PERSONAL SPECIAL.... How you line up your actions

How you line up your actions

What determines how you are spending your time? It's your Priorities. Except we're generally only fuzzily aware of what our current priorities are.

Let me ask you a question. How in control are you over your time? Do you:

• Often have many things pulling you in different directions?
• Get burdened with sudden tasks that take away your attention from your original direction?
• Never have enough time to get the things you want to get done each day?

If any of these feel familiar to you, that means that your time is generally outside of your control. It's like being a ship that is pulled by wherever the wind is blowing from. Although it might be hard to have 100% control of your time, you can definitely start to retake more of it than you have now.

To do this you have to completely take charge of your Priorities. It means you have to be:

1. Always aware of what your current priorities are

2. Be actively involved with setting them

So I don't mean setting your priorities in the morning once, forgetting them by lunch, and getting lost in your daily grind by the end of the day.

What I mean is to be asking yourself the same question before and after each action you take. You should be asking yourself:

If you could just do one thing today, everyday, that would accomplish the most, what would it be?

The answer is different depending on what you need in order to excel.

Consider a project manager. They should be designing a project workflow. Checking email is less important or almost a distraction. Customer service support, though? They should be processing email and even finding more effective ways to do so.

Next, if you're on a good track you can start going further:

If you could do two more things today, that would accomplish the most, what would they be?

And so on and so forth. Then at the end of your day, you should ask yourself:

Did I get done what I intended to? Did I invest enough time, attention, and energy in the right things?

Get into this habit, and you'll start to understand where your time is being spent, what to spend more time in, and what parts you can cut out.

I hope this little bit of knowledge can help you make some instant improvements to your daily life.

- Leon