Don’t Quit, COMMIT!
Continuing from my last article, once you fine-tune your ability to see what is important in a given day, with a maximum of two to five items on your Must-Do list, you are positioned to make better choices.
By limiting the list to the most important items with the questions —What will the impact of this be a year from now? and How does this task fit with my purpose and vision in life?—we were able to be more productive during the day than we had ever been. Even taking on the lowest-ranked item of the five produced far better results than our former method of “winging it.”
However, we would always try to focus first on the item that was most important to us, and then the next, and so on. As we experimented and learned the 3×5 must-do card system, our choices became easy and natural.
Imagine choosing to do something each day from your thoughtful list of a few things that will make the most impact in your life a year from now. This is very powerful indeed.
Here’s a little rhyme I started using many years ago, as I saw it play out in my life many times:
Mile by mile can be a trial,
Yard by yard can still be hard,
But inch by inch, anything’s a cinch!
Imagine the effect of accumulating just one thing each workday. That’s 250 (five days x fifty weeks) meaningful, completed tasks during a year.
When you position yourself to accomplish a little each day, the cumulative effect is truly life changing. Just think, if you even achieved half of that—125 meaningful things in a year—it would be far more than the average person dares to attempt. That rate would put you at the top of the performance curve.
If you work in a company that conducts performance reviews, think what keeping track of these accomplishments will do when you sit down with your boss at review time!
How many people take the time to write down their accomplishments? I can tell you from experience, it is not very many. Yet the benefit is so great now that you know it, how can you pass up on doing it?
As Ken Blanchard once said, “There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses; only results.” Choose to commit, not quit!
Unless you commit to the choice you’ve made and see it through, what chance is there it would have been accomplished? Not much. But when you can see the choice as important to your future, you will make a firm commitment to it, and then you will act on it. How can you fail?
The likelihood of your success increases significantly when you are committed to making it happen. Be intentional in your choices, and they will serve you well. I can’t emphasize strong enough how important it is to commit!
This is your life. If you can’t commit to success in your life, why are you here?
Now that you’ve made your primary choice and committed to it for the day, you’re able to do something about it. In other words, you are in a position to begin acting on it by applying effort. More next time.
Adapted from the book Uncommon Sense by Bill Abbate www.billabbate.com
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