Do It Tomorrow

For almost any initiative, the route to success is regular, focused action.

Exercise
Take a sheet of paper and make a list of all the things you intend to get around to some day. Include your work and your private life. Don’t include anything that you have to get done by a certain date. Ideally they should be the sort of things that won’t get done at all unless you make a conscious resolve to do them.

As a rough guide:
projects with deadlines should be dealt with under the least urgent things first rule.
Projects without any deadline should be considered as candidates for the current initiative slot.
As this project has only a vague time indication – ‘before too long’ – it is best dealt with as a current initiative to get it up and running.

What do you mean, ‘when you can find the time’? You know perfectly well that means never. This is an ideal candidate for the current-initiative spot. I suggest you keep a list of things for that spot and knock them off one by one.

the person misses the deadline, you must follow up immediately. If they don’t hear anything from you they will think it doesn’t matter. Again, use your task diary to remind you to check that you have received the completed work by the correct date.

greatest sin you can commit when you delegate is to sit on work for days or weeks and then produce it at the last minute as an emergency. This will destroy your subordinates’ ability to plan their work.

Prioritising by urgency is far more common, and many people, consciously or unconsciously, prioritise by urgency on a more or less continuous basis.
Unfortunately, the effect of using urgency as our criterion for what to do first is very detrimental. The tendency is to wait to do something until it becomes urgent. The result is that life is lived in a constant rush of impending deadlines. This is very stressful, the quality of work is lowered and reliability is lessened. The benefits of working ‘little and often’ on a project are seldom realised. Finally, one is never able to take full advantage of the amount of time that one has been allocated to complete a project

If you have any significant backlogs of work, I recommend that you make clearing them into a current initiative as early as possible. The reason for this is that backlogs are a very big energy drain. If you have a serious backlog of work, it will be affecting everything you do. Clearing a backlog gives such a great sense of liberation and energy that it is well worth making it among the first things that you do

Remember, if you don’t work on your chosen initiative first thing, before everything else starts to crowd in on you, you will have great difficulty in getting moving on it. The remedy is to make time for it before you even look at anything else. Don’t worry about all the other things you have to do; they will all find their own level.

discovered long ago that if I really want to get moving on something during a particular day – especially if it’s something challenging – it is of the utmost importance that I do it first thing.