“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful”.– Albert Schweitzer

Forward motion is what we want. Taking steps every day toward our success. It’s not a question of giant steps or baby steps it’s moving forward. Of course, it is advisable to take as big action as you can every day. The more forward progress made, the less the distance to our final success destination is.

Let’s take a look at what our day can look like, how tracking hour-to-hour our day. You will be amazed at what you can get done:

Example

8:00 AM to 9:00 AM
Review to-do list, get coffee out of the way, review emails, and voicemails.

9:00 AM to 9:30 AM

Take 30 minutes to work on something that moves you closer to success, example if it’s a business venture what can you do that will advance that project. Perhaps it’s your children, taking time to spend with them that is meaningful to the child. Busy parents learn to be present at the moment with a child. Put away the cell phone and truly experience something with your child. Hop on a game with them, get out in the backyard and watch birds, do something that is outside the norm. Fill 30 minutes with focused achievement.

9:30 AM to 10:30 AM

See what you can do by yourself for a solid hour of nothing but focused achievement. What this might look like, is working on your business plan, marketing plan. Fine-tuning your message.

Perhaps it’s taking one hour to focus on your garden again it’s what you are looking for that gives you that feeling of success. This is focused on time, without interruption. That means no phones, no email, and concentrate on the task at hand.

STOP HERE

Exercise time! Woohoo…

Okay, what I want you to do here is to stop what you’re doing. I wish you if not right now, no more than 24 hours from now. Take one hour and fill it with nothing but production. Follow these steps:

1. Turn off the cell phone and no emails. During this hour, this is focused without interruption.
2. Pick a task that has meaning. Do not CONFUSE activity with productivity! In the end, their needs to be some measurable result from this exercise.
3. This can be something with the family, for yourself, work, it just does not matter. What I want you to learn from this is how much you can actually get done in 1 hour. A prime example to ponder, if you were Oprah Winfrey’s TV producer, you have to fill one hour with engaging content that keeps millions of people glued to the TV. A daunting task, but her team did it effectively for years. One hour! Think about that for a moment.
4. This exercise is important. Don’t just keep reading, stop, and do this!

WELCOME BACK

For those that did this exercise great job. Filling 1 hour with nothing but productivity is hard. The take away here is “don’t confuse activity with productivity”!

A quick note. Do the exercises, you can read this book but doing the activities will make a change. Take the steps!

Have a clear action plan. Working in steps will keep you from feeling overwhelmed. Many failures occurred because someone was ill-prepared and became overwhelmed. Clouding good judgment.