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Taking Inventory of Time

Written on June 9, 2009 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Time Management

Bigg Success is life on your own terms. Today, we want to focus on time – one of the five elements of bigg success.

For bigg goal-getters, there never seems to be enough time in the day. Yet we all have 24 hours … 1,440 minutes … 86,400 seconds in the day.

Sometimes it’s helpful to look at things through a different lens. Let’s make these units of time more tangible by thinking about them as units of inventory.

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Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss today's topic on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player to listen while you read: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Going bananas for time

Think about a grocery store. More specifically, think about the produce area of the grocery store. Can you see the apples, the lettuce, and the broccoli? Oh, and there’s the bananas!

Our grocers have to sell these things before they go bad. Otherwise, they aren’t worth anything. Unlike canned goods, produce has a very limited shelf life.

So it is with our time. We all have 86,400 seconds as an asset at the beginning of every day. But this second is gone. Now this one. The seconds turn into minutes; the minutes into hours.

When you look back on your day, did you get the most out of every hour?

“I don’t have time”

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marylynn Our friend, Lisa Cree, said something profound to me a while back. She said, “’I don't have time’ is a statement of priority, not fact.” If something is important to you, then you make it a priority and you do have time for it.

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george We always hesitate to recommend this, but if you really feel like you don’t have time for those things that are really important to you, keep a journal for a week or maybe even a month. It’s a bit tedious but it will be worthwhile.

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To make the best use of your time, ask yourself these three questions:

Have you set your direction?
You have to know where you’re going to use your time effectively by doing the right things.

Are you working efficiently?
Do you use technology enough (or too much) to get things done expeditiously. Are there tasks you perform yourself which could easily be done by someone else? We have more options for outsourcing, both in our businesses and at home, today than ever before. Are you capitalizing on them?

Are you focused enough?
As a bigg goal-getter, you may like to have a “lot on your plate.” But here’s a really important principle to understand:

If you try to accomplish too much, you risk accomplishing nothing!

Bigg success is life on your own terms. We’ve discussed before that one of the meanings of the word “terms” in our definition is phases. During any term (e.g. a year), focus on two or three major objectives. Break that down into quarters or months. Then you’ll know what you need to accomplish every day and every week.

Here’s another bigg secret: You’ll get where you want to be faster if those two or three objectives work in synergy – the bigg idea behind bigg success – rather than having two or three completely different things.

Focus on doing a few of the right things the right way so you reach bigg success faster!

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Would you like more tips and tools to live your life on your own terms? Subscribe to the Bigg Success Weekly – it’s FREE!

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Thanks so much for the gift of your time today. Please join us next time when we’ll discuss little things that make bigg differences. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
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3 Action Items to Increase Your Productivity

Written on June 10, 2008 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Business, Decision Making, Personal Branding, Time Management

In a new study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a group of researchers surveyed 58 random people in a shopping mall. These researchers asked the participants to recall the decisions they had made that day. Then the researchers asked the participants to solve some simple math problems. They found that the more decisions a participants had made, the less likely they were to solve the problems.

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There appears to be a price to making decisions – we become less productive as we make more decisions. And boy, do we have to make a lot of decisions today!

A six item grocery list
Picture yourself in a grocery store holding a list with six items – orange juice, bagels, Philadelphia cream cheese, Crest toothpaste, Coke, and lettuce.

In 1970, with that list you would have had a choice of 50 items. By 1998, you would need to filter through 250 different products just to get all the items on your list.

This comes from the spectacular book, Simplicity Marketing: End Brand Complexity, Clutter, and Confusion by Steven M. Cristol and Peter Sealey.

Think about it – that was 1998. Do you think it’s any better now?

3 bigg action items to simplify decision making

#1 – Make a list that’s specific.
So specific in fact, that you could send someone else and get exactly what you want. Studies show that people who shop with a list don’t buy as many impulse items so they tend to spend less money.

More importantly, it saves you time and mental fatigue as the studies showed.

#2 – Set a time limit when you’re making a major decision.
Before you begin doing research for a bigg decision, set a time limit. Once you’re satisfied with your findings or once you reach your time limit, make a decision.

As an example, we recently set up the web site for Bigg Studio, a sister company to Bigg Success, for audio production services. We needed to decide on the design for the site. There were an endless number of possibilities. We chose one that fit our criteria and moved on.

Here’s another tip that we love – get out your magic 8 ball. Ask it if you made the right decision. Look at its answer and see how you feel about it. This taps into your intuition about the decision which makes getting to the decision you’re most comfortable easier.

If you like this idea, here are a couple of links you might find helpful:

Get Out Your Magic 8 Ball to Make Your Next Important Decision
This is one of our articles that explains why this works in more detail.

Online Magic 8 Ball
Here’s the real thing right on your computer screen!

#3 – Become a partner in stress relief for the important people in your life.
Get to know the preferences of the people who depend on you, like your customers, your co-workers, your boss, and your significant other. Weed through all the options and present them with just a few.

The authors of Simplicity Marketing make the point that

“the next generation of positioning successes will belong to those brands that relieve customer stress.”

So there’s a significant opportunity in the future for people and companies who are able to simplify things. This applies not just to your company brand, but also to your personal brand.

This is one of the things we try to do here at Bigg Success. We try hard to sort through all the information out there and deliver to you those few things we’ve found to be the most important.

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