Plan everything or it will never happen.

Manage your time as recurring daily, weekly and monthly appointments on your calendar. Most of your calendar should be recurring blocks of time that have you making consistent progress towards your highest priorities. Don’t forget to add in regular blocks for relaxation time, screw around time, family time, etc. These are important parts of our lives that we cannot afford to let happen by chance. 

Live and die by your plan.

Once you choose to live by #1, don’t mess around with your schedule. If your Wednesday says you are exercising from 6-8, don’t “get to it at 7”. At 6pm you drop whatever you are doing and exercise. You said it was important. You allocated the time. Now go do it. As you learn more about yourself and your priorities, your allocation of time may change. If that happens modify the block of time to better suit your life or remove it. Don’t leave it on your calendar and keep skipping it thinking you’ll get to it someday. This is called discipline. Not “Something kind of like discipline”.

Don’t wander aimlessly.

Limit the amount of time you spend randomly browsing the internet. Stay off social networking, news sites, etc. unless they are DIRECTLY related to you researching or working on your dreams. Every website today is designed to keep you there for as long as possible – doubly so for social media sites. Almost nobody gets on Facebook for just “five minutes”. Five minutes will rapidly turn into an hour. If you feel you need time to screw around on the internet, go see #1 and put it on your calendar. If it gets out of hand, then read the bonus tip. 

Bonus Discipline Tip:

Spending time in front of the computer is a great way to burn away unproductive hours of your life. If you know you are the type of person that has this problem, consider installing RescueTime. I have this running all the time. It tracks all the websites and programs that I use to show me how productive I am. Once you have it installed for a week you will get some amazing data that will probably surprise you about yourself and your habits. Use that information to improve how you manage time online. RescueTime is a must have app if you are having online discipline issues. Get it! 

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