Organize Tomorrow Today: 8 Ways to Retrain Your Mind to Optimize Performance at Work and in Life

What you’re doing is imposing intention onto what you do. Instead of operating day-to-day in reaction to events, you’re setting priorities and getting out in front of things. You’re training yourself to get better at prioritizing. And when you are better at prioritizing, you will be surprised how quickly you get things accomplished: we’ve found tha

Identifying daily priorities might seem like an obvious or insignificant step to take, but writing your most important tasks down the previous night turns your subconscious mind loose while you sleep and frees you from worrying about being unprepared.

The second part of the list is called the “1 Must.” Once you’ve determined your “3 Most Important,” you choose the “1 Must” from these three items. It is the single most important task or conversation you need to have that day.

Strong, resilient people have what we call a “Relentless Solution Focus,” or RSF. If a person with great RSF was in the same situation and lost that big client, he or she wouldn’t be some kind of emotionless robot—the loss would sting. But the immediate, laser-sharp focus would be on finding the solution path, and doing it in less than sixty second

Maltz’s theory about self-image is a simple one. He said that a person will not be able to consistently overperform or underperform the self-image he or she has. In other words, if you fundamentally believe you’re an average performer (or a terrific one, or a terrible one), you won’t consistently be able to do a lot better or a lot worse than that

There is no magic success pill. Success requires strong and consistent effort, and the act of evaluating yourself on that effort. Most people believe that it takes their best effort on everything, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Highly successful people give tremendous attention to the most important activities daily and then do fairly

Saturating people with information actually paralyzes action. Think about it: when people are overwhelmed, they typically freeze. Self-doubt slows action.

Traditional time management theories teach people how to do more with the time they have. Time maximization teaches you to create more time.

To set yourself on the right track, ask yourself those two critical questions: (1) What are the three most important things I need to get done tomorrow? and (2) What is the single most important task I must get done? The questions work within your brain’s “channel capacity” to give you direction and prioritization in manageable doses.