How do you start your day? Years ago I started planning mine by writing everything down I would have to do, the night before. I found that drawing up your list the night before prompts your subconscious to work on your plans and goals while you sleep. When you wake up, you feel ready to tackle your challenges.

When prioritizing and planning your time, consider the following points:

• Key questions.
What is the highest value-added action I can do?
What can I, and only I, do that I’ve done well before to make a difference?
Why am I on the payroll?

The answers to these questions help identify all that needs to be done and in what order. That, in turn, will bolster personal productivity.

• Values.
Decide what’s important to you, and in what order. Make sure your values don’t conflict with work. Energy spent worrying diminishes your abilities.

• Consequences.
Every action has consequences – good and bad. Consider what rewards you’d reap by completing a task. Then, compare those rewards with the consequences of putting it aside. This process makes it easier to see which goals have a higher value.

• The Pareto Principle.
Vilfredo Pareto, a 19th-century engineer, argued that 20% of what you do accounts for 80% of the value. When considering the importance of a task, ask yourself whether it’s among the 20% that creates the most value.

• Urgency vs. Importance.
An unexpected phone call or a drop-in visitor may be urgent, but the consequences of dealing with either may not be important in the long run. The urgent is other-oriented, it’s caused by someone else. Important things are self-directed and have the greatest value for you.

• The Limiting Step.
Standing between you and what you want to achieve is the limiting step. That’s the bottleneck that determines how quickly you can reach your goal. It’s important to identify that step and focus single-mindedly on getting that one thing done.

• A Written Plan.
Lists of goals, tasks and objectives are of no help unless they’re written. Putting your plans on paper makes a seemingly elusive goal more concrete. There’s a connection that takes place between the brain and the hand. When you don’t write it down, it’s fuzzy, but as you write it and revise it, it becomes clear.

• Visualization.
See yourself doing what you need to get done. Visualization trains the subconscious to focus on completing tasks. Say, for example, that you want to begin each morning by exercising. Visualizing yourself doing sit-ups and push-ups the night before conditions the mind to do those the next day. When you prime you mind, it wakes you up even before the alarm clock goes off.

Remember you are a winner and preparation goes a long way in helping you achieve all your goals.

–Brian Tracy Programs–

And seven steps to salvation. Tools, techniques, and technologies to
make your meetings less painful, more productive — even heavenly.

The Seven Sins of Deadly Meetings

A variety of tools and techniques (plus a healthy dose of common sense) can make meetings less painful, more productive, maybe even fun. There’s also an important role for technology, although the undeniable power of computer-enabled meeting systems usually comes with astronomical price tags. Still, there’s lots to learn from electronic “meetingware” even if you never buy it. What follows is Fast Company’s guide to the seven sins of deadly meetings and, more important, seven steps to salvation.

Cure the Sick-Meeting Ills

Many people dread meetings for being time consuming, pointless, and boring.

The primary reason for meetings is to share or brainstorm information or to develop action steps toward accomplishing a goal. Period. But if this were the result of most corporate meetings, people wouldn’t moan and groan when they learn that another meeting is going to be held. From our experience facilitating and attending meetings, we’ve found that bad meetings have similar traits regardless of the industry, company, or project:

12 Tips for Creating Better Presentations

You have a presentation to create. It’s important. But, formatting diagrams can take forever and the text on your slides seems to have a mind of its own. Then, there’s the sad fact that everybody’s PowerPoint presentations look the same.

Sound about right? If so, I’ve got good news for you! Creating professional, unique presentations can be much easier than you might think.

This article will help you find the right tools to get exactly the presentation you want. We’ll look at three components of creating effective presentations, and provide timesaving tips to help send your presentation off in style.