How To Prioritize Your Time
Doing what matters most frequently requires discipline and maybe even sacrifices in your personal and professional life. This principle is about time and how to do and become our best with the time we have in life.You have to get your priorities straight, and think high quality and high quantity
The first action is doing what matters most so that you are focused on both high quality and high quantity (HQ/HQ), in the high-performance zone. If you’re not in the high-performance zone, sit down with a partner or a team and evaluate your plan. How do you need to adjust your plan to focus on what matters most? Maybe it means adjusting the development and production plan to launch a pilot rather than mass producing a product on the initial run.
Take Control of Your Life Through Pre-week Planning. Your efficiency, flexibility and stress management will significantly improve if you engage in careful and thoughtful preparation for what you’ll do in the upcoming week. Pre-week planning is simple enough. You take 15 to 20 minutes on Saturday or Sunday and develop a detailed plan for the upcoming week.
Five steps in pre-week planning will help you focus on what matters most each week:
Step 1. Review your vision and your annual goals.
Step 2. Look ahead one to three months, or even further out, in your master calendar.
Step 3. Enter into your calendar all of the meetings and other scheduled events that you have planned for that week.
Step 4. Identify what matters most that week in each role.
Step 5. Determine a time during the week when you’ll do each item you listed under each of the roles.
Pre-week planning is a powerful way to reduce stress, give you better quality time in each area of your life, and certainly increase your balance. It also prevents important things from slipping through the cracks.
Protect and Conserve Your Time. To stay focused on what matters most, you need to create
internal guidelines so that you don’t get trapped by all the distractions. To protect your time,
Handle each task when it arises, and don’t procrastinate.
Manage your email and other electronic media effectively.
Try to eliminate or minimize ineffective meetings.
Avoid negative, draining interactions with others.
You can’t really change or control others, so don’t allow them to throw you off. Draw upon your strong inner core for your own peace, happiness and direction. Your positive and peaceful energy and your effective use of time are two of your most precious resources. Be a master at conserving them carefully
