Day
5:
Learn to Work Off Lists.
Use a daily master list of all the things you need to do and prioritize
them. I might have twenty
things on my list and if they are not prioritized, I will do the easiest
things first and never get to the most important things.
I have the luxury of taking ten or fifteen minutes to sit over my cup of
coffee and make my list as items occur to me.
Some people’s mornings are hectic.
If so, shoot for making your list the night before when the kids
are in bed (or at least in their rooms) and the house has quieted down a
bit.
The other thing I have learned
to do (and I hate it) is to do the thing I fear or hate to do FIRST.
For me, that was making cold calls in my business.
Or warm calls. Just
picking up the phone was hard for me.
So I had to train myself to do my appointment setting calls first
and get them out of the way. I
still am not happy about doing them, but at least when they are done, they
are DONE and not hanging over me. I
can go about the rest of my day without a black cloud of guilt over my
head.
At the end of the day, anything
that isn’t completed goes on your list for tomorrow. Those should get a higher priority ranking but they don’t
necessarily have to have top priority.
If something has been on your list for three days running, ask
yourself why you are avoiding that particular task.
Then figure out if you can delegate it to anyone else.
J
If there are some things you just hate to do, you may be better off
getting them off your list and onto someone else’s.
I had a live-in boyfriend who was a sweetheart and the only thing
we ever really disagreed about was doing the laundry.
We both hated doing it. And
then it occurred to us that we lived (literally) above a laundry.
For about $6.00 a week (this was the 1980s), the laundry would
wash, dry, fluff and fold our laundry and it would come back all neatly
wrapped in light blue paper. What
a deal! Sometimes it is
better to pay a little extra to get something done because at least it
will get DONE.