Focus On A Critical Few

The worst use of time is to do well what need not be done at all. The Pareto Principle says that 20% of your activities will account for 80% of the value of your activities. This means that if you have a list of ten items to accomplish, two of those items will be worth more than the other eight items altogether. To achieve great things, you must always concentrate on the small number of activities that contribute the greatest value to your life and your work.

Don't Go To Meetings Without Goals

Most meetings have an agenda and I have found many people mistake the agenda for the goal. The goal of a meeting is not to get through the agenda! Unless a meeting has a clearly stated goal, don't go there! It is a waste of everyone's time. How can you determine if the meeting was successful, if there weren't clear goals stated ahead of time? Always make sure to have a crisp understanding of the goals before the meeting starts.

Warm Up Before You Play

Professional athletes warm up before the game begins. They obviously do this to warm up their muscles, to stretch and get mentally prepared. In the context of business dealings do you warm up before you play? Before you go into a sales meeting; review the agenda, go through your "sales pitch" in your head. Review your key arguments. How are you going to open? How will you eventually ask for the order at the end? The best prepared person often wins!

Time Is The Most Precious Resource

Time is your most precious commodity. We all have the same amount of time; twenty four hours every day, but not all people have learned to manage it as effectively as others. In fact, time is more precious than money, because it’s a non-renewable resource. Once you’ve spent it, it’s gone forever. If you lose money you can earn it back. It is renewable. But you can never make up for lost time, so use it wisely!

Words Create Your Destiny

The person that says "I can" and the person that says "I can not" are both right. Words are extremely powerful! Words we say about ourselves either out loud, or in our inner dialogue, as well as what other people we trust say about us, shape our beliefs, attitudes and self-concept. If you are not happy with where you are, start changing your words in a more positive direction. Words shape our destiny. What you say will be the way!

Get The Right Things Moving!

It is good to do things right but it is much more important to get the right things moving! To be effective it is vital you learn the skill of proper prioritisation. If you want to get ahead, you need to learn to pick the high value, high impact, high yield activities over other, more mundane things. You don't have to get it right, you just have to get it moving!

The Secret Of Chunking

The secret to succeed with any major task is to break it down into smaller pieces, pieces you can handle, pieces that are actionable. Always look for the next action, do it and the project will open up for you to execute step by step. You can accomplish anything if you break the task down into small enough chunks.