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A long time perspective turns out to be more important than family background, education, race, intelligence, connections, or virtually any other single factor in determining your success in life and at work.
Your attitude toward time, your “time horizon,” has an enormous impact on your behavior and your choices. People who take a long-term view of their lives and careers always seem to make much better decisions about their time and activities than people who give very little thought to the future.
They analyze their choices and behaviors in the present to make sure that what they are doing today is consistent with the long-term future that they desire.
By definition, something that is important has long-term potential consequences.
“What are the potential consequences of doing or not doing this task?”
Future intent influences and often determines present actions.
Think about the Long Term
Successful people are those who are willing to delay gratification and make sacrifices in the short term so that they can enjoy far greater rewards in the long term.
Winners are motivated by their desires toward activities that are goal-achieving.”
If a task or activity has large potential positive consequences, make it a top priority and get started on it immediately.
Motivation requires motive.
Keep yourself focused and forward moving by continually starting and completing those tasks that can make a major difference to your company and to your future.
Thinking continually about the potential consequences of your choices, decisions, and behaviors is
one of the very best ways to determine your true priorities in your work and personal life.
“There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.”
This is something that only you can do. If you don’t do it, it won’t be done by someone else. But if you do do it, and you do it well, it can really make a difference to your life and your career. What is this particular frog for you?
Determine the most important thing you could be doing every hour of every day, and then discipline yourself to work continually on the most valuable use of your time. What is this for you right now?
Make time for getting big tasks done every day. Plan your daily workload in advance. Single out the relatively few small jobs that absolutely must be done immediately in the morning. Then go directly to the big tasks and pursue them to completion.
The fact is that you can’t do everything that you have to do. You have to procrastinate on something. Therefore, deliberately and consciously procrastinate on small tasks. Put off eating smaller or less ugly frogs. Eat the biggest and ugliest frogs before anything else. Do the worst first!
Continually review your duties and responsibilities to identify time-consuming tasks and activities that you can abandon with no real loss.
He cut back to one round of golf per week and transformed his life, especially his home life.
Continually review your life and work to find time-consuming tasks and activities that you can abandon.
The first law of success is concentration—to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right nor to the left. WILLIAM MATHEWS
