It has been said that there are a thousand little choices in a day and all of them count. In fact, each of us makes tens of thousands of choices in our lifetime–choices like:

• Who you spend your time with
• How you comb your hair and how you dress
• What you feed your body and your mind
• How much or how little you smile
• How well you listen to others and how much you talk
• How fast you drive
• The amount of time you spend with your kids
• Whether or not you go to church
• Where you do your shopping
• How you react to circumstances beyond your control
• If you will be on time
• What you choose to think about
• How much patience you have in a given situation

The list could go on and on. How we handle these and other choices in our day plays an unbelievably important role in how well we get through each day. They affect how we treat others and how others treat us. They affect our productivity and how we feel about ourselves. They determine our success in life. We have far greater control over our destinies than we may have ever imagined. As we make conscious, active choices whenever the opportunity comes, we can be sure that those choices will create an important part of what happens next.
“There is no life as complete as the life that is lived by choice.”

©2002 Professional Development Systems All Rights Reserved

Robert Prentice of Professional Developments Systems has spent the last twenty years bringing
inspiration and motivation to business owners as well as their employees. For more information
visit his website at mrattitudespeaks.com mrattitudespeaks.com

All of us have the same amount of time each day. By using that time more wisely, you can increase your time power. Discover how you can accomplish more in a few hours rather than days by regularly putting the following suggestions to use.

1. Make An Action List.

One of the best ways to accomplish more in a short amount of time is to prioritize what has to be done. It’s a good idea to get in the habit of creating an “action list”, which would consist of things that you want to accomplish today.

While jotting down these items, decide if they are tasks or projects. If they’re tasks, they can be done usually in one step. If it’s a project, you may need to break it down into smaller steps, which in turn would be tasks. These tasks will then help you complete your project.

2. Allocate A Set Amount Of Time.

Getting involved in projects and tasks can quickly eat up your time. Because of this, I would suggest you give yourself a time limit on how long each task or project will take.

It’s a lot easier to work in small chunks of time. This way, you put pressure on yourself and you begin to focus on what really needs to be done.

3. Ask Yourself What Do You Want To Accomplish.

The reason for working with an action list is to help you accomplish certain daily goals. You need to decide what the desired result is.

Do you want to have more free time? Be more effective? Do you want to stop wasting a lot of time and put it to more productive use? Once you determine what you want to accomplish, you will have the motivation to get through your action list.

4. Don’t Make Your Action List Too Large.

Resist the temptation to make your list too large. It’s human nature, when compiling a to do list, to get overzealous and try to include lots of items. A good suggestion would be to start with a list of the six most important things you want to accomplish today. Once you’ve worked through that list, you can always add more.

Don’t try to be an overachiever and put 20 things on your list. It becomes too overwhelming and you may end up getting frustrated and not completing anything at all.

Creating and using an action list can be great way to regain control over your time. Just the simple action of writing your thoughts down puts a plan into action. Now get started with your action list and accomplish more in half the time.

“Please Take A Moment And Visit imaginationintomoney.com/ ImaginationIntoMoney.com For Your FREE eBook ‘As A Man Thinketh’, And Discover How This Forgotten Classic’s Approach To Effective imaginationintomoney.com/ Positive
Thinking Can Help You Get Whatever It Is You Want In Life! From Personal Coach, Jamie Madison.”

The things that make our lives better – our homes, food, clothing and our families should make us feel good by just knowing we have them. But those important things likely have been a part of our lives for a long time. Human nature turns our attention away from the familiar. So we seldom feel very happy about what we have. But if something important to us is taken away and then is somehow recovered, we feel joy and appreciation.

Too bad we humans can’t feel so fortunate about things before they are taken away. How great we would feel about our health, our abilities to move around, our mental abilities to reason and remember, and the numerous other things that are out of our minds just because we take them for granted. Shouldn’t we make ‘asset awareness’ a higher priority in our lives? What better way is there to get more out of life? That little bit of wisdom would make us happier if we could just get ourselves to put it into practice.

My furnace stopped working late one evening this winter when the temperature outside was heading toward the lower twenties overnight. There would not be a furnace repair shop open at that time of day. I have quite a few tools, am mechanically inclined, and have some knowledge of how the furnace works. So I went down into the basement and started removing the pump/blower assembly from the oil-burning furnace so it could be inspected. When the mounting bolts were removed and the assembly taken out, several small pieces of shattered plastic could be seen lying at the bottom of the combustion chamber. The plastic shaft linking the motor to the oil pump had shattered into many small pieces. There would be no heat in the house overnight and probably a good part of the next day.

The temperature in the house had dropped into the lower 60s around 8 p.m. when I noticed the furnace was not coming on, as it should. By 10 p.m. when I had discovered the root cause, it was in the mid 50s. Fortunately, I have a lot of extra blankets. I took three, folded each in half for a total of six extra layers and put them on the bed. I put on a coat, a second pair of pants, heavy socks, a knit hat, and knit gloves and went to bed.

I was quite comfortable that night. The next morning, the temperature in the house was 48 degrees F. I was dressed warmly and was reasonably comfortable as long as I kept moving quickly and didn’t slow down. The urge to stay warm felt like an overpowering concern. A call to the nearest furnace repair shop (about 10 miles away) gave me the good news that a replacement part was in stock. The $12 price seemed like a real bargain to get back a heated home again. Just after noon I had completed the repair just in time to eat lunch as the house warmed up to the balmy 68 degrees were the thermostat was set. What luxury!

We have so much. We heat our homes. We provide ourselves with food and other necessities. We have many luxuries and creature comforts. Every one of those good things should be celebrated and enjoyed. All of what we have is special – the newly acquired, the familiar, the big/important things and the little things. It is special to be able to prepare a plate of food for supper, take it out into the yard and sit down in the sun and eat it. If that doesn’t seem special, visit a nursing home (most of us will live in one some day). Most of the residents there are wheelchair bound. They eat in their rooms or in a large dining hall with other residents. Those are their only two choices.

When I walk out onto my lawn with my plate of food, I am going to enjoy it. I hope I always remember – every day that the furnace works is a good day.

Alan Detwiler started the web site Leisureideas. Visitors to the site are encouraged to use imagination and whatever happens to be available to discover new ways to enjoy themselves.

Alan writes books on how to pursue playfulness and a sense of wonder. His books are available in digital format and can be purchased and downloaded on the eBookMall web site. Go to ebookmall.com ebookmall.com Then do a search for Detwiler.

Why is everyone so busy nowadays? When I negotiate a meeting time with a new client, we rarely find that gaps in our diaries overlap in the next two weeks and we usually have to find time more than 15 days away. In business, I think that time is more important than money because it appears that time is the only resource that is truly constrained. In fact, I believe that as your diary or calendar fills up, your business slows down.

This makes management of your time a vital business skill (and habit) that you need to learn. I teach my clients to manage their diaries and work plans in four simple steps that they can choose to implement on a daily, weekly or monthly cycle as suits their industry and personality.

Decide what not to do

Firstly, sit down and list the 20 things you are doing. Remembering to give yourself permission ‘not to be perfect’, read down your list and eliminate the 10 activities that deliver the least value to your business.

Depending on their nature, either delegate these low-value activities or stop doing them altogether. Having chopped out your “To-Don’ts“, you now have time for the remaining “To-Dos” and you can focus on adding value to your business.

Bite off sufficient to chew

Where you have a big task to do, don’t treat it as an elephant to be eaten in one meal. Instead break your elephantine task into five, smaller components, each with a defined end-point or deliverable outcome.

Now you can set a priority on each part and estimate the resources and time you need to digest that component of the elephant. As you achieve each milestone, you can reward yourself and be encouraged by your visible progress.

Sweep the small stuff together

If you have a morass of small daily actions that drown you, manage them as clustered items. Try to do your photocopying in 20-minute chunks, to make your phone calls in half-hour sessions, read your mail in 40-minute slots and to file your papers in 15-minute intervals. Set your own durations for these clustered items long enough to achieve satisfaction but not so long as to get jaded.

When you deal with your mail and email, make your actions immediate: delete dead files, mark your decision on short papers, pile up longer papers for a future reading period, relay decisions for other to act, and mark appointments and future notes in your diary.

Some activities can be condensed into specific times of the day that match your body clock: have a quiet time for reading major documents, fix a “go for” time to do errands, get stationery and make small purchases and agree a ‘walk about’ schedule when you can visit your staff.

Get your priorities right

Of course how you plan to spend your time will always be upset by the reality of customers calling, staff needing help and stuff happening. The value of a good plan is in your ability to re-plan. I suggest that a major element in successfully managing your time is to know the priority that you place on your activities now. So on that list of “to do” activities, rank them from first priority down to tenth priority. Then as new items come in, you can decide where they fit into your ranking.

I have yet to hear of anyone who on their deathbed has said, “I wish I had spent more time at work”. So I coach my clients using the ‘wheel of life’ to help them balance their efforts on what they value: business, family, friends, self-development, sport and other passions.

For those clients who run profitable businesses, I also remind them to plan time to work on the business: they should not restrict their time management to work in their business.

Adrian Pepper coaches people through business and personal difficulties, helping companies figure out what to do, how to move forward and what to get organised. You can contact him through