Have you ever woken up feeling unable to achieve anything or work? That's okay. This article will guide you on a comprehensive way to manage your year, day, and moments; enhancing your ability to focus and make thoughtful decisions to do only the most important things. In short, it will show you how to find yourself being more effective and put you on the path to reach where you want to go by organizing your year, day, and moments.

"Slowing down: the Art of Reflection and Self Renewal"

Life is fast-paced, but you don’t always have to keep up with its speed. Pause, and take a look from above at the flow of events and your accomplishments. Do you feel you’ve made the right achievements with the right people in a way that strengthened your true self? If your answer is no, then you need to slow down, stop, refocus, and start again from that higher vantage point, allowing you to land exactly where you truly want to go. The first step to freeing yourself is to reduce the momentum that prevents you from moving forward. This momentum includes your beliefs, feelings, thoughts, and endless distractions. The positive results of doing so include fewer mistakes, as well as gaining time to question each situation before making the right decision, increasing your ability to see things as they truly are. This opens up new possibilities for making better decisions. When you stop, you may realize you need a break, which is very important; it gives you enough time to think and rest, restoring your strength to continue working better and knowing your next step. You may also realize that the identity you associate with is tied to your work. But if you ask yourself, "What if I lose my job?" you might feel as though you’ve lost your identity, and thus, yourself. Therefore, you need to start seeking other identities to invest in yourself. The more identities you have, the less likely you are to lose any one of them. Seek diversity in your life, and you will achieve diversity in your identities. In your journey to free your life, be courageous enough to stand exposed in your truth, expecting failure. Be yourself. Focus on what truly matters to you to know where you want to go. This is better than overwhelming activity, which often leads you quickly somewhere but without focus.

The Power of Planing for a Succesful Year

Sometimes you may want to be the best, perhaps even better than I am. I wanted to be useful, enjoyable, earn a lot of money, and become an inspiring advisor. To achieve that, I realized I needed to focus on what truly matters to me and what sets me apart. Likewise, you should focus on what specifically matters to you. But we often try to accomplish too much in a single day. While we may succeed, we often realize later that what we accomplished won’t get us where we want to go. So, we need to create a plan to identify our next step, starting with the question: How do I want the coming year to look? The answer lies in finding the intersection of four actions: utilizing your strengths, accepting your weaknesses, embracing your differences, and pursuing your passions. Note that many successful entrepreneurs left their previous jobs to start their own companies, where they could use their strengths. So, focus throughout the year on what you are strong at. Don’t avoid your weaknesses; instead, accept them as potential advantages rather than obstacles. Do you feel different from others? Then embrace your uniqueness instead of trying to be like everyone else, as this is your chance to stand out in any competitive field. To discover your passion correctly, pay more attention to what you want to do and less to what you have to do. Then, make a list of things you love to do, believe in your ability to achieve them, and continue without forgetting to enjoy the journey. Now, you’re ready to define five areas—covering both work and personal life—to focus on in the coming year. These include three professional areas and two personal areas. The professional areas are:

1) doing great work with current clients,

2) attracting future clients,

3) writing and speaking about my ideas. The personal areas are:

Being present with clients and friends, and

Enjoying and taking care of myself. Notice I said "areas," so these are not specific goals but rather zones for focusing your time and energy—aiming to spend no less than 95% of your time there. Most time management systems won’t help you achieve this, as they focus on completing all tasks simultaneously and as quickly as possible without considering the uniqueness and priority of each accomplishment. Now that you’ve planned your next year, let me show you how to plan each day.

Simple Steps Towards Achieving Your Daily Goals

To make your year productive, you should move closer to your goals each day, even with small steps. Here’s how to do that: We all have many tasks and need to pay attention to them all, so we need to break down tasks into parts and work on them sequentially. Here’s the method: organize your tasks in a list, focusing on what you want to achieve this year. Pause and identify the top-priority ones, distinguishing between what must be done and what can be let go. You can find this out by asking yourself: What doesn’t make me happy? What is unimportant to me? This way, you’ll create two lists that serve as a roadmap for you to follow each day—a list of tasks to focus on and another to ignore. The task list should be placed in a daily calendar, so you know when and where you will complete each task. Schedule each task with a specific time slot, ordered by priority. Start with the most important task, even before checking your email, and remember to keep 5% of your calendar time free to meet the needs of family and friends. Make sure no task stays on your list for more than three days. To ensure this, choose one of the following actions: either complete it immediately, reschedule it, or delete it.

Control your distractions to ensure your daily accomplishments

There’s no year without days, and no days without moments. So even if you focus on specific areas and organize your tasks in a daily calendar, you’ll still need to manage various distractions every moment, such as phone calls, emails, and more. Let me show you how to clear distractions from your day. This requires attention to three areas: finding motivation, setting boundaries understanding yourself.

For the first area, finding motivation, often when you search for motivation within and don’t find it, you think you’re the problem. However, this isn’t true; our actions are often shaped by our environment. So, you should change your surroundings to ones that help you achieve smoothly. Also, find enjoyment—where can you find it? It may surprise you, but it’s in focusing on solving problems and finding real opportunities, which isn’t necessarily tied to money. You can also use fear and reward as motivation, but remember that ultimately, the internal drive for anyone lies in their inner story, the one they tell themselves to boost their inner engine. And finally, just start. Once you begin, you’ll find you don’t need as much motivation or discipline to get things done.

For the second area, setting boundaries, it’s about knowing when to say yes and how to say no to anyone asking for something you can’t do. You’ll recognize this need when you feel uncomfortable. If someone has a recurring pattern of asking, inform them of your boundaries right away; people can only respect limits when they know they exist.

As for the third area, understanding yourself, even when there are no external distractions, we are creative at distracting ourselves. The good news is you can turn distractions into positives. For example, is your distraction the fear of losing your job? Then distract yourself by reading a book or watching a documentary on economics and business, and continuously develop yourself. If multitasking is your distraction, eliminate some tasks; you’re not actually doing multiple tasks, but switching between them, meaning you’re not working effectively or productively. Finally, don’t strive for perfection in completing a task; focus on accomplishing more—on true productivity only.

You can now see yourself clearly—what you want to do and accomplish, and what you've already achieved. You took a moment to realize this, slowed down your momentum to truly understand what you want for yourself. Now, all that's left is to start programming your mind for what you want to achieve.