com Not having a realistic idea of what your goals are in life creates a great deal of stress and anxiety. Not having your goals in a written form that can be periodically checked to monitor your progress is another source of anxiety and stress. To get a more ideas and suggestions on how to properly establish a realistic and definable set of Life Goals, click here, www.powergoalsetting.com

6.
Where Is Your Comfort Zone?

What is the point of being in the game if you do not enjoy it? There has to be a point where you say, "enough is enough”. We can only do so much and then we have to regroup, recharge and start again. You have to find out where your limits are and then how far you can and want to go and then work within those limits. We all start to run into problems when we set unrealistic goals, don’t obtain them, then become frustrated and stressed out at our lack of success. You may be very productive at 45 hours of professional work a week but do not do well over 50 hours. Each of us is different, find out when you do your best work and work within this framework. Brace yourself. 50% of your working day you should not be able to be reached by phone. Both landline and cell, as well as any other device that beeps, vibrates or otherwise interruptvers all I can say is “don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it.

7.
The Computer – Friend or Foe?

We are addressing the impact of computers on peoples Time Management. This is an area

Right Direction Try This Way…
Interruptions are only interruptions if you let them be. I have a “get back to me” day and time, Wednesday at 2:00 P.M. If somebody orsomething attempts to interrupt me I say, “Sorry, I’m booked up now. I’d be hato see you/help you/deal with this, etWednesday at 2:00.” End of conversation. This will clear up at least 70% of the interruptions. NOTE: on one person/interruption out of ten bothers to even show up on Wednesday at 2:00.
where you and I should have a general meeting of the minds. I have a clear a very specific position on this topic. My position is simple. When it comes to Time Management, proper Time Management that is, computers are defiantly in the Foe camp. If computers were our friends when it comes to Time Management, then the large part of the world that has become computerized should now be well organized, getting the most out of their collective lives, be stress free, happy and content. Does this sound like you? Your friends? Your co-workers? I did not think so. Just because everyone went out and bought a PC does not mean overnight they also acquired skills they never had before. Unless you were already happy with the results you were generating everyday at work, were happy and content at home, then getting a PC only means you are getting the same negative results, only faster! Yes you can buy computer programs for $49.95 upwards to $300.00 that promise, with a flick of switch, your life will be instantly better, more organized and more fulfilled. Go ahead, buy one of these instant success programs and be sure to let me know how that works out for you.

8.
What Does Your Workplace Look Like?

All I can tell you is, when I can actually see the top of my desk, I get more done in a shorter period of time. It is that simple. You cannot be organized in the middle of a quagmire. To not spend the time it takes to clear out a decent work space for yourself shows a real lack of commitment to getting yourself up and ready to fight for control of your time. Give yourself a fighting chance.

9.
Meetings- Start and Stop on Time

The amount of time we all spend in meetings is staggering. When you consider that there are 2 or 10 people in a meeting, having them start late and then run over time is a horrendous waste of time. If you are trying to get your time under control, this area is ripe for the pickings. Your time is valuable, show this fact to those that you meet with by starting when you planned to and ending when you say you will. I have a reputation for being fanatical about my meeting times; start and finish. If people are not on time, start and let them catch up. If the meeting is due to start and the other people are not there, leave and spend the time on issues that are important to you. A person arriving late for a meeting shows you and everyone else that they have no respect for your time or their own.

10.
Valuing Your Time

If you do not have respect for yourself, how do you expect other people to react to you? The same goes for your time. You will only achieve your full potential when you come to the realization that how you deal with your time is the key. I believe that everyone has an intuitive understanding of what is important to his or her personal success and fulfillment. What stands in our way is the constant battle we all have with securing enough time in the day to get those priority tasks done that will advance us along the path to getting what needs to get done, when it needs to get done. I take a hard line when it comes to protecting my time. It's valuable and I only have a set number of hours to work with each day. When that day is gone, so is my allotted time. If I wasted that time, it is gone forever. I cannot make up for that lost time. That is a fallacy. If I wasted Monday’s productive time, I can’t make up for it on Tuesday because there are things to do on Tuesday that are Tuesday's tasks, not Monday’s tasks. Wasting time is an accumulative negative from which you cannot recover. This is not to say that you cannot regroup and start over and still be productive, successful, stress free and happy. It just means that the time frame you have to do it in just shrunk by a little bit. It shrinks every time you don’t value every minute you have and don’t approach every day trying to squeeze the life out of it. Where do you waste the most time? Spend some time thinking about this and identify just two areas where you know you waste the most time. Once you have identified these areas, set them aside. As you precede through The Power Time System you will you will more readily recognize the areas that will help you when they come up in the System.

11.
Action Plan

Valuing your time is a core issue with establishing proper Time Management strategies. Once a week, pick just one block of time that you use on a regular basis and evaluate that time spent. Ask yourself, am I getting good value for the time I am investing? Could this block of time be better spent on another task, or could I make better use of the time by re thinking how I am doing this task? Valuing your time is something that should be part of the planning, prioritizing and Time Activating process. It is one of the questions that should be asked when ever you are deciding between task A or task B. What is my Return On Investment when I decide to invest any of my valuable non-renewable time?

12.
Take Responsibility

This is probably one of the key issues in taking control of your life and your time. Not until you take responsibility for your success or failure, will you be able to make any meaningful strides in improving.

13.
Proper Time Management Means Investing Time To Get Time

We all want to get as much done as we can. Some of us are willing to pay the price; some of us are not. What’s the price? You have to spend time in order to get more value from your future time. You invest time now, a commodity that is probably in short supply, in order to reap the benefits in the future. If you use your time, wisely now, by working on the tools and Systems to give you the expertise to use your time in the future, you have invested wisely. What happens to us all is this, we are not making the most out of the time we are using now, our choices are not reaping us the greatest return on our time. As we progress through life, we are getting less and less value for the time we invest, we are following farther and farther behind, spending more time but getting less value for it. It’s a vicious cycle, we are not getting the results we want from our efforts, so we try to double up on our workload when in fact the answers lies in not working harder, but working on the right things instead. We need to break this cycle in order to start to gain back control of our time and to start to get better value from our time. Breaking the cycle means spending the appropriate time on learning how to make better decisions on how to use our time. To find those decisions, visit www.powerempowerment.com

14.
Your A, B And C's

An important component of the PTS is our method of ranking priority activities. It is a crucial step in organizing your time through ranking your key activities. A is the most important, followed by B and C. These rankings are part of your to-do-list as well as how and when you time activate activities. The trap that all of us fall into is not that we don’t put in a decent day's work; it’s that we allow B and C activities to creep into our day and rob us of time that should have been spent on A activities. Nothing is more demoralizing than working hard all day and coming home feeling that you have not accomplished the really important tasks. Following our program of A, B, C’s will prevent that from happening.

15.
Action Plan

Getting your Number 1 top A
Priority done an a daily basis is the heart and soul of getting control of your time. Not accomplishing this is losing the battle on a daily basis. This is action plan is simple; start a record of the times you accomplish your number 1 A Priority. Be honest in your assessment, the only person you are hurting is yourself. You will quickly see that the days that you win, accomplishing your number 1 A Priority, will be the days that you will feel the best and will have accomplished the most. You will not always win, but you want to keep getting better and more consistent on getting the important things done daily.

Top 3
Meetings, because they require a minimum of two people, rank in the TOP 3 of time wasters. If it’s a bad meeting, runs on, doesn’t start on time, lacks focus, no concrete actions set out at the end, etc., then you have wasted the time of all the attendees.
It’s simplistic to say reduce the number of meetings you hold as well as the number you attend, but that is a good goal to have in mind.

16.
No Appointment- No Reward

If you want to get in control of your time, you have stop rewarding people around you who want to steal this non-renewable resource from you. Unannounced drop-in appointments are killers to your day. They destroy any flow you may be generating and the time they take is usually in your prime work zone. You need to send a signal that you are happy to see and meet with people, as long as it fits into your schedule. Remember, you are not the one who did anything wrong. Be polite, be firm, and be unmovable. You can simply say that right now you are tied up with a previously arranged activity that has to be done, period. That is the truth; you are working on something now that you took the time to organize and prioritize, Time Activate and set it into your schedule. You thought it was important enough to do all of that, it certainly is important enough to not be interrupted by someone who has little or no respect for your time. At some point in your journey to regain control of your life and make it work for you, you will have to establish your own style when it comes to protecting yourself and your time. This is an area that requires you to make a stand. You must make that stand and you have to work out how you will do that. People who just drop by and expect you to deal with them are stealing from you. It is that simple and it’s that cut and dried. The question is, what are you going to do about it? Get a reputation as a person who does not reward people and things for interrupting your day. You have to take a stand and this is where you take it. People and things that think they will just impose themselves on you have to realize that is not going to be allowed to happen, from here on. Draw the proverbial line in the sand and start holding the line when it comes to interruptions. You are going to start to drive your own Agenda, when anyone or anything starts to take over the steering wheel, you have to assert yourself and stay on course.

Start with once a day, spotting an occurrence when you are being steered off course and taking the appropriate action to get back on course. It could be something as minor as not taking a phone call when you are in the middle of something. A minor step but an important one. You will start to notice that by keeping the interruptions at bay, you will start to get more done and feel less stressed.

17.
The Art of Saying No

This is an appropriate point to follow the one just above it. We have all heard the expression “What part of NO didn’t you understand?“ To get to that point, you first have to say no. If you are going to reap the maximum amount of value from each day, from each minute you have available, you are going to have to learn to say no, it’s that simple. In hundreds of seminars, people give me example after example of situations where other people are off-loading, down loading and handing over tasks and jobs to these people and in the process, are drowning them. A lot of the time my answer is simple, when you see this happening; you have to just say no. It is either you or them, who is it going to be? Are you the one who is going to come up short at the end of the day, or will it be them? Someone will invariably fall short; some one will end up not being able to complete the activities they wanted to do that day. All that is left to decide is this, you or them? I realize this flies in the face of most people’s basic sense of humanity. It’s mean, uncharitable and not nice to say no to someone who comes to you and wants your assistance. I’m not suggesting we suddenly start saying no to every request, every overture, or every time someone walks up to us. I’m raising the issue that in far too many cases, we dig a hole for ourselves when we indiscriminately go off our own planned course because someone else has entered our space with a potential course of action that will sideline us. We once again find ourselves back in familiar territory; we want to follow our own path, and someone else wants us to deviate from that path. The issue is and always will be that deviation is not beneficial to us. You have to decide in each situation, how much time am I willing to sacrifice in this situation? Is this the time I give up those 5 minutes to a fellow co-worker to listen to his story? Remember, you day is under attack, all day long. It gets chewed to bits, 5 minutes at a time. Saying no is not the worse sin you will ever commit.

18.
Standing Up Helps

Standing up is a good tool in getting people to respect you, your space and your time. When someone walks into your office unannounced, stand up immediately. First thing that happens, they don’t sit down. Of course, you don’t have a chair in your office because that is an open invitation for everyone to sit down and settle in for a chat. Okay, they walk in; you stand up, what’s the message that you are sending? By standing up, right away, the message is, you were heading out the door, just as they walked in. You know have the option to continue that process, or any other variations. Going to a meeting, washroom, conference room, out, to an appointment, it's your choice. At the very least, you can say, was just stretching before I go back to work. Regardless of what direction you take it, standing up makes the interruptions shorter and less frequent.

19.
Accomplishing More in Less Time

That is everyone’s goal, getting more done, getting more accomplished in less time. There are many ways this is accomplished, here are just a few. When you properly organize your day, have your agenda properly laid out in your Day Planner, you will have your Interruptions and Housekeeping activities already Time Activated and into bunches, this means you will get more of them done in one block of time instead of having them constantly interrupt you through the day. The result is far less start ups and shut downs of the same activities throughout the day resulting in more production time and less start-up and shut down time which is just wasted time. Properly organizing your day also means that you spend far less time dealing with other people issues and problems and more time on what is important to you, the result is more of what you want to get done gets done and less time is spent else where.

20.
Set Written Deadlines

Deadlines are just wishes until you take the time to put them in writing. Deadlines have to mean something. A deadline that keeps moving is just wishful thinking. The process of putting the deadline into writing helps in the planning and organizing process. If it’s a deadline, there will have to be some other activities that go along with it. Those activities will also have to be monitored. The more interconnected activities associated with the deadline, the better. Along with writing the deadline down, let as many other legitimately involved people know about the deadline. You are less likely to disregard the deadline if half the office knows about it.

21.
Starting Large Tasks

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Starting large tasks can be daunting. Sitting at your desk looking at the huge task ahead is not going to get it done. If you have 60 days to complete the task, divide the workload into roughly 60 time frames of 2 hours each. Whatever the time allotments will be, make them bite size and stretch them over the largest time frame possible. This will allow you to make adjustments early on in the process with enough room to ad or subtract as you go along. Start early; be sure to get some concrete work done in the early stages. Once you see progress being made, it’s easier to start to gain some momentum.

22.
Schedule Interruptions

Interruptions are usually not a surprise. If you are in the same work environment on a regular basis,
you will notice that the same interruptions happen again and again. The same people doing the same things, usually at the same time. Why not schedule some C time around the time when you expect the interruptions. If they don’t come fine, you can still get some low priority housekeeping tasks out of the way. By scheduling these time slots, throughout the day, you can get rid of some minor disruptions and still get some work done. I’ve found the best time to slot these C activity/ interruption breaks is first thing in the morning, before after lunch and close to closing. Interruptions, people just coming into your zone are more likely to happen during the times when people are coming and going through your office area. The same situations occur if you are working from home. This does not mean that you will not be trying to convince the people you work with to respect your time and space through an active campaign to work with you on reducing and eliminating interruptions into you schedule.

23.
Controlling Your Time Reduces Your Stress And Allows You to Accomplish More

When you believe this is true, it brings into perspective the value of learning the proper techniques in how to control and manage your time. The correlation between managing your time effectively and reducing stress is irrefutable. People who are stressed out and feeling anxious about their affairs are simply not going to accomplish as much. Reduce the stress levels and the productivity goes way up, back to normal and even higher. I find that people spend too much time on finding the causes of their stress, when that time should be spent on getting the basics under control, the basics meaning their use of their time. During this process, it’s not uncommon for the causes of their stress to be just a manifestation of their frustration at not getting enough done during the day. Getting control of their time gives them a two fold advantage, better productivity and because of the better productivity, less stress as a result of it.

24.
Out Of Your Head, Into The System, Onto The Paper

“I’ll remember“ is the beginning of the end as far as organizing your time and schedule is concerned. There are so many things wrong with that it’s hard to write them all down. I will address only a few here. First and foremost, unless you are the one in a thousand people with a flawless memory, you will forget. Secondly, unless what you want to do is not recorded, written down, there will be no way to prioritize this activity in relationship to everything else you want to do. If you can’t prioritize something, how will you be able to Time Activate it? If it’s not Time Activated, then it won’t get done, at least not done when it should be done. One of the cornerstones of the Power Time System (PTS) www.powertimesystem.com is our procedure to get things done, get the right things done at the right time. You will fail in your attempt to gain control of your time if you don’t use this part of the system. I’m very open about the other systems out there; we have them listed on our web page. There are systems that claim you will be better organized, get more out of life if you just spend X dollars on a simple computer program, the computer will do all the work. I don’t agree. There is work; thought and physical effort required to get on track. Part of that process is getting your thoughts out of your head and down in a written form where you can manipulate and work with them. There is no free lunch.

25.
Start A Reading File.

We are inundated with written material; magazines, memos, emails, actual mail, etc. There are a number of ways to deal with this avalanche of material, but for know lets at least put all of it a place that allows us to control it, at least a little bit. Let’s reserve this bit for the papers, magazines, and actual mail - anything that is in a hard form. Start a reading file. Depending upon the size of this material, it can be a file folder, a tray or a box; whatever size of receptacle is needed to encase this material. You may want to have a few sections in here, separate business from home, hobby from financials; the divisions don’t matter as long as everything is in one spot. At least now, you know where to put this material when it comes into you, and you know where to look for this material when you need it. I find this file handy when I want to kill a few minutes between tasks; this is where I find that paper I wanted to look at. I also use this file when I know I’m forced to go to someone else’s office and will inevitably have to wait, fills in the dead time with some productive activity.

26.
To Do List, it’s a Start

This idea has taken a real beating over the years. It used to be the rage, then it fell out of favour, it’s been back and forth over the years. My position is very simple; with no “to do list”, you are lost, pure and simple. Without a "to-do-list", you are absolutely flying blind in the fog of Time Management. Rudderless in a storm, a leaf in a stream, you get the picture. Everything you will need to give you a chance at getting control of your time and gaining the maximum value from your efforts starts from some sort of mechanism for putting everything you want to do and achieve in one place. It’s from this small to huge pile of information you will attempt to prioritize it and then to put some time parameters on it. There has to be a start point to you trying to do things differently than you did them before. Why else are you reading this then? Putting together a To Do List, as we outline in the PTS is that start point.

27.
Action Plan

Without a To Do List you have no chance of getting control of your time and getting the things you want to do and need to done, regularly and day to day, is zero. The complete Power Time System, www.powertimesystem.com, has a program in place to deal with this issue but we can start a mini version right now. Write down just 2 things you want to do in the next 24 hours. Just two and make it for the next 24 hours. Monitor if they were done in the allotted time, 24 hours. If they were both not done, you failed this task. Start again for the next 24 hours; keep doing this until you can get both tasks done in the next 24 hours. This seemingly simple task lays the groundwork for everything that will follow. In order for us to really make progress, we need to be able to get done what we want to get done, in the appropriate time frames. When you think about it, is it any more complicated than that?

28.
Remove the Chairs

Why do you have chairs and a couch in your living room? You want people to feel welcome and to sit down, of course. Then why in the heck do people have chairs and couches in there offices? I guess when people walk into to their office, they want them to feel at home, sit down, relax, have a coffee, and stay awhile. Drop by visitors, and people who stay too long after pre arranged business has been conducted, are a huge drain on your time. These "hanger-oners", the ones who actually use your office chairs and couches, can steal hundreds of hours yearly. These are hours you could use doing the things you need and want to do. No chairs in my office, if I want you to sit down, there is a chair in the closet I pull out for people to sit on; it's put back in the closet when you leave. No couch either. Depending upon your office set up and size, the chairs for people to use are in the reception area, lunchroom and in the conference room.

29.
POWER ARTICLE Power Time Management Irrefutables - The Five W's What?

What are the 5 to 10 absolutely necessary activities that you have to do to ensure your success and happiness? Those are going to be your Power Time Management Irrefutables. You have to be serious and you have to be brutally honest with your self. Fudging this list is sabotaging all of the things you will be doing for the rest of your life. It will be like trying to run a marathon with the bear already on your back from mile One. Not a very promising start, with 26.2 more miles to go. You want to work on this list and write down what is crucial, unavoidable and absolutely required for you to get where you want to go, when you want to get there, no screening, sorting or filtering of any kind. This is where the rubber meets the road and this is THE reality check of all reality checks. It is during this process that you want to get all of the bugs out of the ointment. The purpose of you spending your time in this fashion is to eliminate the majority of angst that we all feel when we do not have a clear understanding of what we want and how we are trying to achieve it. Time spent here is well worth the investment. How worth it is it? Of anything you can and will do over your life, this activity is in the top 3 of ANYTHING you can or will do to ensure your success, its that powerful. Who? Anyone that is serious about being happy, successful and in charge. That sounds trite but it is true. Irrefutables, among many things, are about establishing personal standards. People who are successful are people who care about what they do. They care about what they are involved in and they especially care about what is associated with them. All of this leads to performing at a level that demands the best from themselves and, regardless of what is happening around them, they continue to strive to meet their personal standards even when those around them show little inclination to do the same.

When? No time like the present. There is no right time to start to care and start to do it right. Regardless of what level you are performing at now, the bar can always be raised, and then re-raised again. Creating your own Irrefutables is not a one-time activity. It is an ongoing process that will change as you and your circumstances change. Depending on what you do, your Irrefutables could change weekly; some other person's Irrefutables will never change throughout their professional career. You could be a person who rises throughout a corporation moving between divisions, your Irrefutables will most likely change as often as you are promoted. You could be someone who starts, builds and grows the same business from the start to the end of your working life; your Irrefutables could very easily stay the same throughout this process. Why? I have always considered a person less than successful if they do not maximize their full potential. Just because you are a millionaire does not make you successful if you wasted the opportunity to be a multi-millionaire because of a lack of effort or proper application on your part. You should want to use every tool available, every resource you can commandeer to maximize your potential and abilities. This one is one of the best tools available to you. It is a concept that you may not have been exposed to before, at least not in this fashion. I usually don’t dwell on the negative but in this case I will at least broach it. Not setting standards for yourself, not establishing your own set of Irrefutables, will seriously undermine any attempt on your part to join the ranks of the happy, satisfied and accomplished. Where? I did mention the 5 W’s and this is the last one. I stumped as to how to bring the Where in on this topic. I will gracefully admit defeat on this one. www.powerirrefutables.com
Time Wasters are everything that prevents you from doing the one key task or job that you want to do, period. If you want to write a report that is due, EVERYTHING ELSE at that moment is a TIME WASTER. Start to process this through your mind, it will help to put Prioritizing and Time Wasters into perspective.

30.
Change Gears

The best-laid plans can go awry when you get derailed on a specific job or task. It happens, you want to do a specific task, have it set up, organized, time activated, but when it’s time for you to step up to the plate, nothing. For whatever reason, you cannot get the wheels moving in that particular direction. Depending upon the urgency and the time sensitivity of that particular task, make a decision and make it fast. Don’t waffle; don’t beat yourself up about it, that’s the worse thing to do, just move that task, time slot and all to a different spot in your day. Move the bumped block of time into the one you are at now and plough ahead. I find that a change of activity can be all that is necessary to get you going. Sitting there trying to force an activity on yourself is just creating a stressful situation that in a lot of situations is avoidable. This switching of gears is only possible on activities that are not time sensitive or not too high of a priority. Only you can make this determination. Beware of this happening too often, if it does, there could be a problem with your prioritizing procedures. For now, use this technique to increase your productivity and reduce your stress levels.

31.
Power Hour We all have them, we may not recognize them as such, but we have them. Those times in the day when we are at our best, when we can fly through tasks and jobs, when we get the most out of ourselves and our time. We call them Power Hours. Recognize them and use them to your advantage. As you get on track and are using the PTS and all of its tricks of the trade, you will be able to identify key priority tasks, you’re A tasks. You will also be Time Activating these key A tasks into you Day Planner. You want to be sure that you put your key A priorities into your Power Hour time slot/ slots. Remember, it is not the volume of work you accomplish; it is the quality of work accomplished that in the long run, makes the difference. By consistently getting your number 1A and 2A Priorities into your Power Hour time slots, you will be ensuring the best possible productivity for yourself. As they say in Poker, all you can do is get your money in with the best hand; the rest is up to Lady Luck. Proper Time Management isn’t about luck but I’m sure you can see where I’m coming from. In the same vein, sometimes you get a spurt, when things are clicking for you and you are firing on all cylinders, switch from a lower ranked priority to a high ranked one and take advantage of how you are running. The reverse is true, not getting a lot done right now, switch out, do something that requires less effort, wait for an upturn in your energy level, enthusiasm. Remember, you drive your Agenda, not the other way around.

32.
Operating From a Position of Strength Knowing what you are going to do and when you are going to do it is a great advantage to anyone. If you started your day off knowing what you were going to do and when you were going to do it, what advantage would that give you? To get more done each day, which is the end result of proper Time Management, you want to be the one who knows what is coming up next. Having this advantage is a power tool to have; it gives you the jump on those around you and allows you to anticipate better
what may happen next. You get into this position of strength by spending time in advance of actually expending it, in preparation and planning. A small amount of the proper pre planning can immensely improve your performance and what you will accomplish on a daily basis.

No one will ever know what you did with your copy of The Power Time System if you never load it on your computer and never open a file. Who will know except you? This is the time for personal reflection. The time for you to decide to step up and take some concrete positive action to take charge of your life. Remember, it is a personal choice that only you will know if you took it or not.

33.
Identifying What You Hate To Do

You have to identify your enemy before you can defeat him. It’s never the things we like to do that gum up the works, we can usually be counted on to get those things done, it’s the things we hate to do that are the ones we keep putting to the back of the Time Management bus. What backs us into a corner, gets us behind and makes us stressful is the backlog of things we should of done last week that keep biting us in the butt. Once again, these tasks, jobs that are repeat offenders are just that, the same ones over and over again that get put off. Start by identifying the things that don’t get done on a regular basis. The tasks that routinely are left to the end and you force yourself to manage by crisis. The rush job on the last day of the month, a report that is always due on the last day of the month, the report you always have 30 days to complete, but never do. This report goes on your list. There will be others. I will not go into what to do with that list here. It is covered in the PTS. The fact that you are aware of this issue will help you to pay a little more attention to these sticking points and that will help in the process of paying more attention to them and perhaps helping you to get them done sooner.

34.
Stress is a Massive Time Waster

No one operates well under stress, despite what they may say. The very nature of stress makes what would normally be a simple chore, turn into a prolonged difficult chore because we are not operating under normal circumstances. Stress, if we allow it to, can virtually immobilize us into total inactivity. Stress wastes time on a number of levels. When stress has reached a level where it is affecting our performance, it has been present for some time already. We do not just wake up and feel stressed out and anxious. We allow ourselves to be stressed out because over a period of time, we have allowed ourselves to feel out of control, have allowed other people and events to take the initiative in how we will spend the next few minutes, few hours. These are just a few of the situations where stress can be allowed to manifest itself. None of these situations can take place without your participation. In these cases it’s more of a lack of participation but that is not our focus here.

When we let things slip out of control, this creates a stressful situation and we are not able to function like we would like. This creates stress and understandably so. This type of situation becomes a massive time waster when we allow ourselves to become unresponsive and this leads to a loss of productivity. As the saying goes, it is difficult to remember the objective was to drain the swamp when you are up to your ass in alligators. There are times when a sudden one-time event can cause stress but the majority of times, stress is the accumulation of activities, usually the same activities in the same situations. Look for reoccurring situations that make you feel stressed, anxious and under pressure. Work your way backward and start to head these events off before they are allowed to pile up and take control. Remember stress is a self-inflicted emotion. We allow ourselves to feel stressful by how we react and deal with the events around us.


35.
Action Plan

Stress enters our daily lives usually through the same channels. Block those channels and you can go a long way in eliminating the majority of the causes of stress in your life. Identify a major stress factor in your daily life, either at work or at home. Now make this your Number One A priority over the next week, pick a day where you will set aside an hour or whatever time is required to look at the problem and work on ways to alleviate it. For example, a major source of stress at work could be getting the packages ready on time for the courier person pick up. A fairly routine task but it can get hectic if you are always running around at the last moment trying to fill out the forms etc. You will now spend some valuable time on sorting this situation out, once and for all. You may need to set up a schedule, in advance to do the work needed to be ready on time, it could be any number of things, but at the end of the time, you will establish a workable plan. With this new revised plan in effect, we hope this source of stress has been eliminated. If not, back to the drawing board until it is. You have to realize that sometimes the only solution to problems is the proper application of time at the right juncture.

36.
The Telephone, It's Okay To Not Answer It

I don’t own a cell phone and believe it or not, I still can lead a full and satisfying life! This leads me to people’s obsession with their phones, cell and land line. I don’t understand feeling that unless you have a phone to your ear, you are somehow not complete. Let’s forget for a moment the need to have a cell phone/ landline phone presently attached to your ear. Let’s deal with the need to ALWAYS answer it. Phones get in the way of people actually accomplishing anything resembling a full day’s work. Unless your job actually requires you to answer the phone as part of your job description, I can safely say you are answering your phone far too often. I recommend at least half of your working day to be phone free. I can hear the gasps from my office as you read this. That’s 50% of the time you should be phone free. When I say phone free, I mean you are not answering your phone during these phone free times. Give this some thought; try reducing the time people can reach you by phone and watch your productivity shoot up.

37.
The Power of Purpose

As our regulars know, I’m not one to wax poetically. I am a fairly plain, down to earth communicator. So naming this piece, The Power of Purpose is somewhat out of character. In this case, it says exactly what I want it to say. Don’t ever underestimate the power, the multiplying effect of the benefit of how you feel when you are doing something. When you are feeling positive about what you are doing, the impact on your productivity and results can be astounding. This brings us to the Power of Purpose. When you have a clearly defined purpose, when your goals are articulated and focused, it is during these times when you will reap the maximum benefits. When you are in the “groove“, when you are firing on all cylinders, it is during these times that we all do our best work. Work towards finding that clarity of purpose. These times of focus, increased productivity, and clearly defined direction do not happen by chance. You are in the process of getting the tools that will enable you to find those times of ”super charged time“. Just another example of why Time Management isn’t a destination but a journey.

38.
Conference Calls

This is a fast, cheap way to get a few or many people together and save a lot of time on travel. The rules for holding face-to-face meetings still apply for a conference call. Just because you are saving time in one area is not a reason to squander it in another. I use conference calls even when the participants are close by; I find I can move a conference call along faster and end it on time without the usual “hanger-oners” that you get in a face-to-face meeting.

39.
It Does Not Always Have To Be Perfect

A lot of prime productive time is unnecessarily spent on making a task perfect when good or acceptable is all that is required. An internal document going to two co-workers can have the odd spelling mistake in the document without the sky falling down. A report can be two pages long and still be effective instead of a 7-page dissertation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stood over some one's desk and said, that will be fine, that is good enough only to be told they have to put some totally unnecessary finishing touch on it. You need to work out with the people you work with your own form of short hand when it comes to this area.

My standard comment is. “It does not have to be a masterpiece“. That is the signal to just get it done. No bells, no whistles, just the facts. Another trick to getting this point across is to ask for a job with a deadline attached to it, a deadline that sends the signal that you have to get this job done within this timeframe and it has to be squeezed in there. Open-ended delivery projects invite extra work to be done where none is necessary. Communication is important in this area. Working with the same people over a period of time is helpful as long as you are aware of the pitfalls in this area and have been working toward getting the frills and perfectionism out of those tasks that do not warrant it. Since I’ve brought up perfectionists, I will mention briefly that people who like to announce themselves as perfectionist are just setting up those around them for a preordained “reason“ why they won’t be able to ever get anything to you on time. Beware of this “reason“; it is just a fall back position for a lack of purpose and desire to get things done. Dithering on one project is not a reason for not getting on with a productive day.

40.
E-mails

I spend a lot of time in other areas on e-mails so I will make this brief. E-mails are evil. There, I’ve said it. I’m officially a weirdo. Emails destroy people's productivity. If there was ever a technology that has advanced as well as dammed us, e-mails are it. The average person checks their emails 20, 30, 50 times or more each day. That’s insanity. Do you know what is worse than checking your emails 30 or more times a day? It’s thinking about checking your emails that many times and not doing it. Either way it destroys and cripples any reasonable flow you may get in a day. It's additive and a lot of us just do it out of habit. It’s a habit that costs you minutes a day in actual time and much more time wasted in stopping and starting tasks. It would not be unreasonable to say that, in an average day, up to an hour of prime productive time is wasted in servicing our email addiction. If you are checking your email more than 3 times in a day, you are wasting time.

41.
Think Twice- Act Once

When you are rushed and running around not accomplishing what you should be accomplishing, it’s too late then to say you should have planned your day a little better. That is what Time Management is all about. Spending time, in advance of spending more time, making sure you have a game plan to utilize your future time properly. It means that you have to pull back some times, regroup and do some actually investing of current time, time you do not feel you have and do the activities required to get control of your time and make it work for you. The concept of having to take time, when you are out of time, to spend time on planning, organizing and Prioritizing is a tough one to get our heads around. Thinking twice means that when you actually do perform your functions, you have a significantly greater chance of getting what you want done, done when you want it done.

42.
POWER ARTICLE Think Twice- Act Once

I stole this from the carpenters; "measure twice, cut once". Thanks guys. The longer I work on a project; there is always something that comes to the top to make my understanding and grasp of the subject better and better. This section is one of those improvements. Before And After If you are going to take think twice/act once philosophy literally and only limit your self to thinking twice, then it's once before you act and once after. The reason I said literally is that I do not want to be the one that may limit your thought processes about anything to just two. Look at the suggestion of two as that; a suggestion; a start point, not the end all and be all. The point that I keep driving at is that improvements in productivity and production are not realized through the actual act of doing the tasks; it’s realized in the actions that you take before and what you do after to prepare for the next round. Increasing production is a thinking person’s game. Lets look at the before side of this equation. Do not confuse the Time Management activities you do to set up the WHAT and the WHEN, that has nothing directly to do with getting more of that task done. I did say directly, it’s important to understand the role Time Management plays in increasing your production. For this discussion, Time Management is not our concern. During the Time Management phase, when you are finished with setting up the WHAT and the WHEN, you switch hats from being the Time Management person to being the Production person. This switch is important because know you are examining the HOW of the task. The time you invest here has a massive positive impact on your results. This small segment of time probably has the greatest maximizing effect on your results then any other time frame associated with your tasks. I wish I could get more people to zero in on this time frame, its gold in the bank to those that utilize its full potential. Why is this time slot more powerful than any other spot? Easy, here is why. Reason One Your time here will be more focused and you will be able to think clearer away from the actual activity being done. You will be doing this thinking and strategizing before the rubber meets the road and will have a separation away from the action. This separation and detachment will allow you to review this specific job either as a new project or a review of an old repeat project. Either way, you have a perspective you would not have at any other time in the process. When was the last time you spent uninterrupted time analyzing, dissecting and reviewing work that you did or had done for you, with an eye on improving the production functions involved in doing it. That long eh? (Remember, I am Canadian). I think we can all see the value of this time frame. Reason Two Anytime you spend one unit of time that will be utilized at least twice, you are cutting your costs by 50% and hopefully increasing your output by 100%. Half of that statement is absolutely correct; the other half is open for debate. The part that is 100% correct is the fact of being able to utilize one unit of time, over and over again is extremely powerful. I have brought this up in previous chapters, and will continue to bring this point up; you want to find as many circumstances where this maximizing benefit can be found. Not only do you want to find these circumstance, you want to CREATE them as often as you can. Let’s now examine the after side of the equation. It’s the end of a long frustrating day; things went wrong, more wrong than right. You want to just get home and have a cool one, forget the nightmare and watch the ball game on TV. Unfortunately, now is the best time to review what went wrong and to look for ways to make sure the same mistakes are not made the next time. The fresher the events are, the better the chances are you will get a handle on the causes and the effects. Depending upon the magnitude of what you accomplished, or should I saw did not accomplish, your postmortem will be in proportion to the significance of the task. Sometimes just a mental review in your mind on the way home is sufficient, other times, you need a full blown sit down session with yourself and the "powers that be" to work out what went wrong and the corrective steps for the next time. Remember, thinking always costs less than actions and thinking is always a renewable resource.

43.
When To Schedule Meetings

When you schedule meetings has a great deal to do with how productive they are. First and foremost, when you schedule your meetings, they should be when you will be at your best and when you feel that you will accomplish the most, after all it’s your meeting. There are two quick considerations, time of the day, and the day it’s self. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, are the worse days to hold a meeting, starting with Monday, then Tuesday, then Wednesday. The longer people see themselves having in the meeting, the les they will get done, and the less motivated they are to get things done. The best day to hold a meeting is Friday, followed by Thursday. You will get more done on these days because people may be gearing for the weekend but you can counter that with, if we don’t get it done now, when will we get it done You have to ride a little harder on Thursday or Friday but they are the best days to have them. Another problem with holding meetings at the beginning of the week is that a lot of time is wasted in chitchat about what happened on the weekend, even among strangers. There is also the factor of getting back into the groove and work mentality after a few days off. On Thursday and Friday, if they are not in the business groove by now, you have a problem on your hands. Time is straightforward. My sales meetings are always late on Friday. We get a lot done in a short period of time. Monday morning sales meeting ALWAYS go over time, always have way too much chitchat and are never as productive as the late Friday afternoon meetings. Those, by the way, always end on time.

44.
Time Management is About Personal Change

If you are reading this you are at least putting yourself in the game. You are exploring new ideas, looking at alternatives, exploring areas that you may not of been before. There is a reason you are doing this. Only you can be sure what that reason is. I hope you find some answers in this material; a lot of other people have already. Once you have found a good idea or two, it’s time to take it from the looking stage to the doing stage. The same old activities will produce the same old results, that’s a given. If you want to move forward, you must make some changes to how you do things. Personal changes are hard to do some times, they require us to go outside of our comfort zone and do things that may make us feel uncomfortable and go into unfamiliar territory. That is the price we pay for improving and enriching our lives. No one least of all me, says it has to done over night. I’ve said the opposite; Time Management is a journey, not a destination. That translates into, start small and make gradual but consistent steps in the right direction We have given you the tools and mechanisms to point you in the right direction, all you have to do is start making those first few steps and you will be on your way.

45.
Action Plan

There are hundreds of individual tips and tools in just this short book. Where to start is the question. What ever you do, it will be a personal Change from what you are doing now. That is a leap of faith. You need to take it sooner than latter. What I cannot do is pick where you start. That has to be a personal choice. The best rule of thumb is for you to pick what you feel will be a combination of what will benefit you the most with the least amount of time and effort involved. You want to always get the biggest bang for your buck; you want to invest the minimum amount of time and get the greatest return back to you. Only you will be able to identify what fits both criteria, for you and your circumstances. Let’s pick one thing, one activity outlined here that you feel will benefit you and one that you will start to use, right now, today. Your choice, lots to pick from. You want to pick one that is simple to implement, one that will give you immediate results. I cannot suggest one because then it would be my choice, not yours. I do suggest thought out this book topics that fit this bill. Don’t make it complicated, just pick one and jump in, the water is fine.

46.
"Don’t Make Excuses – Make Good.“ Elbert Hubbard

It’s time to move forward, it’s time to take control, take responsibility and get some positive results. Now. You will be exposed to hundreds and hundreds of ideas and ways you can be more productive, get more done, get more of the right things done, all you have to do is pick one to start. That is all that is required to get the ball rolling in the right direction. You want to see some positive action and you want to see some positive results. There are a lot of reasons not to start; all we are looking for is one reason, on your part, to start this process that will benefit you for life. One of the many advantages of getting your life under control, through proper Time Management is the fact that one single change in your life in how you will properly manage your time in the future, hopefully forever, will in fact last you a life time. If you have 20, 30, 50 years ahead of you, it’s hard to calculate the positive impact on your life that one little change will have. The positive multiplying benefit is staggering. Get started now, just pick on idea in this list and get started, it really is that simple.

47.
How Do You Eat an Elephant

One bite at a time. We probably all have heard this example at one time or another but it perfectly illustrates this point. You have what appears to be an over whelming task or job ahead of you. We sit there wondering how to approach the job and how in the heck are we going to finish it, especially if we have a deadline looming. You need to do an inventory of a huge warehouse that has 10,000 items. It’s not going to get smaller the longer you look. Start with counting just 250 items. Now you have only 9,750 to do. Count just 250 a day for 5 days. At the end of the week you have only 8, 750 to do. You started small and worked toward completion, a good start and one that will end the job as long as you keep at it. In this case you would divide the days you have to do the job into the amount of work and work out the appropriate schedule. The point is: sitting there looking at it won’t get anything done. I have a saying that bugs the heck out of some of the people who work for me, “when in doubt, do something “. Very rarely is action the wrong course to take.

48.
Squash Those Nagging Thoughts

Nothing is more frustrating than working hard on a task and having a nagging feeling at the back of your mind that you should have been working on something else. Nagging feelings are akin to being stressed out and we know stressed out people are not happy and certainly are not productive. These negative thoughts deter us from doing a good job at what we are doing and make the whole time spent unpleasant, un productive and a waste of good time. We allow these thoughts to creep into our day when we have not properly planned, organized and prioritized our day. We know the days when we are on our A game and the days when we are less than at or near top form. The days where we are running from one crisis to another, when we are reacting to what is around us instead of dictating what will happen around us are the days that have already gotten out of control on us. You can be the bug or you can be the windshield, your choice. I personally believe that almost all people have a good sense of the days that they are organized and get the right things done and the days where they go from pillar to post and don’t get what should have gotten done, done. The time to properly utilize those nagging thoughts and put them to use is in the planning, prioritizing, time activating stage. This takes place several days, leading up to the day before you have the nagging thoughts. It’s in these planning stages where you work out your doubts and avoid the wasted, unproductive days. It’s better to invest some planning time, than to waste entire days with unsatisfying unproductive wasted time. Once you have worked through the process of organizing your time, in advance, you make a decision, you lock it in and you are ready to do battle. Once you have given ample thought, worked through the ramifications, you have made a decision, one task was time activated for that day and another task was moved down the list to be done a latter day. It is now time to move on. Put your head down and start working through what you have planned for the day. Unless something earth shattering happens, you will work through the day on the tasks you have in your Day Planner, like always. There is nothing wrong with assessing what you did that day and asking yourself if you did in fact make the right decision about a particular task. This is a productive, constructive thought process that will help you make further decisions, better ones based on this process you have with yourself. This can take place in the meeting, meetings you have with yourself each day. We should constantly be trying to improve our performance and wring every available ounce of productivity we can from a finite amount of time we have available to us each day. Reassessing and rethinking what you have done is a productive and necessary part of proper Time Management.

49.
Breaking Bad Habits

You have to be ware they are bad before you will want to break them. Part of the value of the PTS is to show you a range of activities that are conducive to proper Time Management. Going through this material will enable you to spot things that you are not doing and are doing things counterproductive to getting your time under control. Bad habits in other words. We will by pass the part where we have to explain why you should break those habits and get to the how part. It really isn’t about how to break them but how committed you are about improving your quality of life. There is a direct correlation between breaking bad habits and the degree of your need to get ahead. It’s not unlike stopping smoking. If you really want to, you will make it happen, if you are just mildly motivated you will probably fail some where down the road. There is not a secret formula that will allow you to break a bad habit. If it’s a conscious thought process that directs you to do it, then the same process in reverse will enable you not to do it. In other words, it’s within you to take the steps to stop doing it. What have to be present are the will power and the commitment to make it happen. Two suggestions: First, there are a lot of activities here that will give you plenty of things to do, a lot of alternatives to the bad habits you may have accumulated. Start with the easy ones first. Start small, start with something simple that won’t turn your life upside down. Get into the swing of things with something you know you can do, accomplish it and you will gain some momentum. Second, don’t try to go cold turkey. If it’s something you want to introduce into your schedule, do a little at a time. Add one addition a week for 4 weeks instead of trying to do it all at once. Remember, bad habits are usually formed over a long period of time. They won’t disappear over night.

50.
Be Aware Of The Bulging Briefcase

Briefcases are not storage compartments, they are meant to carry work from one place to another, the work is to be performed and the transported back to where it originated from. If your briefcase is bulging and remains bulging, it is now being treated as a storage compartment and that is only trouble for you. What is happening is that your workspace is spreading out and is becoming more unmanageable. Your desk is overcrowded, your sideboard, and your credenza. Now you are storing unorganized, unknown material in your briefcase. This does not mention what you have crammed in your computer, your phone, your Blackberry, etc. One of the major time wasters in all of our lives is the time we spend just looking for the things we want to work on, we spend more time looking for the work than the time it will take to do the actual work itself. Being disorganized means when you want to actually do some work, you have to spend actual productive time finding the work to start to work on it. If that sounds bizarre, it is. Be aware of spaces in your work environment where you allow things to accumulate. Unless they are in a clearly defines area, an area you have designated for them, any accumulation of materials, hard copy or other wise is a bad sign. Staying on top of these areas, not letting this clutter gather are concrete steps in getting a handle on your stuff and getting organized and productive.

51.
Your Computer

No list that deals with issues affecting your time would be complete without some mention of computers. I personally have a love/hate relationship with my computer. For someone who is where I am in the business world (self-employed is a good description), my computer skills are poor to say the least. At times I wish I could fully unlock the advantages that computers hold for us, people in general, business people in particular. By not having even average computer skills, does this put me at a disadvantage in the business world, when it comes to being organized, productive? The answer is an emphatic no; on the contrary, I feel it helps me. First and foremost, let me put out my opinion on the subject of having a computer and being organized. There is no correlation between them. In fact, I believe that computers have, in a lot of cases, misled people to think they are now better off than they were when they didn’t have a computer. I always say all a computer allows an unorganized person to do is make the same mistakes, only faster. Computers will only do what we tell them to do, they will not think for us, will not prioritize for us, will not determine what tasks should be done before other tasks and they will not organize our time for us. It’s that simple. Above all, computers will not do the wok for us that is necessary to get organized, to be more productive and to be happier in life

52.
“You Will Never Find Time for Anything, If You Want Time, You Must Make It “ Charles Buxton

I could not have said it better myself. There is only a certain amount of usable time in the day. No more, no less. When people say, “I couldn’t take 5 minutes to call you yesterday”, what actually happened was this. They had 5 minutes yesterday and they had 8 hours to call you. They just decided to do other things, INSTEAD of calling you. This is the crux of Time Management; the trade-off of activities with the available time. Do I do this or that? What is more important to me or what is more pressing now? The difference between being in control and not is, who decides what you do during the day, you, or the outside forces around you? In our example, did our person consciously decide not to spend 5 minutes to call their friend? Was that call of so little importance to them that they couldn’t spare 5 minutes out of 8 hours? That would be the message that I would take from that exchange. Most people would not. Most people would just accept that their friend had a busy day and leave it at that. This is a minor example; a returned phone call between friends would probably not have any consequences. That is not the point. This is a symptom of how most people control their time. When it becomes important, they will react the same way, with the same results, with the same excuse. When it matters, saying you didn’t have the time takes on a whole different perspective.

53.
Nothing Wrong With Restarting the Game

Very little of value is accomplished in one fell swoop, from start to finish. Starting again, and again and as many times again is not unusual. It’s more likely the norm. It is certainly the norm when talking to my clients. Time Management is a very interrelated set of actions that don’t interact in a vacuum. On the contrary, they interact in an environment that seems to be at odds with what we want to accomplish. This constant struggle between what we want to accomplish and all the external forces around us going in seemingly the opposite direction makes our task even harder. That makes the likelihood that you will not have smooth sailing when you start to implement the PTS. Be prepared for some set backs, some roads that end on you and days that seem were invented to make your life miserable.

54.
Prioritizing

This is another massively important component of the PTS and Time Management in general. If you do not have a method of separating the important from the not so important from the unimportant, you will fail at getting control of your time and your life. This isn’t a point where there is some wiggle room. It’s the foundation that everything flows from. Throughout this Top 151, I say there are a lot of ways to start the PTS, there are different points to start with, etc. That is very true, but near the top is Prioritizing Activities. We deal in detail what to do, how to do it, when to do it; all about Prioritizing. For you to have any real positive steps in the right direction, you must start to work on this area. Some quick points: What derails people when it comes to getting the most out of each day is allowing unimportant tasks to take time away from the really important tasks. You will want to Prioritize your tasks using a simple ABC system. A for the most important, B next and C as the least important. What makes this system so effective is that once we have Prioritized your tasks, we then Time Activate them into your Day Planner. Another feature of our Prioritizing System is that it allows you to move tasks up and down the ranking system based on not only what is important but also when it becomes important. This is another critically essential factor in getting to the point where you are consistently doing the A Priorities ahead of the B and C ones. It’s important to keep track of the C Priorities on Monday that will develop into B Priorities by Wednesday and then become an A Priority on Friday. Prioritizing is not just for the next day’s schedule. You will want to keep a handle on what you are doing for 6-month segments as well as I, 2 upwards to 5-year slices of your life. Things change, and your Priorities change with them. Your personal as well as your professional lives will blend and intertwine, along with this messing you will want to keep a running tally of what is important and what is not. You will never get where you are going unless you know where you want to be. Prioritizing will help you find out where you want to go and when you get there. Be sure to look into this important tool to help you prioritize, www.powerlivinglifelist.com

55.
Action Plan

You will notice that Prioritizing is mentioned throughout this document and for good reason. If we do not get what we need done, when we want to get it done, then we are not going to accomplish what we want to doand we all know what that means, failure, in one form or another. Failure is a tough word, one that will upset some people and will receive knowing nods from others. You have to decide to what standard you will hold yourself accountable to, know one else can do that for you. Here, not gettingwhat you want to get accomplished is Prioritizing means you identify those key things that you need and have to get done in order for you to move forward in life. What could be more important than that? The process of Prioritizing you activities is part of a series of activities that are all interrelated and when followed in order, create a series of checks and balances that makes a successful outcome virtually guaranteed. See the process here, www.powertimesystem.com Prioritizing in its simplest form is deciding between two activities, which one will get your time and energy BEFORE the other. Prioritizing does not mean that one gets done and the other does not, what it means is that if you only have time for one today, which one will get done today and which one may get done latter today or perhaps tomorrow. Let’s start this process by randomly picking two activities or tasks that are competing for your time and Prioritizing them in order, which one gets done now and which one you have decided can wait till a latter time. If you want to make better use of your time, this is a skill and a process you will be doing daily for the rest of your life.

56.
Electronic Data

It’s here to stay, that’s for sure. Electronic data is very different from paper data in a lot of ways. For one, it has added a second layer in our challenge to get the things in our life organized. Unfortunately, we use more paper now than we did 5 years ago and that has been true from the 80’s, 90’s and 2000 onward. So the paperless office is not going to materialize. People are just getting electronic data and printing it out, so they then have two pieces of data to control, the original electronic piece and a second piece, a paper hard copy. As much as we like to think we are moving forward, we still like to hold our data in our hands and manipulate it, touch it, move it around and then we must file it. The one good aspect of dealing with electronic data is that the same rules apply to electronic data as to paper data. Just because you have a piece of electronic data instead of a piece of paper is no reason to handle it, click on it 7 times before you actually do something with it. You want to handle paper only once before it actually moves closer to its final destination, same rule for electronic info. On one hand, computers have made receiving, moving, storing and handling data a lot faster. Unfortunately along with this speed, they have made it a lot easier to mishandle it as well.

57.
Bunch Appointments

Appointments, by their very nature, cut into our workday. We have to stop whatever we are doing and sit down with someone, deal with an unrelated topic and then try to get back to what ever was interrupted. Back and forth all day can be tiring, not to mention, disruptive. Bunch your appointments in 2 to 3 hour segments in a time frame that is not your best time. Do not space them out, and be sure to slightly over book your time. You can borrow some time from the ones that end early and fill in some spaces for those that take up extra time. Always have your reading file with you or some other 5-minute tasks that can be banged off in between appointments. Late arrivals wait while you are finishing with your current appointment and they are shortchanged, do not go outside of your time limit to accommodate people who do not respect your time. Outside appointments are tougher to control but try your best to make them first thing in the morning or last at thing at night, at least you can use off hours to travel.

58.
Be A Driver Not A Passenger

This is a central theme to all of our Systems and tools. If you want to get better results, be more productive, have less stress, be happier, it all starts with the concept of becoming a Driver and not a Passenger. The second part of this equation is that when you become a Driver, you will then be able to drive your own Agenda and take charge of the events around you. For this to happen, you need to have a System to set your Agenda. This is where most people go wrong; they start each day without a clear idea of what it is they want to do and then its very easy for them to be put off track, primarily because they had no track to start with. Have a plan and then work your plan.

59.
Determining What Your Priorities Are

This task is one that will be a task you spend the rest of your life working on. It will never be finished and it will never remain the same over any length of time. You change, your job will change, relationships, where you live, all of these changes will effect what your Priorities are and will be. The activities you do each day will hopefully mirror what your Priorities are. This is what organizing and Prioritizing your time is all about, aligning your daily activities to enable you to achieve your Priorities. We can’t always spend each day directly working on things that will impact our Priorities on a day-to-day basis. That is not practical and if you are in a position to do that, I envy you. For most of us, working gets in the way of achieving our goals in life to some extent, unless you are in a position to be doing something each day that is in fact one of your Priorities. The real reality for most of us is the fact we are working in a job or have a career that is simple a means to an end, something to pay the bills. In these cases, it is even more important to get to a balance between getting the job done, as well as we can, as quickly and effortlessly as we can so we have as much possible outside time to pursue the real goals in our lives. Some times this process of sitting down and working through where you are now and where you want to be can be a real eye opener. It can help clarify what you should be doing versus what you are actually doing.

60.
Make Deadline Commitments To Others

Once you have a decision out of your head and into the Power Time System, www.powertimesystem.com, and if it deals with a deadline, a helpful trick is to spread it around, tell other people about it. This can be a useful trick in helping you get motivated and stay on track. Along with this tool, try to reduce the open-ended tasks and activities. Putting written deadlines on things helps to keep you on track and makes Time Activating tasks a more concrete and real function.

61.
Cell Phones

I have a love/hate relationship with cell phones. I personally do not have one, nor do I have Blackberry or other similar device. I manage just fine thank you. The problem with cell phones is people are using them to replace their lack of planning, forethought, organization skills, anything remotely resembling a thought process. This last statement clearly puts me in the category of zealot and that’s okay. Unless your job is directly related to you being in contact with your staff, superiors or customers, cell phones are vastly overrated as a means of staying in touch. The issue is, staying in touch has enabled a lot of people to escape the responsibility to plan their day, organize themselves and their time. They have replaced all of these functions with the blanket, "call me and we will work something out on the fly" approach. Cell phones can, of course, serve a function and can be a valuable tool to a lot of people. The reverse is, they have given people a crutch, a fall back position that they use to run their day by, a poor substitute for being organized and in charge. Before the advent of sell phones, people who were organized and in charge, did well. Those that were not well managed did not do very well even after the advent of cell phones. Did the advent of the cell phone change anything? Did the "not too well managed people" suddenly become well managed? No. In fact, in my opinion, they became less well managed and in a lot of cases, were worse off than before. They are worse off now because they have yet another drag on their time, another door in the hallway that opens constantly throughout the day and gives them very little back in return. Give this section some thought. My view on cell phones raises a lot of eyebrows and in seminars evokes very strong reactions from the people attending. After the dust has settled, I get a surprising number of emails and calls from people who have weaned themselves off their cell phones and found they have a lot more time to do the things they want to do and are a lot less stressed out.

FACT:
Over the years there is one constant that keeps cropping up among the most successful users of The Power Time System. That constant is TIME ACTIVATING PRIORITIZED TASKS. Time activating provides structure, provides you with a definite game plan and helps you stay focused and on point. Learn from the success of others.

62.
Time Activate It

I refer to Time Activating Priorities as the missing link. In the PTS an absolute Irrefutable is: Time Activating Priorities. I even have an article on the web page that says, If You Do Not Time Activate - Why Bother? This is a core activity; this is the activity that makes wishes and dreams a reality, or at least brings them into better focus. We all want to do and accomplish a lot of tasks in a day, and without Time Activating these tasks, finding specific spots in our Day Timer when we will actually do these tasks, we are just flying around in a fog. Our concept of Time Activating Priorities and activities is a major difference between how we approach Time Management and others in the field.

63.
Action Plan

Time Activating separates the winners from the non-winners, a nice Canadian way to say losers, eh. Unless you include this step in your Time Management thought process, you are simply not going to get the value from all of the other work you may have put into the process. Time Activating brings into focus the actual time that will be required to do everything that you are planning to do on a daily basis. Time Activating is one of the last steps you do before you start the production side of your day. Without doing the Time Activating step, you are basically flying blind in regards to the segments of time you will need to perform your Priorities as well as all the other time commitments you may have on any given day as well. Start paying more attention to the time it takes to do your regular activities, the things you do daily. Knowing how long it takes for you to do your common everyday activities will come in handy when you start to Time Activate everything you want to do in a day. This practice will make Time Activating your entire schedule in the near future more of a reality than a guessing game.

64.
Time Management Isn’t A Destination, It’s a Journey

You will probably see this statement more times than any other on this site, in fact we say it at the top of every page. I personally never made the connection between what I accomplished, or did not accomplish, until I believed that I would never conquer time, I could just tame it a little. Time is an elusive target; it never stands still long enough to get a good bead on it. I’ve been working on getting control of my time for 30 plus years. I'm getting better at it but still not there yet. As long as I realize this fact and still work at it, I’ll be on the right track.

65.
Make a Power Living Life List (PLLL)

The name pretty well says it all. Start a list; put everything you want to do with the rest of your life, on that list. That pretty well sums it up. This list, your own personal Power Living Life List, should be part of the fabric of your life from now on. The more time, effort, and diligence you put into creating this list, the more chance you have of achieving what’s on that list. There will be a direct correlation between the completeness of this list and what you accomplish in the ensuring years. Trust me when I say this, your Power Living Life List will become your best friend on your Time Management journey. For some additional info, www.powerlivinglifelist.com

66.
Action Plan

This is something you cannot come up with something you want to start today with on your own, you can start to day with this. Grab a piece of paper and start jotting down the things you want to do, for the rest of your life. Keep writing until you run out of time, that is the best way to describe your Power Living Life List, PLLL. People go wrong with this concept when they start to put parameters on this process. There are no parameters, there are no rules. If there is a universal favorite among all of the people who have participated in this program, this one is it. Among all of the others, it’s this tool, the PLLL, that peopsay makes the biggest impact on their performance and on their lives. It works because for minimal effort, you reap huge continual rewards, for as long

67.
Make Action A Way Of Life

Time Management is all about action. Without action, the concept of Time Management is meaningless. There are two parts to the Time Management concept. The first part is the thought process; the planning, getting ready, getting organized part. That is the relatively easy part. The second part is the action part, the "where the rubber meets the road" part. This action part is where we get the work done, do the tasks, complete the processes that allow putting to bed what is done and get on with the new stuff. Remember, when all else fails, do something – anything, but do something.

68.
Time is a non-renewable Resource

Once gone, time is gone forever. This is a startling realization, when it becomes a realization. To get good really good at managing and controlling your time, this statement has to be at the top of your head awareness, at all times. When you act, this has to be just simmering below the surface, it has to help guide and direct every step you take. When you are in this space, you will have arrived, my grasshopper ☺

69.
All Roads Lead to Rome

Time is the stuff our lives are made of, a paraphrase of many similar like sentiments. If it matters, it will have been through your Time Conduit, your Power Living Life List, your Time Activity Funnel, your Day Planner, and every other tool you use daily to get where you want to go, on time, doing what has to be done, when it should be done. When you want to get better at something, any thing, the road you want to be on, is your Time Management journey.

70.
POWER ARTICLE Time Management - All Roads Lead To Rome

Back in the good days, all roads led to Rome. At least any roads of consequence. There really wasn’t any argument and the people that mattered back then, the Romans, believed this with a frenzied all-consuming zeal. Nothing wrong with good, old fashioned frenzied all-consuming zeal, as long as the focus is on the right object. And what do you think MY old fashioned frenzied all-consuming zeal is directed at? You win the stuffed animal if you guessed Time Management. I’m reluctant to come right out and say that I believe, as well as know, that regardless of what your situation is, where on the food chain of success and happiness you are, you will immeasurably improve your lot with a small to large dose of frenzied all-consuming zeal directed at improving how you spend, use and invest your time. The reason I’m reluctant to put Time Management into the category of some sort of cure-all is that by doing so, I will in some people’s minds reduce Time Management to a kind of modern day snake oil. Let me give you some background on the how and why of Time Management from my perspective. I didn’t wake up one day and say, “I think I will spend a good deal of the next 30 or so years working with and dealing with Time Management”. Way back then, the term Time Management wasn’t even on my radar, let alone did I know what it meant or the implications of the term. I was a business consultant by accident. I was in the process of developing one of the two franchise organizations that I would build, develop and spread across Canada. In the process of selling the franchises, I came in contact with a great many people who were looking to get into business for themselves. They would answer my ad in the Toronto Star, Winnipeg Free Press, or Vancouver Sun and the dialogue would start. Some would buy my franchise, a lawn care business. Many would not. During the qualifying process, it would become clear that what I had to offer was not suitable for many of them. They would explain what they were looking for and I would see what I could do for them. A career was born. From there I branched out into other areas of business development and consulting. As I met more and more people who became clients, a trend started to develop. The goal of being in business for yourself is to prosper and get rich, right? Everybody had the same goal; they just all had a different approach as to how to get there. I was always amazed at how haphazard the approach was. The goal seemed clear to everybody. The way they were going to achieve it, however, was far from clear. Even from the beginning, I noticed that almost everyone was making the same mistakes. No clear plan, no written plan, no focus, and no direction. Everyone focused on the end with no thought as to how to get there. I started working with some of my earlier clients on getting some structure, some direction, getting them to pay attention to what was clearly, in my mind, the foundation and the base on which to work. I had stumbled upon Time Management. The more time I spent on what was becoming my learning curve for Time Management, the more success my clients had. We started to spend less time working on the short strokes; the details of their individual businesses but more time and focus on how they handled their own time. There was no question in my mind, and in theirs, that there was a direct correlation between how well they managed and controlled their time and their success, regardless of the business. Whether you were a mortgage broker, owned a plumbing business or wanted to be a baker, the constant theme and road to getting the most out of what you had was your ability to manage, control and use your time to your maximum benefit. I started to spend more and more time on Time Management and less on the general business consulting side of my operations. I spent time researching, going to seminars, started putting on my own seminars and worked on putting down on paper everything I had learned. Out of this collective activity came the Power Time System. Which leads me to the problem of telling people that the path to get what you want out of life, whatever that is, is irrelevant. That path will lead through your personal Time Management journey.

71.
Stress and Managing Your Time

Ever tried to do something that requires two hands and having one of then tied behind your back? That is what it’s like trying to get your time under control while you are stressed out and anxious. A concept that is hard to come to grips with is this one, the very situation that is creating the stress in the first place, poor use of your time, is the one you have to seemingly make worse before you can make it better. You are stressed out because you feel you are dealing with a lack of time to fix the problem, long term, you need to take what is in short demand already and use some of that time to reorganize and re group. That is a very hard thing for almost all of us to do. Taking this step, re grouping and taking time to step back and start to do some of the things you need to do to gain back control of your time takes discipline, determination and conviction. To learn more, click here, www.powerempowerment.com

72.
Take a Working Day Off

This is a concept that I started to do, out of necessity and it works great. This concept, like all the others in this Top 141 is covered in more detail in the PTS, but I will just touch on it here. It’s not super complex; in fact it’s pretty simple. I live a fair distance from my Plastic Recycling facility and to cut down on travel time, I work one day a week from home. I didn’t want to take this day “ off “, so I designated it a working day from home. I then took it a step further and added some leisure activities to the day, interspersing the leisure activities in between the work activities. I did a little experimenting and ended up with 4 work blocks of 2 hours and 2 blocks of leisure time of 2 hours each. To make long story short, THIS working day off as I call it, with a whopping 4 hours off during the day, 9 times out of 10, this working day off is my most productive, by far. Give this a try, it works great.

73.
POWER ARTICLE Take A Working Day Off

Sometimes mixing a little leisure time with business time works. "We all have times when we think more effectively, and times when we should not be thinking at all" Daniel Cohen. I will add one more thought to this brilliant quote. There are also times when we can do both at the same time and still reap the benefits of the time we are "on" and the times we are "off". –BB This is a concept that I use and one that we teach in our seminars and it works really well for some people. It’s based on the reality that it’s the quality of the work you do, not how or where you do it. Depending on the type of work you do, and where you do the most of it, try this and see if it works for you. When I moved north of the city and even farther into the country, driving to my primary business (I own a plastic recycling company that requires a processing facility which is in the city near major roads and our customers) was now almost 2 hours one way, in good weather, which we do not have 6 months of the year where I live. This necessitated a change in my regular routine. I would work from home one day a week and this would cut out two round trips a week. It also would mean that I would have to change my routine and what I did from home, a new challenge for me. I tend to put in a lot of hours, sometimes out of habit, sometimes out of necessity. I use to equate volume of hours with getting a lot accomplished. I have, over time, learned that that is not always the case and is, in fact, usually the opposite. Wednesday is the day I work from home. I organize the schedule down at the recycling facility and make sure the right staff is there and work is properly laid out for them. It does not make sense to have a working day off and then have the phone ring off the wall from your business 2 hours away. It defeats the whole concept. Another reason I don’t own a cell phone. My schedule from home on Wednesday is set up for two things to happen: get a certain amount of work done, as well as get some "other activities" done. The other activities can be as far ranging as you want; it’s your choice. In my case it’s working on my pond. Yes, my pond. I have 10 acres out here in the boonies, and when I moved in there was a small natural swimming pond, about a half-acre. I intend to do some work on it and that is where I will spend at least a portion of my working day off. (I have done working days off in the past at other places and will for illustrative purposes here, describe the most recent location). My schedule is this: �� I get up at 5:30 AM, feed the cats before they drive me crazy. This is my normal routine and I want to keep it as normal as possible. It helps me stay on target and reinforces in my mind that this is still a workday and there is a set agenda and work has to and will be accomplished, just in a different fashion. On other days, I’m in my car and driving south to my facility while I listen to the 6:00 AM news. On Wednesday, I want to be sitting down at my computer working by no later than 6:00 AM. This way, by 8:00 AM, when I would normally be just getting to work, I have already booked in 2 hours of prime work time. These are what we call Power Hours, described in the Power Time System in more detail. �� This is where the "off" part comes in on the working day off concept. Its now 8:00 AM and I’ve already worked 2 straight hours. These were 2 Power Hours where I was uninterrupted and accomplished considerably more than I would have at "work ". I schedule 4, 2-hour work sessions of A Priority activities, for a total of 8 hours on my working day off. When does the "off" part come? Right now. I’m up at 5:30, and start work at 6:00, I work four, 2-hour sections and I want to have my feet up at 6:00 PM, no later than 7:00 PM. That makes my working day off 12 hours long. That leaves 4 hours of off time throughout the day. In my case, I have jobs I want to do around my new swimming pond; trees to plant, rocks to carry and move, hills to be built, a waterfall to make. Lots to do. These activities are all on my Living List. And, like any activity on that list, at some point you have to make the time available to actually do those things. This is when some of those non-work activities actually get done. In real time, its February 6th 2009 and where I live there is 3 feet of snow on the ground therefore no work on the pond this time of year. In the winter we heat our house with wood, so on my Wednesdays, my working day off, I spend some time doing wood related activity. I still consider this to be relaxing and a "time off" activity. That’s my schedule and it works very well for me. I work 4, 2-hour shifts and intermingle those with outside activities that I find relaxing and refreshing. I usually take some time off and go out for lunch with my wife as well. You will determine how you schedule your working day off and what you want to accomplish work-wise as well as non-work related. IMPORTANT NOTE What I have found, as well as the feedback I get from my clients who have used this technique, is that the quality of the work that they complete on their working days off is consistently superior to the results they achieve working with their traditional schedule. Give it a try. I know you will be very happy with the results.

74.
Are You The Bug, Or The Windshield?

Bugs are people who don’t care or take the time to organize their lives. Windshields are people who do care and take the times to organize their lives. When the bugs and the windshields meet, what happens? Who wins, always? To really get into the groove and get the maximum out of your time and therefore get the maximum out of your life, you have to realize, when some one gets their Agenda realized, some one else does not. Time Management is all about getting what you want done, getting your Agenda accomplished. When your Agenda gets accomplished, more than likely some one else did not. Much more about this later.

75.
POWER ARTICLE Are You A Bug Or A Windshield?

“He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.” Harry Emerson Fosdick What does this have to do with Time Management? A lot. Before you can be effective and really make some positive changes in how you deal with and treat time, you have to be able to see the playing field. You have to not only see the playing field but also know the players, the rules and how the game works. In this case the game is Time Management, the players are you and everyone and everything that interacts with you and finally, there are no rules, at least not written down ones. It’s a jungle out there and every one of us has to find out where they are in the pecking order. These bring us to the question, are you a bug or are you the windshield? �� Windshields Splatter Bugs; It’s A Simple Concept. Windshields are hard and bugs are soft; no contest, the windshields win every time. It’s an important point to bear in mind. Windshields do not look for bugs to splatter; windshields go on their merry way, minding their own business and if a bug happens to be in its path, splatter. Something else to bear in mind; the only time a windshield splatters a bug is when its moving, unless of course a bug wants to commit suicide and it flies into an immobile windshield. Windshields have agendas. I don’t suppose you thought that, but they do. Windshields are always going from one point to another point, they are always moving; here, there, everywhere. They have a plan and they are executing their plan. That constitutes an agenda. �� If you were a windshield, driving around, executing your agenda, do you really care how many bugs you splatter? You know you are a hard surface, bugs are a soft surface, and you are going to win each time. Why would or should you care? The reality is, the bugs get in your way, not the other way around. All you are doing is going about your business, not bothering anyone else, especially the bugs. Windshields Have Redeeming Qualities I’m sure you were not aware of that, but they do. In fact they have several. They are polite, when asked, they will slow down, they will turn left or right, they will stop, alter their speed, and do pretty much what you ask them too, all in the goal of avoiding splattering bugs. They are kind, they will alter their route in order to avoid splattering bugs, and all you have to do is ask them, nicely. They are courteous, even when they have planned a route. If given enough notice and an alternate route to take, windshields will take that alternate route in order to avoid splattering bugs. And most of all, Windshields are SMART. They can learn different routines, new ways of doing things and they take direction very well. All windshields need is a little guidance, some patience and someone to help along the right path and they can become a productive part of society. So do you want to become a windshield? But maybe you already are one? Last point about windshields; they always win because the bugs are not a challenge to them. Bugs are not too bright, don’t look where they are going and on top of it all, they are soft. If you always win, what’s the point in changing? Bugs If you are a bug, you don’t have a very bright future or a very long one for that matter. Bugs are a strange breed. Some of them exhibit a great deal of intelligence but unfortunately the majority of them are not too bright. Bugs have lives and this means they have to get out and about everyday. Out into the world, a world that is inhabited by, you guessed it, windshields. We know all about windshields, but unfortunately, it seems that bugs do not. The problem with bugs is their inability to deal with windshields. You would think that knowing they are no match for windshields, knowing that windshields are out there, they would do a little planning and organizing to be able to function with them but this isn’t the case. Lets review how bugs interact with windshields. Bugs see other bugs getting splattered everyday but don’t learn from this horrifying spectacle. Bugs have an opportunity to plan their day to avoid windshields. They can plan and organize their day and be in other parts of town far away from the danger of windshields, but alas, very few take the time or trouble to do so. It’s a well know fact that windshields are a reasonable sort of creature and are very willing to change, alter and make provisions in there day to PREVENT unfortunate sudden fatal collisions between themselves and bugs. Bugs know this, they know that they never survive these sudden impact situations but for some unfathomable reason known only to the bugs, they very rarely spend the short amount of time necessary to literally save themselves from certain death. Does anyone know how to spell intervention? There is one irrefutable fact that makes the life of bugs usually a very unsatisfying and short one; they must get out into the world of the windshields on a daily basis, no options, no alternate plans. It’s a world full of windshields, whether the bugs like it or not. What’s a bug to do? A bug can’t change the world it has to live in. What can a simple little bug do to survive and prosper in a world full of windshields is change and adapt to the reality around it. The question is not “do you want to be a bug”, but, if you are a bug, are you willing to do what it takes to become a windshield?

76.
Action Plan

This one is simple. At the end of each day, ask yourself this simple question, was I the Bug or the Windshield today? It will be pretty easy to tell, did you accomplish as much as you wanted to today, if the answer is yes, then you were the Windshield. If you were put off your game plan, or worse, did not have a game plan, then you were the Bug. Moving forward, day by day and accomplishing what you want to get done, is as much about attitude as it is about performance.

77.
Can “Lost“ Time Be Found?

First of all, time is never lost. Time is a never-ending string that has a long history and an uncertain future. We know how much time has passed; we are never sure how much time we have in front of us. Regardless, time is never lost, it's wasted, squandered, used, misused, but never lost. If we wasted time today, can we make up for it tomorrow? I say no. Assuming you live a relatively full life, you have things you want to do every day. If you wasted Monday, and you think you can do Monday’s activities on Tuesday, when do you do Tuesday’s activities? Assuming you squeeze BOTH Mondays and Tuesdays activities on Tuesdays, what happens if you have a bad day on Tuesday? Do you think you can do 3 days activities on Wednesdays you can see where we are going with this? You waste an hour; it’s gone, forever.

78.
Your Turf

This started out as "defend your time" but evolved into "defend your turf". It’s more all encompassing and more accurate. Your turf can mean many things, your office space, your time, your agenda, your space, your privacy; it can mean a lot of things. I try here to get people to be more aggressive, more propriety thinking about what is there’s, especially about their time. You only have so much of it and only so many chances to use it. Each day you have 8 to 10 hours of time, and only that time frame in which to reap some benefit, some reward from it. After that, it’s on to another day and another chance.

79.
Just Leave

We have numerous encounters during the day, I’m referring to the face-to-face kinds, most of them are unintentional and by chance. When you add up all the by chance encounters, and the ones you did not plan on initiating, the time that could be taken up by these is substantial. You can allow these chances and not so by chance meetings to chew up your time or you can try these two quick gambits. The first is what I call the walk through. You see the person coming towards you, if you wish, start talking, say as much as you want or care to as you approach them as you are beside them and as you are walking way from them. Once you are out of earshot, you are done. Your choice how much you want to say and their choice how much they may want to squeeze in, the trick is, only as much as you can say while you continue to walk. Second only, as you are walking by, if they wish to talk to you, simply say, “walk with me”. They have the choice to walk and talk, or stay and miss a chance to talk to you; it’s there choice. One of the choices on this menu is having you stop, interrupt your day and have you talk to them. Remember; are you a Bug or a Windshield?

80.
The Weekly Meeting With Yourself

We have talked about the most important meeting you will have in any day, and that meeting will be with your self. You also need to introduce a weekly meeting with your self as well. This meeting by the very nature of it, a review of the week will be longer than the daily ones. The same rough criteria applies, informal, on the go, in one spot, at home, at the office, in transit, the key is, it’s alone and it is a “meeting “. You need to touch base with yourself and review the week and how it went, what went wrong, what went right, a pat on the back or a boot in the butt. Based on the outcome of this meeting, the coming week, weeks will reflect that outcome. That’s the point of what we are doing here, if we didn’t get done what we really wanted to get done last week, we have to do better this week and the way to do that is to get those key Priority tasks into more Time Activated time blocks and work on getting them done.

81.
Have A Do Not Do List

We have all heard about the famous To Do List, along with that one, you need to have a Do Not Do List as well. Well over 80 % of the problem areas in our lives come from repeat offenders. Things we know we do wrong, or should not do in the first place, but continue to either do them, or do them wrong when we do, do them. If we can discipline ourselves and zero in on this small group of activities we do that cause this over proportion of trouble for us, we would be doing ourselves a great deal of good. This boils down to identifying these activities and then disciplining ourselves to either not do them in the first place or if we have to do them, take steps to do them correctly.

82.
POWER ARTICLE Have a Do Not Do List

We have all heard about a To Do List; now let’s look at a Do Not Do List. Increasing your productivity hinges on your ability to not keep making the same mistakes over and over again. The people who learn from their past mistakes are the people who will move forward much quicker than those who do not. There is a saying, “If you do not learn from History, you will be forced to repeat it.“ The reason this saying is particularly important to us is twofold. History for us will only be valuable if, by some chance, we have discovered the best possible way to do something and there is no chance it will ever be improved upon and only then will history be a good thing for us. As we know unless we are continually looking for ways to improve our performance, we will not be gaining any additional production advantages. It’s just as important to keep track of what you do not want to do as what you want to do. By increasing your D.N.D.L., you are eliminating the activities that are hindering your production, your ability to function effectively and hurting your bottom line. The argument that items on your D.N.D.L. are more important than your To Do List is a valid one. The question we have to ask ourselves is this, what hurts us/ benefits us more or less, a positive or a negative? The Negative Argument We find some aspect in our process to order products that is costing us time and money. We discover that ordering a week in advance does not give us the chance to react to inventory levels so we order twice a week instead and solve the problem, saving time and money in the process. We put the "ordering once a week" process on the D.N.D.L. for future reference. If down the road someone says, why don’t we save some time and only order once a week, we can trot out our D.N.D.L. and explain we have been down that road. This is an example of turning a negative into a positive for our gain. The Positive Argument The same process but in reverse. We are ordering twice a week and someone suggest we order once a week and we find out that once a week is better. We add that new process to our To Do List. The fact that we went the through the process to find the newer and better way to do a task we do on a regular basis is very important to the overall goal of maximizing what we do. The continual search for ways to become better, more functional and more efficient is at the heart of increasing your production. When I started this topic, I knew there was not going to be a nice bow that I could tie this up with. Sometimes that is not possible nor does it always have to be necessary. Sometimes the journey itself is the process. In this case, there really does not have to be a better way, they both feed off each other to make you a more efficient person. If we all learn from this is that we want to have a To Do List of things we know benefit us and we have a reverse list, our Do Not Do List of things we have found to not benefit us, then we are going to move forward. What you want to take away from this is: you want to always be weighing what you do with a risk / reward ratio viewpoint. You want to always be looking, investigating and thinking of ways to get better at what you do. You want to discard the way you do something whenever you feel you will gain an advantage. If you don’t gain an advantage, keep looking, experimenting, and discarding until you find that advantage. Once you have found that edge, repeat the process all over again because there will always be another edge out there for someone who is looking for it. After all, isn’t this what it’s all about?

83.
You Should NEVER Have To Ask, "What’s Next?"

You should never have to think about what is next. Your Day Planner is your best friend in this regard. One of the values of your Day Planner is that it takes the guesswork out of what is next. It’s right there in black and white. Remember, you’re Power Living Life List, your Time Activity Funnel, your Time Activity Conduit, all the other tools you use to get organized. This is the pay off. In the middle of a busy day, you are not rushed, not harried, not stressed because you have an agenda, you are driving that agenda and you are in control. That’s a nice place to be.

84.
DBMP: Don’t Bring Me Problems

Don’t Bring Me Problems. If you have staff or any other type of person who is likely to interact with you, get them on the same page when it comes to what they bring you. You can not stop people from bring you there problems, that is human nature, but what you can do is the next point we cover here.

85.
BMS: Bring Me Solutions

Bring Me Solutions along with the problem. A big part of Time Management is spending your time to properly organize their time. In this scenario, work with those around you to spend time BEFORE they get to you at least thinking about the problem. They should have formed some sort of solution or course of action before they get to you. It’s the old story of people just dumping their problems on your desk with the attitude, "solve this for me". One of the surest ways to ensure you don’t get what you want and need to get done is to start to do other peoples jobs for them.

86.
Your Power Living Life List (PLLL) Makes You A Driver

Having a clear picture of what you want to do in your life is critical to achieving day to day success. Not having this clear definition of what you want to do, make the day-to-day operations of your life impossible to properly plan and execute. You’re Power Living Life List, PLLL, www.powerlivinglifelist.com gives you the first vital step in getting your life organized and gaining back control of your time. Becoming a driver means you are able to make sure that your Agenda is what gets done on a daily basis, a critically important step in ensuring you achieve what you want in the day to day term, as well as the long term. Your PLLL is what starts the process of identifying all of the things you want to accomplish in your life. That may sound like a daunting task, but in reality, it is a very simple process. Without knowing what you really want to accomplish in your life, the day to day things that you accomplish lose focus and direction, and this leads to wasted days, weeks, months and eventually years. You want to make sure that establishing and adding to your PLLL is a high priority.

87.
Time Activity Funnel

This is the next step after building your Power Living Life List, PLLL. Your PLLL is a huge non-Prioritized list of everything and anything that deals with the rest of your life. It’s a jumble of information and that’s how it should be. The next step in the process is to start to take bits and pieces of information from your PLLL and put those bits and pieces of information in some sort of order. This is where your Time Activity Funnel comes into play. Visualize what a funnel looks like. Big open top, slowly narrowing into a small pipe that empties into what ever you want it to. This Time Activity Funnel is an important next step in getting your Priorities into focus and separating business, job, personal, social, family activities into some sort of order.

88.
Attend Only The Portion Of The Meeting That Deals With You

Meetings are massive users of time. Depending on the number of people at the meeting, one meeting can use up hundreds of people hours, in only a one-day meeting. It is rare that you need to be in an 8-hour meeting from start to finish. Perhaps you only need to sit in on one or two sections, one or two hours. Why waste the rest of the day on issues that have little or no value to you? If you are organizing the meeting, set it up so there are clear divides between specific topics. This will enable those people to be present when needed and then they are free to go once there section is complete. The savings to you/ your organization in man-hours will be substantial.

89.
Will You Lead, Or Be Led?

A large percentage of the people you deal with each day are people who would be just as content if you led them, rather than be the ones doing the leading. The point is this, people fall into the trap of being led, having other people decide what and when things will be done, more out of chance than design. Use this to your advantage. When the other person is not interested in taking the lead, be sure to put up your Agenda and your game plan as a viable route to go. 9 times out of 10, everyone will be happy for the course of action to be determined for them and would be happy to follow along. It’s a win/win situation for everyone and you end up moving your agenda along uncontested.

90.
Controlling Time Means Reaping The Maximum Value Out Of Life

It seems so obvious, but so many people would like to look in other directions in order to get more out of their lives. As a business consultant, I saw so many of my clients not happy with the results they were getting from their businesses but when I wanted them to spend some time on redirecting their focus from a singular approach to one that included working on reining in their use of their time, they would bal. Even when I showed them the results from so many other clients, the resistance was still there. Even now, it’s hard to pin point why. There is a general reluctance to think that controlling and managing ones time is the answer to so many problems, but the reality is that by spending just a small portion of your time in this area, you will reap you massive benefits. Time is the stuff life is made of. When we waste time, we waste our lives.

91.
Small Steps, Big Impact

It’s a long road that does not have any bends in it. You will probably start and start on your Time Management journey a number of times. That is the way most people make the transition from here to there. Every one starts with a lot of enthusiasm and good intentions. Things work out well and then we get behind, experience another set back or two. Even though your progress may be slow, the impact on you results and productivity will be large. Even small changes in your daily routine will have massive benefits to you because the benefits are compounded over the rest of your life. Start the habit of Time Activating tasks for the next 5 days. Set one hour aside each day to perform a specific task. See how many days you can stick to the task and get it done within the prescribed time slot.

92.
The Best Offence Is A Good Defense

Our goal is to get what we want to get done, when we want to get it done, on our timetable. That is our offensive strategy. How we get that done is be the first onto the playing field and establish our game plan as the plan to follow, and then wait. We wait to see if any one challenges us and starts to put forth their plan as the one to be followed. Example, you get into your office and start to follow your agenda, the first hour goes by and no one, or no things interrupts your flow, great, so far. The next hour, someone wants to see you about a report, a report they want to see you about, not the other way around. The first challenge to your game plan for that day. You suggest tomorrow at 10:00 is best for you, they agree, disaster averted. You continue on your way. The rest of the day could go either way. You hope to complete the Priorities you have already set out in your Day Planner. The interruptions and distractions will come, you will be in a position to deflect them, postpone them, deal with them, all with a view to get back to your plan. Your actions are your offensive plans, your defense is your are dug in and set to defend your plan, already in place and working for you. It’s this combination of offense and defense that will win the day more often than not for you.

93.
Stress Is Like Having Cancer

Stress is like having cancer, you can have it and feel fine, and then one day, you keel over and it’s all over. Most people when you ask them are you under stress and they will answer surprisingly no, but the truth is, almost all of us are under stress and this adversely effects are ability to function properly. How stress affects our ability to function is simple, it makes us perform below our normal capacity. When we are under stress, are anxious, feel depressed, feel angry, and are disappointed, we are no longer able to perform at our normal capacity. If we were able to process 3 reports in an hour, when we are under stress, we will only be able to process 2 or maybe 1 and ½. To find out how to identify how stress negatively effects you and ways to reduce your stress levels, visit, www.powerstressreducer.com

94.
Yesterday Has Gone

There is nothing we can do about yesterday other then learn from what took place. You can’t change what you had for breakfast let alone something important. We could benefit from what we did yesterday and learn from either our mistakes or our success or we could come up short. The real waste from a day where we did not benefit from our actions is not learning from that exercise. If we learn from the exercise, we did pick up some good from it, just not the good we had anticipated.

95.
The Now Is Here

Lets make the most from today, while it is here. Today will be short, the time available to move us along, closer to where we will be and want to be is very limited. My goal each day is to be a little more content at the end of the day than at the beginning. I have found over the years that the majority of people, at least the people that I have come in contact with, are less stressed, more content, happier if they have coupled their actions that day with some form of closure on a task or job that needed to be done. It seems simple, but that is what makes most of us happy. The feeling that you get when you can say, "I did that job and it’s done, I accomplished something today, I started AND finished that job I wanted to do". Two pieces of the puzzle have to be there, the start as well as the finish piece.

96.
POWER ARTICLE Power Time Management Irrefutables Will Force you to Make Tough Decisions

Time Management Irrefutables will force you to make tough decisions. As long as you are serious, that is. Developing a set of Irrefutables to run your business or life by is a way you can start to show yourself that you are, in fact, serious about becoming successful and actually start to achieve some of the goals you want for your self in life. I have a saying, “if you want to run with the big dogs, you have to get off the porch“. That is one of my favorite quotes. (Not an original, do not know where it came from, sorry) It seems so descriptive and captures the essence of what you are trying to say, especially in this instance. When you create a series of Irrefutables, ways that will define what you do and how you will do it, you have taken the first concrete steps to taking charge and driving your own agenda. Irrefutables will make you ask tough questions and then make tough decisions, both of which are good things for people who are serious about becoming successful. Tough Questions Any one who is not happy with their results has to start to ask themselves some tough questions. If you do not, then you are going to continue to be unhappy, indefinitely. Indefinitely is a long time by the way. Here are a few questions that need to be asked: �� Are the means to change my results within my capabilities? �� Do I control my own destiny? �� What am I prepared to do to change the results that I am currently achieving? The questions are tough because they place the burden where it should be placed, on our own shoulders. If you do not want to shoulder the responsibility for taking control of your own future, then you have to realize that you really are not that dissatisfied with where you are now and where you will probably continue to be for the foreseeable future. Only when your dissatisfaction level rises to the point where you are prepared to actually do something concrete about it will your prospects for the future actually change. It’s a tough pill to swallow when we have to admit that we are the reasons for our lack of success or our lack of happiness. Without this admission, chances for things improving are minimal. This is not a self-pity exercise, far from it. What we want to do is take the reins and move on, as quickly as possible. It is a huge positive step forward when we realize that the cause, as well as the cure, lay within our own control. Tough Decisions What are you prepared to stop doing today and start doing differently tomorrow that will create the results you want? It is a simple, but not easy switch of activities that will lead to you realizing some of the goals that you currently not achieving. This is where developing your own Irrefutables will help immensely. I have been with thousands of my clients, either on a one to one basis or in group seminars and very rarely do the participants not know the areas of their professional or business lives that are the root cause of their lack of results. Salesmen know that if they made more calls, the results would come. Production managers know that if they spent more time planning, production would go up. The answer does not lie in the means, but in the will, more precisely, the lack of will. For there to be real progress, there has to be some fundamental changes in the core functions that are being done now. I’m not talking about the window dressing cosmetic things that will always fluctuate and change; I’m talking about the irrefutable activities that are required by you, that are at the core of what will make you successful. Let’s take our salesman as an example. This person makes his living by getting a commission every time he sells a house. No sales, no commission, no success; a pretty simple equation. This person must create a core value in his business, must work within an Irrefutable that dictates he must make 20 sales calls a week, minimally. This is the tough question, tough answer part. He asks himself the tough question, “What will it take for me to become successful?“ The tough answer is “at least 20 sales calls a week“. That answer now becomes the answer to another tough question, "what are you prepared to do to become successful?" We already have the answer to that question; make at least 20 sales calls a week. Once this process is complete, there will be a certain amount of relief in knowing at least the way for our success has been partially laid out for us. www.powerirrefutables.com

97.
Tomorrow Will Come

Unless something unpleasant happens, tomorrow will come. The burning question is, will we be ready. ? I always find there is a direct correlation between the amount of time I spend getting ready
and preparing for the next days and the results I get. The more time, the better the results.

98.
The 3 Minute Power Tasker

Do you really know how long 3 minutes is? Take out a watch with a second hand and time out 3 minutes. Watch the second hand go around 3 times. When you sit there and watch it, it really is a surprisingly long time. The reason we get behind and stressed out is we let a whole pile of little things pile up until there is a huge mountain of little things that now will take a chunk of time to whittle down to a little pile or no pile at all. Use what I call the 3-minute Power Tasker. Start doing small tasks that you think you can squeeze into 3 minutes. Most people over estimate the length of time small tasks take, usually by a lot. Sending a short reply email, responding to a phone call, addressing an envelope, writing a short note, filing some papers, moving some files. The small finicky items that crop up all day long. Try the 3 minute Power Tasker and you will be very pleasantly surprised at how much you can get done in 3 minutes.

99.
Stay Ahead Of The Chaos

We all experience days that just seem to get away from us, days that start off on the wrong foot and just go down hill from there. The problem is how many of these types of days do you have? If they are the rare exceptions, we can live with them, if they are the norm, then you are in trouble. When you are constantly operating in a state of chaos, then you are constantly in a stressful state and that means your productivity and effectiveness are way down. Staying ahead of the chaos means you have to plan better, be more organized, be the one in charge. Sounds simple but we all know it’s not.

100.
Action Plan

The chaos that we experience is not what comes in from left field; it’s what we deal with on a daily basis, day after day. The majority of things that cause us grief are the things we know about and just refuse to dwith, usually because we say we do not have enough time. We should start to know by now that is not the case, we have plenty of time, and we just choose to spend it on other activities. The two main causes of chaotic or stressful situations in our lives are events that we allow to creep into our day that we have not planned for, or activities that we try to do in too short of time. Either one of this is just a lack of planning on our part. Start to identify events that you regularly allow too little time for them to be done properly in and start to allocate more time for them. Learn from past experiences and try not to repeat the same mistakes again.

101.
Check For A Comfortable Work Environment

I’m always amazed when I visit a client and see where they are trying to work. This is where you will be for 5 days a week, 7 to 10 hours a day for in some cases your whole working, business lives. You think people would spend a little, time, thought and money on making this space pleasant to be in as well as functional and logistically correct as possible. You would be wrong. Get serious about making your personal work space a pleasant place to be in as well as having what you need where you need and when you need it. In the PTS, we spend a big chunk of time on this neglected issue.

102.
Your Best Ideas About Work Do Not Happen At Work

Work is not a good place to think about work, at least not the good kind of thinking. That is a strange thing to say, but most of the people I talk to agree. It all depends on the kind of work you do, but if there is value to you to have progressive thoughts about your work or business, you should have a system in place to capture those thoughts. As you will probably guess, I DO NOT own a tech-type of device to record my thoughts. I don’t even own a cell phone. I use good old fashion paper and pencil; keep a running file on thoughts ideas, suggestions, things that go buzz in the night. These go into my PLLL, or into separate files for, new article ideas, separate files for new pages on the web, breakdowns by page, etc. The fact is, I’m ready for the thoughts that come out of nowhere and have a system in place to catch and record those thoughts. You should have one to.

103.
CC. Do Not Be a Copy Cat

It's way to easy to cc people these days. A push of a button and your whole email address file gets a copy of who knows what. You can be the problem or the solution. Every unnecessary cc has to be read by some one. It drains their time and takes away from their ability to work on what’s important to them. Be respectful of there time and think twice before cc someone else. On the same vein, let the people who needlessly cc you that its not appreciated.

104.
Mini-Sort

This is another short time saver that packs a big punch. Its just 5 minutes a day. Take 5 minutes EVERY day to do a 5-minute MINI-SORT of the top of your desk/ computer. You are looking to clear the decks of the material, things, papers, files, bits and pieces of paper that can pile up in the course of the day. You are looking to do as many micro tasks as you can squeeze into 5 minutes. For this to be effective, it has to be done 5 minutes, every day. Try if for a week, 5 days, and the impact on your desk, computer is amazing. It’s the accumulative impact of short regular activities like this that can really pay off. The time invested is small, the R.O.I. is huge.

105.
Weekly–Sort

This one is, you guessed it, a weekly sort. Time Activate a block of an hour. Same as above, it must be done weekly. It is best done on the dame day, same time. You want to accomplish the same as above, but with up to 1 hour at your disposal, you should be able to accomplish much more and go a little “deeper“ into the type of things you want to sort. You may want to create some files, do some in-file sorting, do some deleting, add some new commands; anything that will make the flow of your work go smoother. This exercise is all about keeping the decks, your desk, computer and any other work area, surface free of things that will gum up and slow up your ability to perform your job.

106.
Checks and Balances

Just when you think you have something covered; you learn something new that blows you away. This happened to me when I discovered that what I had been doing for the last 30 years or so was basically giving people a series of checks and balances to help them run their lives and get the best possible results. I was always trying to find ways to describe to them the value of a System, a ways and means to help them get where they wanted to go and accomplish as much as they could, along the way. The www.powertimesystem.com, is just that, a System, a checks and balance System that will ensure you stay on track, get what you need to get done in order for you to wring the maximum out of life. Its not about living life, it’s about living the best possible life. What I personally like about the Power Time System is that it has the tools in place that if followed, does a portion of the work for you. For example, if you set up your own Power Living Life List, flow those activities into your Power Activity Funnel, you have now established a sound sustainable way to identify what you want to do and are taking the proper steps to turn a wish into a reality. The value of the proper tools and Systems is that they are there to guide you along the right path, if followed, your chances of doing the right things at the right time dramatically increase.

107.
Monthly-Deep Sort

Right again, this deals with a monthly deep sort. The time allocation for this is open; you should allocate the required time to get all of the things you need to get done, to be able to start the next month with totally clear decks. With doing your daily sort and your weekly sort, your work area should be in fairly good shape. Use this time to make your work area, user friendly and logistically quick. We all make jokes about a cluttered desk being the signs of a busy person, a successful person, and some one who can get things done. The truth of the matter is, a cluttered desk is the sign of someone who at the very least spends an inordinate amount of time trying to find the things he needs to do his job. That’s the very least and that alone is reason enough to keep the decks clear and ready for action.

108.
Drive Your Agenda

You will hear this a lot in the PTS, I hope you heed it. The people who end up driving their Agenda on a regular basis will be the people who are successful in the end. There are so many advantages to being the person who sets the agenda, whether it is at work, in your business or on the job, you can’t be without this strategic edge and hope to do as well as you should do. Driving the agenda simply means that when you up beside another person, thing, event, activity, that the end result is, you will prevail and they will not. It can be as simple as a telephone call at an inopportune time or an unexpected appointment showing up. It can be as complex as your 4-month project takes precedent over someone else’s 4-month project. Driving the agenda means you set the pace of the race, you decide the order of the cars, and you decide who kicks first in over time. You can see the advantages to the person who makes all of those decisions.

109.
Action Plan

This is very much a head game concept. You have to decide what is important to you and what is not, and then make sure those things important to you get done. That in a nutshell is the definition of Driving your Agenda. Driving Your Agenda means having an Agenda to drive, knowing how to set up your own Agenda, how you’re day to day Agenda fits into your over life game plan. There are quite a few pieces to the puzzle. To find out what all the pieces to the puzzle are and how they fit together, visit us here www.powerempowerment.com

110.
Time Management And Productivity; Joined At The Hip

It is hard to write about the PTS and not stray off course and talk about Productivity. Time Management is all about action and action is all about Productivity, getting the most done in the shortest period of time (a simplified definition for now). We deal with Productivity in much more detail on our site dedicated to Productivity, www.powerproductivitymaximizer.com. The point of both sites is to give people the tool’s and knowledge to get the most out of their lives and to be as happy as possible with the results they get. I feel the way to accomplish both is to get control of the blocks of your time and then get a much done inside those blocks of time as possible.

111.
POWER ARTICLE Time Management And Productivity

Time Management and Productivity are two peas in a pod. It’s very hard not to spill over into the other when you deal with either issue. That is why Productivity is the next area we will be dealing with. The best way to separate the two areas of activity is this way: Time Management deals with setting up the blocks of time Productivity deals with what goes on inside those blocks of time As we move forward dealing with Productivity we will touch on issues that are covered in detail in the Power Time System. If you are a visitor to that site, you will already be familiar with what we have covered on that site. If not, visit, The Power Time System and spend some time looking at what we have to offer there. We will be referencing aspects of the Power Time System and it will be beneficial to your understanding of this topic to be familiar with that System as well. Let’s take a quick look at some of the areas we will be covering here. Accomplishing More Isn’t this the key? It does not matter what it is, we want to get more accomplished, and we want to get more done in less time. Achieving both goals is difficult. We will be dealing with both aspects of wanting to accomplish more. Maximizing Our Efforts We want to get the maximum benefit to ourselves from the energy and effort we expend. If I work hard for 3 hours, I want to ensure that my results will reflect the time and effort that I invested. Invested is a word we will be using as we show ways to get the most from the time and energy you spend. The Maximizing Factor How do I maximize myself? How do I maximize those that work with me and for me? There are several ways to do this and we will show you how to use these techniques to get the most out of your effort and time. I will tell you one of the more powerful tools and it may surprise you. Two workers doing the same job, one consistently produces more, why? The worker who produces more is usually the worker who has a clearer understanding of what his task entails. He will, all in all likelihood, be more trained and more skilled as well. Work Smarter, Not Harder. There is always a right way to do a task and there is always a less than right way to do it. You always want to be the person who looks at a task or job and says, “I can do that better, or faster, or more efficiently“. There are times when you need to just put your head down and get at it, no question about that. There are more times though when spending time on thinking about ways to improve and do it better will reap substantial returns compared to the wasted effort of not spending a little time in advance of doing the task. Productivity and Management These words go hand in hand. Managers have to manage if they want to get the Productivity they expect. Time and time again I look at companies and see the results they are getting and then have to listen to owners and managers complain about the output from their employees. The first area that I look at is the IMPACT that the managers and owners have in the production process. Far too often, staff is left to basically shift for themselves. We will show you the methods and tools that will impact your production process and increase your output substantially. Organize Your Time To Organize Their Time. This statement has far reaching implications for you and your productivity. Whether you are looking at getting more done yourself, or you are managing any number of employees, organization is a key element in maximizing your efforts and getting the biggest bang for the smallest buck invested. Done right, organizing, especially prior to the activity, will virtually guarantee that you will reap the greatest rewards from the minimum effort and time expended. We will show you how to get those maximum returns. Maximum Productivity Requires Perseverance and Commitment Productivity is all about action. Action requires effort, could be mental, could be physical, and is usually both. You have to be committed to the task and then you have to hang in there to get the results you want. We are talking about getting maximum results, we are talking about getting that last 3 or 4% more out of an hours labor. The last 3 or 4 % could be the difference between a profit and a loss.

112.
Listen Just Long Enough

Someone walks into your office, place of business or your workstation and starts what looks like a long tirade. What do you do? There are many variables and different endings but what should happen is this. First and foremost, you want to establish how you are going to conduct your business, from this point on. You want to set the tone, and yes, you want to drive your Agenda. For this reason alone, you listen for a very short period of time, then you interrupt and state, the appropriate time to hear what they have to say is and based on the gist of the message, set a time that makes sense based on what they were allowed to say. You cannot reward behavior that perpetuates unsound business practices for every one involved.

113.
He Did Not Plan To Fail, He Just Failed To Plan

We have all heard this old chestnut I’m sure. Its sage advice and very true. No one wants to fail at anything. That’s not an excuse for allowing behavior that lets failure exist to happen. We have a great System here, 1,000’s of people have used it and had varying degrees of great success with it. There have been those who used the System and were not successful with it. Was it the System or their lack of application of the System? That’s a question you have to ask those individuals who were not successful with our System. The direction of this point is this, regardless of what direction you go in, there will have to be some form of organized plan in place if you are to succeed to the degree you should. Success is relative; you should want and strive not only for success, but also for the maximum benefit that you are capable of achieving. Half way up the mountain isn’t really success for you if you are capable of reaching the top of the mountain.

114.
O.H.I.O.

That’s short form for Only Handle It Once. How many times have you moved the same piece of paper from one side of your desk to the other side, back and forth, trying to get into the routine of only handling it once? 4 things to do with it, toss it, do it, file it, and delegate it. Use these 4 steps as a way to handle these troublesome bits and pieces and 95% of them will fit into one of the 4 categories.

115.
Stress Will Destroy Your Productivity

Getting the most done that you can in a day means maximizing your efforts and that is all about increasing your productivity. The way you increase your productivity is to be cool, calm and in charge. There is only one way to make that happen, plan, organize, and think before you act. That means having an organized written plan for each day, laid out PRIOR to the start of each day. Right now, if you cannot reach over and physically see your Power Day Planner, or your version of one, then you are fighting an uphill battle that you will lose far more often than win. Stress reduces your ability to function and that reduces your chances of being organized, in charge and as effective as you could be. You need to preempt stress, by eliminating the causes of it, get organized, plan ahead and have a written Day Planner that keeps you on track and ahead of the chaos. For more info, www.powerproductivitymaxamizer.com

116.
Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan

This is really close to, “He didn’t plan to fail, He just failed to plan “but this idea is so important, it s worth repeating. When you get up in the morning, if you do not have a clear plan laid out for that day, you have really no chance of getting what should be done, done. Leaving things to chance, letting other people and events run the agenda, has gotten you where, so far? The best time you will spend is the time you spend working on a plan, a direction of what you want to do. Armed with this plan, you now have a fighting chance to get those activities and tasks in that plan done. In Time Management you will see this constant theme; there will be a thought process, followed by an action process. One without the other is usually very ineffective.

117.
You Have To Have The Patience To Hone Your Skills

Once you get the skill-set; you then have to have the patience to hone those skills. Someone can show you how to hit a golf ball, give you the skill set, unless you practice and hone those skills, just knowing how to hit the ball without the skills being worked on is pretty much a waste of time. The Power Time Management System requires a commitment and requires a new set of skills to be absorbed and implemented. We do not hide that fact from people. You are not going to pick up the PTS and in a week or two be an expert who can implement all the systems, policies, procedures, tricks, shortcuts and tools we cover without some sweat equity. Be patience, your patience will be rewarded.

118.
Increased Productivity Is All About Getting The Biggest Bang For Your Buck

Time Management deals with the what; Increasing Productivity deals with the how. Increasing your Productivity is a natural extension of organizing your time. To get the greatest value out of your Time Management efforts, it’s important to carry over that effort to the Productivity half of the equation. Spend time on deciding what should get done and when it should get done, are important elements in determining the proper use of your time. Once that is done, the same effort and time should be spent on the best ways of accomplishing your tasks, the how part of the equation. One of the advantages of working on getting back control of your time is that the steps you take to do that are the same ones you will apply to your Production issues. You will find that a large percentage of the time you spend working in one area, either concentrating on time issues or production issues is directly applicable to the other. Think once, benefit twice.