Make Yourself Accountable

Time management is common sense in theory but self discipline in practice. The best way to improve self discipline is to make yourself accountable to someone else. Tell them what you are going to do and show them that you have done it afterward.

Bite-Size Your Plan

When you are working on bigger projects, both goals and actions can seem daunting at first. We have all heard how to eat an elephant; one bite at a time. The trick is to continue to break the activity down until you reach the feeling of: "I've got it. I can do that. I want to do that." Then you know you have the right size tasks in front of you.

Trust Your Team

Show confidence in your people. Give your team a good reputation to live up to. It 's giving them praise in advance. Usually people will raise to the occasion. Interestingly, former Harvard professor David Maister notes that embarrassment is far more effective a motivator than guilt.

Deal With Incoming Stuff

In the book "Getting Organized" Stephanie Winston propagated TRAF when dealing with incoming documents. The acronym stands for: T = Toss; throw away, or delete. R = Refer; delegate to someone else. A = Act; complete the task right away. F = File; put away for later use or reference. Do as much T and R as possible, as much A as required and as little F as necessary.

Change Faster

In order to grow and learn new things we need to keep up the pace and rate of change in our lives. There is a healthy stress level to work toward, just outside our natural comfort zone. I particularly like the quote from the famous race car driver Mario Andretti: "If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough!" Are you going fast enough?

Focus On Key Areas

Don't try to scatter yourself to do too many things all at once. Stay focused on a couple of key areas and concentrate your energy there. Let me suggest you organize your life around family, career and personal development goals. The law of the excluded alternative says that when you choose to do one thing, there is something else you are not doing. So focus on your key areas.

Backup Your Brain

The brain contains 100 billion of these nerve cells that are connected by 100 trillion synapses, junctions where the signal from one neuron is transmitted to the other. As fantastic as it is, the brain is best equipped to process information, not to store and retrieve data. Get organized, backup your brain and create a comprehensive filing system for work and home. Usually an alphabetic system works best.