If and only if you want to have your best year, quarter, month, week, and day then it is critical that you stop living out of your inbox.

Keep the main thing the main thing by starting your day with a proactive plan on what you want to accomplish to move you toward your major priorities and objectives for the year broken down by quarters and monthly goals.

Remember what Jim Collins said: “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.”

Plan your day so you can get the most out of it. Thinking time is the most valuable time you can spend yet most entrepreneurs do not spend enough time on this most important activity. Write down your action steps to move your goals forward.

• Writing crystallizes thought and thought motivates action.
• Writing gives form to your ideas and gets them out of your head, freeing up bandwidth. Helps separate the trivial from the important.
• Writing is the instrument for transferring your thoughts, words, and strategies into a form that you can return to over and over again.

Plan to work on your highest payoff activities, those activities that have the greatest return on investment of your time effort, and energy.

Get rid of your low payoff activities, the activities that distract you from your goals. The activities that someone else could do for you so you can stay focused on keeping the main thing the main thing.

Do whatever it takes to stay on your plan. Remember you are on your goals program or someone else’s always.

Create strategic blocks of time for your most important tasks i.e. – Phone calls, emails, client tasks, whatever it is YOU want to do that will move you closer to your GOALS. Keep your calendar and your goals highly visible.

The smartest and most successful people spend plenty of time really thinking. Think time is the most important and yet the least valued and appreciated because most of us have grown up in the west with an over-emphasis on being productive.

The late Peter Drucker had three very powerful ideas that you should really ponder:

• “You can be very efficient doing the wrong things in life and in business.
• “There is nothing as useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
• “We must do the right things, at the right time in the right way.”