Fill your with the Good Days

If you want to have a better life, you must fill it with good days. The best way to do that is to organize your day according to your personal priorities - doing the most important things first.

It's easy to do. Yet most people don't. Eighty percent of the people I know - and I'm including all the intelligent and hardworking people I work with - do exactly the opposite. They organize their days around urgencies and emergencies. Taking care of last-minute issues that should have been dealt with earlier. Or doing tasks that help other people achieve their goals while ignoring their own.

Doing first things first. It is a very simple discipline. Yet its transformative power is immense. It can change your life - literally overnight.
It is the single best technique I know for change. And it's the fastest and easiest way to turn your life around if you are not happy with the way it's been going so far.

Doing first things first. Is that what you do?

Here's what I do:

• I get up early - never after 6:30 a.m.
• I get to work early - never later than 7:30 a.m.
• I spend my first hour doing a task that advances my most important goal.
• If I'm going strong, I spend the next hour doing the same thing. If not, I switch to a task that advances my second-most-important goal.
• I spend my third hour on another priority.
• Only after four hours of doing important work do I allow myself to deal with less important work and other people's urgencies.

By the time most people start wandering into the office - between 8:30 and 9:00 - I've done at least an hour and sometimes two hours of work that is helping me achieve my important goals. Goals that correspond to my core values. Goals that will immensely improve my life.

That's how to begin a very good day!

I do this five days a week. And on weekends, I find at least two more hours each day to devote to my top priority. In a year, this averages to about 600 hours. Six hundred hours may not sound like much, but it is.

Six hundred hours is fifteen 40-hour work weeks. That's almost four working months! Think about it.

Here's what you can accomplish in 600 hours:

• Learn to speak a foreign language with moderate proficiency.
• Become a reasonably skillful ballroom dancer, with a good command of the swing, the fox trot, the salsa, and the hustle.
• Achieve a blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or a brown or black belt in one of many other martial arts.
• Develop a decent singing voice and feel comfortable singing at parties.
• Write five 60,000-word books on a subject you know.
• Write and edit two novels or 365 poems.
• Write, direct, film, and edit a 30-minute movie.
• Start a multimillion-dollar side business.