Well here we are staring at the end of the year, only a few short days away.
Are you ready for the New Year? Did you accomplish the goals you had set for 2011 or do you still have some things that just didn’t get done.
How did those 2011 New Year resolutions work out? Are you thinking about the 2012 list?
We all do it, don’t we? We start the year out with BIG plans and a motivation to carry them out. “This year is going to be different”, we say.
Will it really be different this year? Do you want it to be?
I want to take this time to share with you a success I had over this past year. You see, in fact, it was different for me in 2011. I did set goals and have carried them out. Now, it is not like I have never accomplished a goal before but this year I put a consistent plan in place that truly kept me on track throughout the year. The key to the success was the plan was very simple. A daily to-do list with a few simple tools allowed me to stay on task throughout the week and funnel new activities into the system as they occurred.
Discover The Secret To My Success in 2011
With all of the inboxes we have in the world today this can be a daunting task. One of my goals this year was to maintain my emails on a daily basis and not let my inbox load up with thousands of emails like I had in the past. I don’t know how you deal with your emails but I was completely overwhelmed before I put a task plan in place to deal with my inboxes on a daily basis.
What helped me put these things into action was a little book I bought about this time last year. It was less than $10 and I certainly felt like if I really wanted to make some changes it would be well worth the investment. I am here to tell you – this book made me more money than any other book I have ever bought. Well, “Richest Man in Babylon” has helped me learn how to save but that is a bit different.
Truly, if you put this little gem of a book to work for you I guarantee you will see results. This is a blend of Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Successful People and David Allen’s Get Things Done. Two very powerful books in their own right but combine the two with a simplistic concept and you have a real easy to implement strategy that can produce results, immediately.
Discover The Secret To My Success in 2011
Here is a couple of simple but powerful tips from the book.
One of the keys to any time-management system is the to-do list — it keeps all the tasks that you can’t do at this moment organized so that you know what you need to do at all times.
David Allen’s GTD asks you to separate your tasks into separate to-do lists, known as “context lists”, such as @work, @ computer, @home, @calls, @errands, and so forth. The reasons is so that when you’re in a particular context, you only have to look at the tasks you can actually do at this moment, rather than looking at a long list of tasks that are mostly un-doable right now.
In ZTD, it is important to keep a simple system that you will actually use … a system that you will trust to keep your information. Here are the three components of a simple, trusted system:
1. Setup. A simple system would consist of inboxes, a calendar, lists, and a reference system.
2. Tools. It is also important that you use very simple tools, so that the system does not need to be maintained much.
3. Usage. Finally, the important thing is that you actually use the system, and make a habit of checking it daily.
