One without the other is like having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the jelly. Most of us have heard about prioritizing our activities but not many of us have heard about Time Activating. I first heard about Time Activating around 1983 or 1984. When I heard about it, I realized that was the missing link in what I had been trying to do up to that point.

What I had been trying to do was not necessarily show other people how to get control of their time and accomplish what they wanted, when they wanted, but was to get my own Time Management house in order. I was trying to run a number of very busy, successful businesses and at the same time was just starting to open up my first Franchise operation, across Canada .

To be honest, I was struggling and was not doing a good job of running either operation. As rushed as I was, I signed up and attended a Time Management seminar, even though I was also giving my own seminars on the same topic. I spent the whole day in this seminar and it was mainly a re-hash of either my own material or material that I had already heard and had discounted.

There was however, one golden kernel among all the chaff, the concept of Time Activating your Priorities. When I heard this, a light went on. This was why I was not getting as much done as I should and the very reason my Priorities were falling by the wayside. The concept is simple, but incredibly powerful when used properly:

• Once you have established a Priority for any given day, you Time Activate (TA) that Priority into your Day Planner, in a particular time slot.
• It is not enough to say, "I want to do these 3 Priorities tomorrow", to get them done, you have to ensure that there is sufficient time to do them and then pick out the slots of time and TA, write those Priorities into those time slots.
• It is during this process of Time Activating that your day will start to take shape and conflicts regarding your actual real available time will emerge.
• Our reach always exceeds our grasp, our ability to get what we want done compared to the real time we have available in which to do all that we want.
• Among the benefits of Time Activating, walking through this process in advance of the actual day will show up the difference between the time it will actually take to do our Priorities and the actual time we have available to us.
• Time Activating is not just for Priorities, it is used for all blocks of time we need to set aside during any day. We TA the block of time we have set aside for clearing our emails, TA another block of time to deal with interacting with staff, visitors, appointments. We TA another block of time where we make and return phone calls. We TA another block for Housekeeping duties, we TA for anything that we know will take up our time during the day.
• When we can visually see how our day can be chipped away. Time Activate blocks of time and it brings into sharp focus how easily we can allow our day to be gobbled up by tasks, and other than the ones we want to do and should be doing.

Time Activating: the process is a way we can enforce an internal set of checks and balances on ourselves. That is why I say that TA is a powerful tool, if you use it, and allow the process itself to help you get organized and ensure that what is important to you gets done. You should be spending the appropriate amount of time to get to the point where you have identified what activities will do you the most good and then make sure those activities do not get crowded out by lesser activities that do not benefit you as much, or maybe don't benefit you at all.

I have referred to TA as a self-imposed checks and balance system. If you look at this activity as just that, a System that will keep you on the straight and narrow if you use it, you will be on your way to driving your own Agenda instead of being a passenger.