It’s a cliche of executive life: you don’t have time to do everything. Whether you use little slips of paper, a planner, scheduling software or a Palm Pilot, all attempts at time management fail. Rather than throwing in the towel, I suggest that you need a new frame of reference. Change your focus from time management to priority management.

Create a list of priorities

Your strategic plan should highlight your business priorities. If you don’t have one, take a look at my articles on the subject. . Answer the question, “What is most important to accomplish in this time frame?” Make those priorities explicit, write them out. Keep a list prominently posted by your desk.

About priorities

The word priority is derived from prior, meaning before, and related to the Latin primus, meaning first. And while some things are more important than others, your list of priorities should contain all the items of first importance – Only the items critical to developing your business, and nothing else.

Rethinking your to-do list

If you are like most people, your to-do list is a long hodgepodge of everything you have thought to do now and in the future, ordered simply by when you thought it. Perhaps you write little letters or numbers next to each “task” and cross out what’s done. Your list grows and grows – you re-write it only when it becomes unreadable. Throw it away!

The List of Seven

Start fresh every day. Today’s list, written today for today, should contain no more than seven items. Based on your priorities, list today’s most important item first, and so on. Each item on the list must advance a critical issue in your business. If it doesn’t, why are you doing it? Remove it from your list. If you still think it’s important, but not that important, delegate it to someone else.

Planning and Reality

Each day brings scheduled and ad-hoc meetings, walk-ins, sit-downs, and emergencies. Plus, you have daily rituals – answering email, your half-hour reading, or reviewing sales figures. Each meeting and each ritual should be evaluated against your highest priorities. If it doesn’t address your priorities, don’t do it. Don’t participate. Give it up. Delegate it away. The time remaining after meetings and rituals is available for your to-do list. Don’t squander it!

Using the list

Put your energies into doing the first task on your list until it’s complete. Only then, move on to the second item. You may not complete today’s list today – you may not even complete item one – but if you’ve spent the day advancing your highest priority, you’ve been productive.

Tomorrow, make a fresh list on a fresh sheet of paper or its computer equivalent. Don’t automatically carry anything over. This will give you a sense of completion and force you to freshly evaluate what’s important. If you have multiple “highest priority” tracks to follow, break up the available time into fixed time slots, and advance several priorities at once.

Evaluation and balance

At the end of each week, match your accomplishments against your list of strategic priorities. Check to see that you are making progress with all your objectives – that all your priorities are moving forward. Don’t let key areas in your business languish. Evaluate your progress against the list provided in New Year’s Planning.

There may still not be enough time for everything, but the things that are critical to your business will get done. Everything else can wait.

Visit http://www.paullemberg.com/toolsandtips.html for a free copy of our “Priority Setting Worksheet.”

Before the movie “The Secret” a long line of writers and thinkers has promoted the self-help powers of positive thought as long back as man pondered his own existence.

Reams of research have shown positive thinking to be good for your health. A positive attitude and optimistic thinking are healthy. The power of positive thinking is shows that those who remain positive are healthier, live longer, and report greater satisfaction with life than those who might be labeled pessimistic.

But, what about negative thinking?

Here’s a story about how negative thinking can affect your health. (I’ll have to paraphrase it; I heard it off a seminar by Bob Procter.)

One night a night watch man was patrolling a railway yard to check that no one was breaking into the containers and stealing the contents of them.

He came across a container that had its door open. He walked over cautiously to see what was going on and could find no sign of life around so he took a quick look inside.

The container was empty, but as he walked in the door of the container closed behind him and he found himself locked in. he pushed on the door for a while to see if it would open but it was completely stuck. He then started to yell for help but there was no answer.

As he resigned himself to being looked in the container he started to look around and noticed that the container he was in wasn’t a normal but that he was locked in one a refrigerated one.

After a while he noticed that he was getting colder and colder. Because he didn’t think he was going to get help any time soon he decided to write on the wall of the container to tell of his experience.

He wrote that he was getting colder and colder and starting to lose feeling in his body.

After a couple of hours it got harder for him to write but his last comments he wrote that he was going to die soon because it was so cold.

The container was opened later that morning by some work men who found the night watch man dead body in the corner.

If I finished this article you would say it was a tragic accident and it would be, but the tragic part is that the container the night watch man locked himself in was having maintenance done it that day. The part that was broken on the container was the refrigeration mechanism.

The temperature inside the container that night was no different to the temperature outside.

So what caused the man to die? Was it his thinking? Had the negative thoughts he was having about his situation caused him to give up his will to live?

You may have your theories, but I think you can see that not matter the situation you find yourself your thoughts either positive or negative can affect how you deal with your problems whether real or imaginary.

When you’re planning your business, setting goals is very important. In fact, it’s imperative. It will help you stay on track and will also help measure progress. When you meet a goal, you should feel good and be motivated to meet the next one. However, it’s still important to reward yourself when you achieve a certain thing you have set out to do.

You don’t have to reward yourself by buying yourself a big fancy car for every big goal you achieve. You should gift yourself with something you’ve really been wanting and means something to you, so that you’ll be motivated to reach the next goal.

Small Goals, Small Rewards: Big Goals, Big Rewards

Reaching a small goal can be just as important as reaching a large one. In addition, because smaller goals are easier to reach, they keep us motivated to reach bigger ones. In fact, big goals can actually be broken down into smaller goals incrementally, so those big goals don’t seem so large after all. For example, if you want 60 new clients within six months, you can set a goal of attaining 10 new clients a month for that span of time. Nevertheless, no matter how you structure it, you should reward yourself every time you reach a goal, large or small.

If you decide ahead of time what your reward will be for a particular goal, it will give you an extra incentive to keep going when the going gets tough. For example, a small reward can be simply treating yourself and a friend to dinner out, while a larger goal might get you that new motorcycle you’ve been wanting. Put a picture or description of the reward you’re working toward on your office wall, so that you can look at it and keep your focus.

Reaching Big Goals

Make sure you’ll be able to afford the reward you’ve decided for yourself once you’ve achieved that goal. For example, if you really have your heart set on that motorcycle, make sure you’ve got the means in place to buy it before hand. If for some reason you can’t afford it once you reach the goal, you’ll be disappointed. This disappointment may make it harder to stay motivated for your next big goal. Remember that you deserve to be rewarded for goals you’ve reached. Make this as much a priority as you do anything else. If the reward is not feasible at this time, then decide on something smaller that will nonetheless still satisfy you and keep you working toward a larger reward at a future date.

You need to set goals in business in order to achieve success, but rewarding those goals is just as important, to keep momentum going. If you give yourself something to look forward to for every milestone you achieve, you’ll be able to aim even higher every time you reach one and set the next.