This is another gold mine for those who are astute enough to create these situations. This is another area that you can consider to be an advanced technique but well worth the effort if you can work with it.

A Maximizing circumstance is one that is going to be repeated enough times in the future that investing some time now, will continually benefit you in the future. You own a small advertising company and you have to prepare quotes for people who ask about your services. You prepare have to prepare about 10 quotes for every confirmed order. The process to prepare quotes is time consuming and up to now has been done manually. If you can carve out some time, you can throw together a quick computer program that will do about 90% of the work in half the time.

This is the classic maximizer situation. You spend 10 hours today, to save you 5 hours each day, for ever. Just 2 days into this scenario, you will reap a productivity increase of 5 hours, every day, for the cost of just 2 days initial loss of production. What some people have a hard time doing is spending time now that does not seem to directly lead to production today.

This problem goes hand in hand with the fact that most of us are running as fast as we can to just barley stay ahead of the day to day workload, having to stop and use up that precious time on futures is a tough thing to do. It's the old drain the swamp up to your ass in alligator's scenario.

I'm behind now, I can't seem to get caught up and you want me to fall farther behind by using up time and resources I can't spare to work on something that may help me in the future. On the surface that seems like a legitimate concern, but only if you take a superficial look at it. If you spend any time and thought on the issue, you should realize that spending time now on creating and exploiting maximizing situations like the one here, is the only long term sustainable way to increase you productivity and get better results.

I have a question I put to my seminar people because they are live and right in front of me at the time. It's after I've made a presentation on a topic like creating maximizing circumstances. I ask them this simple question,

"Do you think the people who are more successful than you, who are happier than you, and are getting more done each day than you, do you think they are creating more Maximizing circumstances than you or less maximizing circumstances than you ? "

There is a saying, want to be a successful person, find one and do what he does.