Persistence Unlimited Personal Productivity Tips

Finding Your Most Important Task of the Day

If you have ever struggled with what you should do here’s a simple tip that can help.

We know we are supposed to first focus on our top priority.  But sometimes determining which is the top priority, that’s the $1,000,000 question.  

I know when I’m stuck between two or more top priorities, I get stressed and often it takes much longer to start.  So here’s a trick I use to sometimes find out what I should be doing so I can get to work.

It’s pretty simple really.

1.  Take the tasks that are on your immediate mind, write them all down.   You don’t have to spend an hour doing this, spend five minutes if you’ve got it.

2.  Rank each task for DIFFICULTY:   You might say that taking out the garbage is a 2, while sitting and writing 3 pages of your book is a 9.

3.  Then, simply pick the most difficult task on your list and get to work.

Odds are, the task you feel is most difficult is also your most important. We have a tendency to put off tasks that we feel are most difficult. But tough work is also what brings the highest value. We get more rewards for completing the tasks other We get a lot of benefits from doing the most important tasks on on our list. We might be paid higher, we might receive more love or more commitment or more energy.

Do you have any unique ways of divining your most important action of the day?  If so, feel free to let us know about it in the comments below. :)

Power Posts from March ‘08

Today being the number 1 fools day of the year brings to close a cold and windy March. And March, although a tough month, was good for the self-development posts here on Persistence Unlimited. (How’s that for a segue?)
Here are 5 of my favorites:

The Little Roomba That Could; Or 5 Reasons Why Persistence [...]

Joshua Radin Turns Lemons Into Lemonade

Indie/Folk Music fans may be familiar with the artist Joshua Radin. He’s got a quiet, but emotional music style reminiscent of Elliot Smith and Damien Rice. But there’s a secret about his music style you may not know…
Joshua Radin says when he was living in a small apartment, he had a problem with his [...]

107 Simple Ways To Turn Your Dreams into Reality

Goal Setting… Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it’s still the most efficient way to achieve your dreams.

Many of us never learned how to do it. Others know how but don’t do it. Both are headed for trouble…

Two important questions:

1. Does goal setting work?
2. If it works, is it worth doing?

Answers:

1. Goal setting is something you do every day, whether you are conscious of it or not. You want things, you “set your mind” to having a new TV, microwave or iPod and eventually you get it. That, my friend, is goal setting. If it didn’t work, you wouldn’t have any of the things you want.

2. Goal setting is worth doing because it makes you more efficient at it. Put another way, what good is it to want a new car only to wait 10 years to get it? Increase your goal setting efficiency and you get the things you want faster. You don’t have to struggle so hard. And the confusion surrounding it fades to where you can make success a habit.

And a warning to those who want to dismiss this outright. The difference between those of us who have goals and those who don’t are obvious. Those with goals simply do better financially, mentally and socially than those without a goal to hang their hat. And the gap is widening. With warnings of a shrinking economy, debt at an all time high and other economic woes on the horizon, do you really want to leave your future to chance?

Now is the time to take things into your own hands. Take control once and for all.

Instead of wishing for the outcomes you want, you follow a roadmap that takes you there.
I want this to be the end-all be-all goal setting breakthrough guide. The excuses stop here. When you are done, you’ll have every tool you need to get started and follow through for the rest of your life.

Oh and yes, this is a compilation of the 31 day series I wrote called 101 Goal Setting Breakthroughs. I edited it for brevity and it still ended up being more than 12,000 words! And… Oddly enough, there turned out to be 107 tips in the series that are reflected in this post… Hope you like it :)

Note to Subscribers: I purposefully did not send you this full post because it is so large it would be a long download. You can still read it in it’s entirety here

Do Some Dreaming With The 4-Hour Workweek spreadsheet

Jared Goralnick created a pretty cool “Dreamline Worksheet” based on Timithy Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek. (see my mini- review of the book here.)

The worksheet looks to be a well-thought out Excel spreadsheet that is attractive as well as functional. You can enter your dreams for having, being and doing on page 1 and do a budget on page 2.

“It’s been almost eight months since 4-Hour Workweek Dreamline spreadsheet; it’s been both an inspiring (many success stories) and enlightening (many helpful suggestions) time. I’ve used much of the feedback that I’ve received to create a new version, which you can download below.

The most noteworthy new feature is allowing both one-time and monthly expenses. In the previous version, one had to determine the monthly cost of each of their goals. Now one can enter the full cost and the spreadsheet will divide that total by the number of months for the Dreamline…”

You can download it and get more info at Technotheory

February Favorite Posts

February was another busy month for me personally and professionally. But there were still some good posts that seemed to hit the right nerves. This blog even had it’s first guest post!

Here’s my list - if yours is different let me know.

• 5 Reasons Why You’ll Never Amount to Anything…
• 15 Inexpensive or Free Software Tools for Goal Setting & Success
• How I Nearly Doubled My Feedburner Subscribers in 1 Day…
• 9 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Life

The No-Fail Flashcard Technique Update

How would you like to be able to memorize virtually anything fast and with very little effort?
I covered a great way a few years back in my post The No-Fail Flashcard technique. Basically, the trick to this method is to put only one question and one answer on each card and to review the [...]