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It’s six in the morning and I’m sitting in my wood-grained and black leather chair, feet on a footstool, laptop on my lap, writing. Getting here, this early in the morning, was not easy. It never is. But without question, it’s worth every bit of effort.
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I had pressed the FIND ME button, hovered in the air, saw my life, and redirected myself toward where I would make the best use of my strengths, weaknesses, differences, and passions. I chose the areas on which to focus my year, wrote them down, and planned my days around them.
Once I pressed that FIND ME button, my view went from a slowly rotating earth down to my state, my city, my street, and, eventually, to me landing in my chair. The pixels slowly aligned, and my life came into focus. I landed in the perfect place to take full advantage of my particular talents—gifts as well as challenges. Each day, I pour my to-do list into my calendar and watch as my calendar is filled with the right priorities.
I arrived where I am, where I should be, where I can make optimal use of who I am and what I have to offer, by following the ideas in this book.
And yet, for good reason, this book is not over.
Because even when you know where you should focus, and you plan your day around those areas, things get in the way. People call. Emails come in. Things get scheduled for you, sometimes without your even knowing. You get distracted. Sometimes nudged, sometimes knocked, off course.
And it’s not just other people getting in our way. Sometimes we get in our own way. Like when we procrastinate on something challenging, something important, perhaps without even knowing why, pushing it off, letting other things take its place.
Most books on time management start too late and end too early. They start with how to manage your to-do items and end with a plan to organize and accomplish all those to-dos.
But that’s too late to start because if you haven’t made deliberate strategic choices about where you should and shouldn’t be spending your time—where you should and shouldn’t be spending your life—so that you make the best use of your gifts, then it’s likely that many of the things you accomplish will be the wrong things. In other words, you’ll waste your time and your life (though you’ll be very efficient as you do).
And most time management books end too early because the hardest part about managing time isn’t the plan, it’s the day-by-day follow-through: getting started, sticking to your areas of focus, ignoring nonpriorities, and avoiding the allure of unproductive busyness.
Follow-through may seem easy, but it’s not. It’s where most of us fail. And yet it’s the lone bridge across which ideas become accomplishments. We need to follow through, to strongly and diplomatically manage ourselves and other people, so nothing prevents us from accomplishing and becoming all that we can.
I love writing. And it’s one of my five areas of focus: Write and Speak About My Ideas. But it’s hard work, with somewhat flexible deadlines, and tempting to push off for more urgent, easier tasks. In other words, it’s a lot easier to decide that writing is important than it is to actually spend time writing. In reality, my writing time is fragile. What I’ve discovered, after a few missed writing days, is that if I wait until 9 AM or later to start writing, it always slips away, replaced by also-important client work.
This is a struggle that many of us experience all the time. We intend to do something—run in the morning, finish a proposal, have a difficult conversation with someone, stay focused on our plan—but then, in the moment, when it matters most, we get distracted. We don’t follow through. We give in.
So now, whenever I can, I schedule my writing to start somewhere between five and six in the morning. At that time, there’s little to distract me and I can spend three to four hours writing before the official business day starts.
The best ideas are useless if we can’t get started, don’t follow through, or get disrupted. The chapters in this section—divided into three parts: Mastering Your Initiative, Mastering Your Boundaries, and Mastering Yourself—offer ideas, practices, tips, tricks, and gentle nudges to get you going, keep you going, and help you create essential boundaries so your actions will move you in the direction you want to go while the distractions simply pass you by.