Take Control of Your Time & Maximize Your Productivity (In Only 5 Minutes Per Day)

Today's Business & Life Tip, is yet another business tip on the all-importance subject matter of Time Management. This particular subject matter really is encompassing a great many psychological components and one of them is commitments that you made with yourself.

Have you ever given consideration to the fact that all of the to do’s that you have open right now, are actually open commitments with yourself. It could be something that you’ve logged into a list or it could be something that your keeping in your head, something you’ve decided you need to do. Well, that’s an open commitment and one of the key things to the subject matter of time management is being able to trust yourself. Being able to know that you will follow through with the things you’ve committed to. And too often times I meet people who have a lot of open commitments, they continue to unfulfill and as results of it, they start to loose confidence in themselves.

One of the effective strategies that you should be using is something called a “Mind Sweep.” Now let me explain what this is, but before. Let me get perhaps to Leslie Boyer, who was a wonderful presenter in our most recent Nashville Masters Retreat on the subject matter of time management. Leslie had worked for 12 years with the David Allen Company and was the top trainer for that organization on the “Getting Things Done” methodology.

One of the things that she teaches is that at the beginning of every day you should have a ritual in place, where you do a sweep of your mind. Literally, take out a sheet of paper and just go, and list all of the things that you know that you need or want to do. It could be returning a phone call, it could be errands that you need to run, it could be something you want to tell your child, it could be something that you need to do to prospect for a new transaction. Whatever it is, but get it all dump out of your head and on to paper and from there prioritize that list to start your day. Because too often times were reacting to what David used to refer to, when He coached me, as the latest and the loudest. Whatever comes screaming at you and seems to have the most urgency, and it's usually driven underneath it by fear is what we're going to tend to go, do first. But often times, those aren’t the most important things and the highest priority items. So you've got to get those things out of your head and into a list that you can then organize and prioritize, and really chunk that down and start attacking it one thing at a time.

Doing a Mind Sweep is the key because if you're carrying these things around with you all day long in your head, it's very very difficult to be present. All of you have had this experience, before you go home you have seven things that you know you need to do tomorrow, you don’t have them in a reliable system, you’re trying to make sure you don’t forget them so you keep them in top of mind consciousness if you will, and then your at the dinner table with your family and your toggling through all the things that you need to do tomorrow, and your not really present with anyone.

So in order to be able to put your mind at ease, so it doesn’t have to continue to try to circle through all the things that you need to do and try to remember them for tomorrow. You need to have a system and a part of that system is to do a mind sweep every morning. Get everything down and documented, and then pound through that list throughout the day and get as many of them done as you can.

I hope that you found this business tip to be helpful to you. I will be back to you next week and in the meantime have a wonderful week and thank you so much