DIT and Focus

I’ve often remarked that I’ve never been able to take full advantage of the DIT system myself because I am always experimenting with new time management methods. Each time I experiment with a new method I am letting go of DIT itself. The result is that I certainly sympathise with Edison’s famous remark that he had learned 10,000 ways of not making a lightbulb!

I’ve determined however that I am going to make DIT itself the subject of an experiment. What I want to find out is if consistent use of DIT over a relatively long period results in a virtually automatic focusing of one’s energies in the direction that is most profitable (using that word in its widest meaning) - even if one has no idea to start off what that direction might be.

The reason I think this is probably what will happen is that our minds are naturally creative - too creative in the majority of cases. We get sidetracked onto all sorts of fascinating byways, while what we should be focusing on gets neglected. But at the same time that natural creativity will be coming up with many new ways of being more productive. The problem is of course distinguishing which of these creative ideas are sidetracks and which are productive.

If one implements DIT conscientiously - especially the requirement to carry out an audit if one can’t finish the Will Do list for more than a few days running - one is virtually forced to identify what is really important and cut out the rest. My theory is that this will provide a concentrated focus on what is important which will propel us forward!

So I am going to stick to the rules exactly for the next few months and see what happens. Bear in mind that my aim is not to get through all my work but to monitor continually the validity of what that work should be.

Chaining: A Way to Keep Going

Most of us have some goals which we would like to keep going on a daily basis - it may be going for a run, or doing our piano practice, or tidying the office, or any of thousands of possible actions which we feel will leave us better off physically, mentally or financially.

Some of these may be negative goals, in that we want not to do something on a daily basis, like smoke cigarettes, eat chocolate or drink coffee.

So we are either trying to establish a new habit or break an existing one.

The trouble with these types of goals is that they often are very difficult to keep going. We usually start off with the best of intentions, keep going for a week or two and then miss a day. Then it’s a shorter period until we miss another day and that turns into two days, and before we know it we have given up the goal altogether. All we have achieved is to make ourselves feel guilty!

How can you motivate yourself to do better than this?

There is a simple method called “Chaining” which can greatly increase your chances of success. It takes the form of competing against yourself to produce the longest chain of days in which you succeeded with your goal. 

For example, if your goal is to practise the piano daily you manage to carry this out for two weeks and then miss a day. You have made a chain of fourteen days. Now your aim is to beat your record of fourteen days.

The great advantage of chaining is that it recognises that we are almost certain to fail sometimes, but this a positive as it allows us to compete with ourselves to get better and better.

So why not give it a try? Select one goal (positive or negative) which you would like to establish in your life and see how long a chain you can make. There’s even a website to help you do this:

www.joesgoals.com

Get your first goal well established before taking on another. Having too many goals going at once will dilute the effect.

Let me know how you get on!

Yaro Starak: How to Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up

There was a great post on Yaro Starak’s blog “The Entrepreneur’s Journey” yesterday entitled How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up.

Dialoguing

One of the techniques recommended in my book How To Make Your Dreams Come True is dialoguing. This is a very useful technique for accessing your own unconscious mind, and can sometimes provide remarkable insights. I want to show my readers how this technique works, so how are we going to do this?

The best way is by demonstration, so let’s show how we can cover this subject as a dialogue between two voices.

So who do these two voices represent?

In this case, they are simply you talking to yourself. In the book, you recommend having a dialogue with your “future self” - that is to say yourself after you have achieved your current major goals and vision.

The idea is that one voice is looking at the goal from the present, and the other is looking back from the perspective of having achieved it?

Yes, you’ve got it. It’s a powerful technique because research has shown that you get more creative answers from the perspective of “I’ve achieved the goal, and here’s how I did it.”

Rather than “I’ve got this goal to achieve. How on earth do I do it?”

That’s right! But that’s not the only way to use dialoguing. You can for example make one voice yourself, and the other an imaginary coach. That can be very powerful. And a lot cheaper than a real coach!

Or you can write an imaginary dialogue with someone you are having problems with - a difficult boss or customer or perhaps a member of your family. It’s amazing what you can learn from having to take the other persons point of view.

Isn’t there a danger that the dialogue will go something like this? “I have behaved perfectly and all the problems have been caused by you alone” - “You’re right, I can see it now, I most humbly apologize and beg your forgiveness.”

Funnily enough that’s very rare. The “other person” usually puts up a spirited defence! This can make you realise in no uncertain terms where the real other person is coming from. That of course will then make it much easier to have dealings with them in real life.

What about dialoguing with a “higher power”, like in Conversations with God?

Personally I think there’s a danger, because it’s supposed to be God you are speaking to, that you come to believe that the answers are infallible. You always need to keep the perspective that it’s an imaginary conversation and both parts are being written by you. Otherwise you will just end up confirming your own ideas, rather than challenging them.

What you are saying then is that dialoguing is a very useful tool, but that as with any other tool you need to be aware of its limitations.

Exactly that. 

Related article:

Journalling Revisited

"Dreams" - the underestimated book

Some people consider How to Make Your Dreams Come True to be my best book. Others can’t stand it. This ambivalent response probably explain why the sales have never been as good as my other two books. Personally I think it is at least as good as many top selling self help books and a good deal better than many!

But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can find out for yourself very cheaply because it is only £5.99 on Amazon UK at the moment. And to whet your appetite I plan to run a series of articles on this blog over the next few weeks on themes from the book.

Buy How to Make Your Dreams Come True

Getting Going Again: Day 2 Report

I finished my Will Do list today at about 12.30 p.m., just in time for lunch. Everything has been pretty effortless so far, which is encouraging.

The most important thing I did today was the item “Think about the future of my business”. That actually only took me about ten minutes, but generated a whole stream of other “Think abouts”, including:

Think about:

how to blog regularly
new subjects for seminars
collecting subjects for future articles
subjects for another book
increasing sales of existing books
using audio/video/teleclass formats
touring
publicity
joint projects
increasing website circulation
monetarising my website

I’ve scheduled these forward over the next two weeks in my Task Diary, and added at the end the all-important “Think about the future of my business again”.

The great thing about the Do It Tomorrow system is that it enables one to keep the momentum going.

Buy Do It Tomorrow

Project Management

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on this site in the Comments and the Discussion Forum about the best ways to manage projects using the Do It Tomorrow techniques. The word “project” covers everything from writing an article about fly-fishing to building a bridge from the English mainland to the Isle of Wight. Do It Tomorrow is not intended to be a project planning manual, and so much of what is involved in a major project is far beyond its scope. What it is intended to address is how you manage yourself within a project - or multiple projects.

The key to managing yourself within projects is your Task Diary. You can use it for all sorts of project related activity, especially for keeping track of when actions fall due (which is not the same as the deadline for completing the action).

One very important aspect of using the Task Diary is that you need to put plenty of “project management” type tasks in it. It’s a great mistake to use it only for concrete actions such as “Call Pete”, “Place monthly order for supplies”, “Draw up budget”.

The sort of tasks I am talking about here begin with these sorts of verbs:

Think about…

Investigate…

Discuss… with …

Plan…

Review…

List…

You can probably think of more for yourself.

When I blogged yesterday about getting my business going again, the very first action I put in my Task Diary concerning it was “Think about the future of my business”.

Remember: Thinking is the most important action a manager does, and using your Task Diary allows you easily to translate that thinking into action.

Buy Do It Tomorrow

How to have a great 2008!

John McConnel, a stress management trainer and coach, has sent me a useful checklist for having a great 2008. You can read it and/or download it by clicking here.

He is happy for you to make what use you like of it as long as you attribute it to him.

Distraction or pure action

When you do an action how pure is that action? Do you just get on with it or are there all sorts of additional intentions which make the action more complicated than it needs to be?

Some examples of these additional intentions would be: wanting to show off how well you do it, wanting to do a perfect job, wanting to impress the boss, wanting to avoid an argument, wanting to get the job out of the way, wanting to make a point and so on.

If we have these sort of intentions the action becomes much less easy to do and it also becomes much more liable to distraction or emotional upset.

To give an example which may resonate particularly for men, there is a lot of difference between:

A. Driving from A to B

B. Driving from A to B showing off what a great car you have, proving you can drive faster than other people, trying to impress your passenger, trying to beat the SatNav, getting annoyed with the car in front because it’s driving too slowly, and trying to avoid the police mobile cameras.

With a set of agendas like B, it’s no wonder that your driving might be aggressive and dangerous. If you simply have A as your agenda your driving is much more likely to be courteous, efficient and safe.

To those of you who don’t relate to the car example, have a look at the agendas you have on occasions like the following:

a. you are dressing for a party.

b. you are doing the housework before a visit from your mother-in-law.

c. you are complaining about poor service from your bank

Or instead, try examining the very next action you take after reading this. See if you can identify how many intentions you have attached to that action. It’s quite a good idea to write them down.

Then decide what you are going to do next, consciously drop all intentions about it and say to yourself “I’m just going to do it”.

Goalless living?

One of the questions I have been asking myself recently is “What happens if we deliberately live without any goals?”

All the books I’ve written in the past and just about every other self-help book assumes that goals are essential to success. But is this true?

We tend to think that living without goals would result in lying on a couch in front of the tv all day with a six-pack of beer (or whatever your own particular form of goofing off is!) But I suspect that this is actually the result of negative goals, rather than no goals at all. A negative goal would be something like “I don’t want to do the housework”, “I don’t want write that report”, or “I don’t want to do any work”.

The reason I have been asking that question is that I am conscious that many major positive changes in my life have come about without my having formed any definite goals about the changes. It’s been far more a case of acting on opportunity out of a deeper feeling that I am taking the right action for me. I’ve written before about how it’s sometimes only possible to see what is important to you by looking back to see where your past actions have been leading you.

So if you genuinely live without goals, positive or negative, what are you going to be doing? I think a fair amount of the time you would be doing the things which you enjoy doing, simply because you enjoy doing them.

If you enjoy doing something, you are far more likely to do it well in my experience.

I’m not quite sure where this is leading me, but I am sure it will be interesting to find out!

Great Inspirational Movie

Here’s a great movie for inspiring yourself. Only three minutes long!

www.natureofsuccessmovie.com

What You Don't Want

I’ve often said that one of the best ways to find out what you really want is to start with what you don’t want. I’d like to explore this theme a little further in this posting.

There is something about asking for what we want that attracts a lot of negativity in our present-day culture. Many of us remember childhood sayings like “Those that ask don’t get”, or we remember that we were made to feel selfish when we expressed our wants. So it is not too surprising perhaps that for many people it is incredibly difficult to come to a satisfactory answer to the question “What do you really want?” When we do succeed in answering the question clearly and without reservation it has the effect of bringing a much greater focus to our energy.

However the effect of this childhood and cultural conditioning is that most of us find it much easier to identify what we don’t want than what we do want. The secret is to take what we don’t want and then turn it into the positive opposite.

So, to take an example, at work you might find yourself saying: “I am always getting interrupted when I am trying to concentrate on my work.” And sometimes we can go on saying that for years without doing anything about it!

The first step is to identify what you don’t want. This is pretty obvious: “I don’t want to be constantly interrupted when I am trying to concentrate on my work.” However note that this is a much more powerful statement than “I am always getting interrupted.” Once you have identified it as something you don’t want, as opposed to something you are merely complaining about, there is a much greater likelihood of your doing something about it.

Step two is to identify the positive opposite. What is the positive opposite for you of being constantly interrupted? Note that I said “for you” — we are not looking for the exact grammatical opposite but what it would mean for you. So you might say “to have a uninterrupted couple of hours every day during which I can really concentrate on my work.”

Compare the effect that each of the following statements is likely to have:

“I’m always getting interrupted when I’m trying to concentrate on my work”

“I don’t want to be constantly interrupted when I am trying to concentrate on my work.”

“I want an uninterrupted couple of hours every day during which I can really concentrate on my work”.

Which statement is most likely to result in your being able to concentrate on your work without interruptions?

Take the Brakes Off!

There are all sorts of reasons why the thought of success is frightening. We may be afraid of being taken beyond our comfort zones or of getting out of our depth. We may expect the reward for our hard work in doing a difficult job will be even harder work at an even more difficult job. We may believe that to be successful will mean our friends and family will be jealous and won’t like us any more. And so on.

Of course some of these reasons are perfectly valid. If we are willing to face up to them and acknowledge them, then we are able to act appropriately.

The problem comes when we don’t face up to these reasons and fail to acknowledge them. Then they continue to affect us subconsciously and we wonder why we never seem to be able to live up to what we believe should be our real potential.

What often happens is that we are forging forward with the brakes still firmly on!

The more I explore the subjects of time management and personal organisation the more convinced I become that most of our problems in these fields are simply ways we have devised of braking our performance, of limiting ourselves.

Imagine that you are your Unconscious Mind and your mission is to invent ways of keeping your performance within safe limits. What sort of things would you come up with? Here are just a few suggestions:

• Take on too many responsibilities
• Avoid setting up efficient systems
• Never discuss your workload with your boss
• Make sure your attention is continually distracted throughout the day
• Don’t delegate
• Don’t follow up
• Reduce your mental efficiency by not taking breaks
• Reduce your mental efficiency by not taking exercise
• Never do anything immediately.
• Spend lots of time daydreaming but don’t take any action to turn your daydreams into reality.
• Spend lots of time worrying but don’t take any action to address what you are worrying about
• And, at all costs, avoid purposeful focused thinking like the plague.

Exercise

Spend a bit of time having a look at the brakes you have constructed on your own success. There are probably quite a few of them. They may be in the list above or they may be completely different. Our unconscious minds are extremely inventive!

The good news is that once you have acknowledged that you are deliberately (though unconsciously) putting the brakes on, you can deliberately (and consciously) choose to take the brakes off. This is best done one brake at at time. Ask yourself “What is the biggest brake I am putting on my performance at the moment?” and go all out to take it off.

If you could just do one thing...

As I have often written, one of the most fundamental principles of good time management is to aim to do a few things well, rather than lots of things badly.

This however raises the question of how to select those few things out of the multitude of different choices that we are all faced with these days.

Here is a technique which can help you with this selection process. You can apply it to any time period, ranging from “What do I want to achieve in the rest of my life?” down to “What do I want to achieve in the next five minutes?”

Let’s take the example of a year. The technique is simply to ask yourself the question “If I could only achieve one thing by this time next year, what would it be?” Really think about the answer to this. If you have several contenders then imagine yourself in a year’s time and ask yourself which would give you most satisfaction to look back on.

Once you have got the answer, then ask yourself “If I could achieve one other thing this year, what would it be?” Keep asking yourself this question until you have about five items on it on your list. The exact number is up to you of course, but it is essential that you do not put down more items than you would have time to do properly. So you now have a list of essential goals for the coming year that you should actually have time to do!

Keep this list where you can see it, and firmly resist all attempts by yourself or others to add commitments to the list. Next year of course you can make a new list!

Exactly the same technique can be used to set yourself clear goals for the coming week. Just ask yourself the question “If I could only achieve one thing this week, what would it be?” and then repeat the process as before. Resist the temptation to add more items than you would definitely have time to do.

And again you can use it for your goals for the day. You might prefer to use the word “do” rather than “achieve”. So the question would be “If I could only do one thing today, what would it be?”. And make up your list by repeating the process in the same way.

A variation on this which is very effective is not to write up a list for the whole day at once, but to keep asking the question as you go along in order to decide what to do next. So part of your day might go something like this:

Q. If I could only do one thing today, what would it be?

A. Get the finished proposal to the clients. [Take action to do this]

Q. If I could only do one more thing today, what would it be?

A. Ring John back before he goes on holiday. [Do that]

[and so on]

Identifying Our Long-Term Themes

I’ve written before (see Time to Think Again) about the long-term effects of decisions which we take for short-term reasons. I have always been fascinated too by the way in which our lives can take shape in the long-term in ways which are entirely unimagined by us in the short-term.

A few days ago I was thinking about how much my life has changed over the last fifteen years (fortunately almost entirely for the better). And I started to wonder how much of my present circumstances I could have forecast back in April 1992.

Some of it would be pretty easy. I am still married to the same person. My children have predictably got fifteen years older and have left home. I’m still living in the same house.

Some I might have hoped for but might have had a hard time believing could come true. So I have achieved a long-standing ambition of working for myself, and doing it successfully. Fifteen years ago, I knew I wanted to work for myself but had absolutely no idea about what I might do or how to go about it.

And some of it would be entirely unpredictable, even to the extent of never crossing my mind. I’d never heard of coaching. I’d never thought of writing as a possible career. I’d no idea of the potential of the internet. And, apart from my immediate family, I had not yet met any of the people who are currently most influential in my life.

If I’d sat down in April 1992 and written about how I would like my life to change over the next fifteen years, I would have said something like this:

• Freedom from having to work for other people
• More able to express my own individual talents
• To have achieved a successful business
• To be out of debt and free of money worries
• To be rewarded according to the effort I put in
• To be growing myself and helping other people to grow
• Be able to do what I want when I want to
• Have loads of supportive friends
• To feel in charge of my own life.

Fifteen years ago I would never have dreamed of actually sitting down and writing this list out, so all those things remained unexpressed. But looking back over the last fifteen years I can see how these themes all worked themselves out in my life, almost without my conscious control. And yes, I’ve achieved all of them.

And what do I want for the next fifteen years? More of the same, or something different? Hmm, I’ll have to think about that!

Exercise:

Have a look at your circumstances ten, fifteen or twenty years ago. How have they changed? What’s better and what’s worse about your life?

If you’d sat down that number of years ago and written out how you’d have liked your life to change between then and now, what would you have said? How far has it come true?

What do you want for the next period of years? More of the same or something different?

Overcome Procrastination with Checklists

One of the reasons many of us have a tendency to procrastinate over big projects is that we always look at the project as a whole. For example we are given a major report to complete by the end of the month and it will take about five days’ intensive work to write. Every time we think about the report we get oppressed by the thought of all that hard work. And naturally this makes us reluctant to begin.

Even if we do begin the report we can’t claim to have succeeded until we have finished it. So however far we get with it we are still oppressed by the remaining work. And it’s only after we have struggled through the five days’ intensive work (or more likely thirty days’ procrastinating and two days’ frantic last-minute effort) that we can chalk up a success and cross that report off our list of current projects.

However even the longest and most difficult task only consists of a series of smaller tasks, which taken individually are easily achievable. So the way to overcome our natural tendency to procrastinate is to break a big task down into smaller tasks. The more we are resisting the project as a whole the smaller we should make the tasks.

The best way to do this is to write a checklist of the actions that need to be done. And always make the first item in the checklist “Write checklist”. That way you know you have an easy first step to give yourself a good start!

Usually with a checklist it’s best to confine yourself to the actions that you can do now. Planning the entire project may in itself be too threatening to allow you to get started. So write down the simple actions that you can take today to get the project moving.

So with the major report, I mentioned above your checklist might go something like this:

Write checklist
Jot down main headings of report
List people I need to contact
Check final completion date
Block off time in diary
Write checklist for action tomorrow

This has taken you a whole lot further than what we usually do when faced with a project like this, which is to sit around doing nothing except wonder how we are going to find enough time to get it done!

As soon as you have written the six lines contained in this checklist you can chalk up your first success by crossing off the first item “Write checklist”. By the time you have completed all six steps, none of which are difficult, I can promise you that the project will suddenly be looking much less threatening. In fact you might even be feeling optimistic about it and be raring to get moving on the steps contained in the second day’s list!

One point to note: Sometimes you may come to an item in your checklist which you haven’t made small enough with the result that you find yourself resisting it. If this happens simply break it down further with a sub-checklist. The secret of writing checklists is always to break things down until the next item you have to do is small enough for you to feel no resistance to doing it.

Plan backwards!

One of the most effective ways of planning is to imagine yourself in the future as having achieved the goal. Then, looking back, describe how you got there. Imagining yourself in the future looking back is far more effective than the way we usually plan, which is to look at the goal from the present and try to work out what steps we could take. This is treating the goal as a problem to be solved. While looking back at it from the standpoint of the future treats it as an achievement that we can describe.

Something you may not know is that many authors write the back cover of their book first. Once they’ve written out what the book is about and described why someone would want to buy it, all they’ve got to do is fill the gap between the covers with words!

A similar method is often used by software developers. The first thing they do is write the advertisement describing all the wonderful new features of the software and why it is better than anything anyone else has to offer. Then they have a clear picture of the software and can start writing the program to provide those features.

To achieve a major goal, first write a rough description of 1) what it will be like when you’ve reached your goal 2) how you reached it and 3) where you are now in relation to it.

Then at regular intervals (at least daily to start off with) come back to it and revise it. Flesh it out more and more each time. As you start to develop the goal, the plan and your present progress, your mind engages fully with the process. You may well amaze yourself with the insights that you start to get and the progress you are making towards the goal.

The process of continous revision which I am describing here is a very powerful one. It takes full advantage of the psychological effect known as maturation. This basically states that when you come back to something at regular intervals, you will be further advanced after the interval than you were before it. In other words your mind continues to process the information after you have ceased to work on it consciously. Most of us have experienced this effect by following the advice of our music or language teachers that the way to success is “little and often” rather than huge efforts just before the next lesson. If you’ve ever tried to write a report or an essay the day before the deadline, you’ll know it’s a much harder task than writing it bit by bit over a number of days or weeks.

Applying this to goal setting and planning, we can actually begin to live the process on paper. The wordprocessor is a great invention and makes this type of continuous revision extremely easy.

Keep Chipping Away

Keep Chipping Away

We’ve all I’m sure read articles and books about how to achieve major goals. Usually they talk about such things as breaking them down into steps and setting deadlines. This is all good advice, but to my mind they miss the most
important factor in reaching a goal —- which is simply to keep on working at it.

When I say “keep on working at it” I mean that you need to schedule a certain amount of time every day to work on that goal. If you ever started to learn the piano as a child I expect you remember your tutor saying to you that it’s far more important to practice a sensible amount every day than to miss it for days and then try to catch up in one huge session. Exactly the same applies to working at goals — whatever they are.

Almost every problem in human life will respond to regular concentrated attention. As Liane Cardes wrote: “Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.”

Forget doing it right. Results won’t come from waiting until you can do the job perfectly. It’s working at it that will bring results. So if you are a painter, paint. If you are a writer, write. If you are a poet, write poems. Don’t wait around for inspiration — inspiration is something that comes when you are working not when you are waiting around.

Remember the artist’s prayer (and apply it to any area of life): “Dear God, if I provide the quantity, you will provide the quality”.

From Pipe-Dream to Projec

How often do you get a great idea for something, but somehow it never translates itself into action? Why is it that some things which you’ve always meant to do have to wait until you “can get around to it”? What is the missing ingredient that transforms something from being a pipe dream into a viable project?

That missing ingredient is the question: “What needs to happen now?” If we fail to ask that question then our pipe dream is doomed to remain a pipe dream forever. Once we have asked that question and answered it then we have identified the first steps to arriving at the fulfillment of our idea.

The full form of the question is: “If I am to achieve X by such-and-such a date, what needs to happen now?”

Note that it’s essential to have a deadline. If you ask yourself “What needs to happen now if I’m to achieve X sometime in the future, but it doesn’t matter when?” Then the answer is obviously “Nothing!”

In fact the first step to getting moving on any project we have been putting off is to give ourselves a deadline. The deadline forces us to think in terms of getting things moving.

I often coach people who are trying the make the jump from a full-time job which they hate into running their own business. They frequently keep putting the necessary decisions off for a whole variety of reasons. The solution is to ask the question: “If I am going to be working in my own business by the end of the year, what needs to happen now?” And then keep asking it!

A lot of the time, people get stuck over a project like this because they can’t really believe that they are going to be able to carry it through. Self-doubt causes paralysis. So it’s important to face up to the uncertainty by further refining the question: “If I am going to be 90% certain that I will be working full-time in my own business by the end of the year, what needs to happen now?”

This really starts to pin you down to action. Your pipe dream starts to become a real project.

You will note that the question “What needs to happen now?” is impersonal. Putting it this way is a lot less threatening than asking “What do I need to do now?”

This applies just as much to our daily tasks. Try out mentally the difference between -

Personal:

“What do I need to do now?” “I need to write that report”, “I need to do the housework”, “I need to take some exercise”

Impersonal:

“What needs to happen now?” “That report needs writing”, “The housework needs doing”, “My body needs some exercise”.

You will probably find that the second set of question and answers provokes significantly less resistance in your mind.

Challenge

Identify a project that you have been meaning to get around to “sometime”. Give yourself a deadline by which you will have done it. What needs to happen now if you are to have project completed by the deadline?

How to Get Any Project Up and Running

Do you have lots of great ideas for projects but never get round to starting them?

Do you have a host of old projects that you got so far with and then ran out of steam?

Or do you find yourself saying things like “I really must do some more marketing, but I can never find the time”? (Translation: “I’m not doing the really important work because the less important work is more important!”)

I’m going to tell you a method now which will enable you to give any project your best shot. I can’t of course guarantee that your project will succeed, but at least if you use this method you won’t fail because you have let yourself down.

But be warned: you can only use it on one project at a time!

The basic idea is simplicity itself. You can keep any project moving powerfully forward if you take some action on it first thing every day.

Let’s analyse that a bit further. There are three elements:

1. Take some action
2. First thing
3. Every day

Let’s deal with each of those in more detail.

Take some action

You need to take some action, not just think about taking some action! It doesn’t matter how small the action is. The important thing is to get started. I’ve written before about how a simple phrase like “I’ll just get the file out” can be the trigger for getting into a difficult or daunting task.

How much action do you need to take? It doesn’t matter. Just as long as you take some action, it will keep the project alive. When people come to me with writer’s block, I usually set them the the target of writing for at least 10 minutes every day. Al Secunda in his book “The 15-second Principle” makes it even less — he says a minimum of 15 seconds work a day on any project will bring it to fruition.

Of course Al is not telling you to work for only 15 seconds. He is telling you to work for at least 15 seconds. Once you have succeeded in getting started, most days you will go on and do some significant work on the project. But even if you don’t do more than the minimum, you will have kept the project alive in your mind and you will find that you naturally get into the swing of it in the next day or so.

First thing

In my book “Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play” I give an exercise in which you are asked to select one task that you are going to do the next day. If you succeed, you then select a slightly more difficult task for the next day. If you fail, you select an easier one.

This sounds an incredibly easy exercise, but the truth is that most people find it almost impossible to keep it going for more than a few days. Yes, it’s rather a horrifying thought — most people are incapable of selecting just one new task a day and doing it without fail!

Your project is going to get lost in the same way unless you make sure that you do it first thing before doing anything else. You know exactly what will happen if you don’t do it first thing. You will find yourself late in the day saying: “It’s nearly time to stop work and I haven’t done a thing about that project yet. It’s not worth doing anything now. I’ll give it a really good go tomorrow.” Guess what happens tomorrow!

I have learnt the hard way that if I want to carry out some particular task every day over an extended period — such as writing, going for a run, whatever it may be — it has to be got under way before I have my breakfast, before I make a cup of tea, before I look at the newspaper. If you work in an office, then the task needs to be started before you check your e-mail, before you talk to your colleagues, before you listen to your voicemail. The second that you say “I must get started on that project, but I’ll just check whether there’s anything new in my in-box” you’ve lost the battle!

Once you’ve got going, you will find that most days there is a natural tendency to keep going. And if some days there isn’t, so what? As long as you’ve done something, you will find it is easier to do more the next day. And that brings me on to my next point.

Every day

When someone tells me that they are stuck on a project, the first question which I ask them is “When did you last do some work on it?” Invariably it turns out to have been weeks ago.

Once you stop working on something, it will start to die. Think of your projects as house plants which need watering daily. They don’t need a lot of water, but they do need some. If you forget to water them for one day it won’t be fatal, but forget to water them for several days in a row and they will start to wither. Yet sometimes even the most dead-looking plant will revive if you resume the daily watering. And so it is with projects. If you have a project in your life which is really stuck, try doing some work on it first thing every day and you will be amazed to see how it starts to move forward.

When I say “every day” I mean every working day. For some personal projects you may want to do seven days a week, but for most work projects five days a week is fine. There may be days during the week when you know you are not going to be able to do any work on the project. You might for instance be away at a business conference. The important thing is to identify these days in advance. And what’s the first thing you do when you get back into your office after your conference? Yes, you’ve got it!

On days which you haven’t identified in advance don’t accept any excuses from yourself. The most common justification that I hear is that an “emergency” came up. I’m not saying there aren’t occasional unforeseeable life-or-death situations in which you have to take immediate action to avoid a catastrophe. But be honest with yourself: how often does that really happen? Most of our so-called “emergencies” aren’t emergencies at all. They are simply situations which we have neglected so long that they have come back to bite us.

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So there you are, that’s it. Follow the principle of taking some action on your project first thing every day, and you will be amazed to see how the project comes to life and progresses almost like magic. But remember what I said at the beginning: you can only do this with one project at a time!

So how do you decide which project you are going to use this method on? Ask yourself some questions, such as:

What’s the project that I have been putting off longest?

What am I most stuck at?

What would make the greatest difference to my life and work?

What would really take my life or business forward if I took action on it?

Concentrating on one project at a time is a very good time management principle. You may remember that old music-hall turn, the Chinese spinning plates. The performer has a huge number of bamboo rods and the aim is to get a plate spinning on the end of each rod. A good performer can get thirty or more plates spinning at the same time. The way it is done is to get one plate spinning properly, then to move on to the next plate, then to the next. Go back to an earlier plate only when it starts to wobble.

It’s exactly the same in your life or business. Get one project up and running properly before you take on the next. That is far the best way to move forward.

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Reading this article won’t make the slightest bit of difference to your life unless you do something about it. What you need to do now is to decide on one project which you are going to do first thing tomorrow and every day thereafter until it is fully up and running. If you want to reinforce your decision, why not make a commitment in the Comments and make a note to report back in a few weeks to tell us how you got on!