Easy To Form Daily Micro-Habits That Lead To Massive Macro Success! with D'vorah Lansky

Welcome to this edition of the Real Fast Results!  The special
guest today is D'vorah Lansky, M.Ed.  She has been mentoring
authors for about 10 years, and a lot of what she teaches has to do
with setting goals, having the right mindset, and being really
clear about your focus. So, without any further ado... Today's
Promise What we're going to be focusing on today is how those
micro-habits, that we have the option of creating, when applied,
can bring us macro success.       D'vorah's
Excellent Book For Author Productivity [caption
id="attachment_2636" align="aligncenter" width="357"] Click Here -
The Busy Author's Productivity Journal by D'vorah Lansky
Ed.D.[/caption]   Forming Micro-Habits On any journey, you
need a road-map.  Otherwise, you might get somewhere, but not
necessarily where you want to be.  By creating habits
that allow you to reach your goals, you're going to be creating
the road-map to your dreams.  Without
a road-map, we often find ourselves being really busy, and doing
all of this busy work, thinking that we're accomplishing all of
these things, but we're not really accomplishing much. It's like
being on a hamster wheel, and that's exhausting and overwhelming,
so we don't want that.  I'm hoping the tips that I am sharing
today will help people with that.  Then, by having an
action plan, you'll actually accomplish a lot more, rather than
winging it and hoping you'll accomplish things. The
benefit of doing this gets larger and larger as time goes by. 
You get used to the habits, and of course, success attracts
success.  It also allows you to focus on, "Where do I want to
be spending my time," or "Is this a good use of my time?"  You
also have to factor in time for relaxation and time for
family.  I'm not talking about working 24/7.  I'm just
saying, focusing with intention. Overview of the Three Micro-Habits
I'm going to be going in depth in a few moments, but the three
micro-habits that would really help to turbo-charge a person's
career would be: Get really clear on your goals and develop an
action plan. Schedule and prioritize your time. Become a master of
your to-do list. Step 1 - Get Really Clear on Your Goals Step 1 is
to get really clear on your goals.  One of my favorite
sayings is, "A goal is a dream with a deadline."  So,
we're not just having it out there in the ether; we're actually
putting a plan for it.  As you get clearer on your goals and
your action plan, one of the things that I recommend you do is get
a blank piece of paper and create a master list of all the projects
you're working on or want to develop. Step 2 - Schedule and
Prioritize Your Time Gather up all of those sticky notes
that are all over the place, that may be in binders, on walls, or
on your computer, wherever they might be, put them on your desk and
transfer them onto a master project list.  You may
want to divide your page into six boxes and put things by topic.
Once you have that master project list, that is going to be, if
we're using the analogy of a road-map and taking a journey, so
that's the gasoline in your engine.  And then, what you want
to do, is you want to look at all of those ideas, and that might be
a highlighter or a couple of different colored highlighters, and
somehow narrow things down so you can identify the #1 thing that
you want to accomplish over the next 30-90 days.
 While you may have 50 or 100 things on that list, I
would imagine that the bulk of them would go under 4 or 5
headings. So, which of those 4 or 5 headings do you want,
if you had to pick one, do you want to work on over the next 30-90
days?  This is going to allow you to get a laser
focus, and it's going to allow you to get a lot
done.  It's also going to allow you to take a lot off
of your plate so you can reduce that feeling of overwhelm. 
When you can create that laser focus, and put everything else on
the back-burner, what I find is that I actually have more time to
do the fun things. Step 3 - Become a Master of Your To-Do List To
be able to go and do those enjoyable activities, take the dog for a
walk, travel with your family, you need to be able to get things
off your plate.  One of the tips that I recommend is that,
once you've created this master list, and you take that one project
that you want to focus on, put that on a fresh piece of paper and
then break out all of the pieces of the puzzle that go with that
project. Anything on that master list that does not fit
with what you're focusing on currently, or in the near future,
cross it off your list.  Move it to a "someday,
maybe" page, and put it on the back page of your master
clipboard.  That's going to get it off your mind.  You
won't lose it, but I find that this activity is so freeing. 
It's just like you've finished 25 projects.  But, you don't
have to lose them; they just don't have to clutter up your current
mind space. Your Success Is Hidden in Your Daily Activities One of
my favorite things, along this line, is "Your success is hidden in
your daily activities."  You can see how serious you
are about your success. Just takes a pad of paper and carry it
around with you for two days, and make a list of everything that
you do and how long you're spending. It will be
eye-opening.  It's kind of like, have you ever done a diet
journal, where they have you write down everything you eat? 
It's very eye-opening.  So, do that with your time. Then, what
you want to do is actually schedule time in your calendar, because
we think we're working a lot, but it could be, if the phone rings,
Facebook pings, if someone comes over, if we have a whim, our work
may take a backseat.  It's not only important to know
what you'll be focusing on, but when you'll be focusing on
it.  What I recommend is, open up your calendar, and
don't schedule times that you think you should, schedule times that
you think will really work.  Obviously, you don't want to
schedule when you have to drive the kids to soccer, or when you
have noise in the background, or whatever's going on in your
life.  Schedule times that are realistic.
Maybe there's a time when your family is all out doing something,
or you have a downstairs room where you have privacy and you can
have a sign up that lets people know that you're at work. 
Involve your family and let them know when those hours are,
and schedule those as recurring appointments in your
calendar.  Not only that, but don't put those in your
calendar, and then when anything comes up, just ignore it. 
Prioritize those times as if they were your best paying client. Try
this for 30 days.  It will blow your mind, and it will
increase your income.  You also want to minimize distractions
during those work times.  So turn off your cell phone. 
If you need it on, put it on vibrate, and disable Facebook pings or
close Facebook altogether.  This one, you can take to the
bank. When you're scheduling, there's a couple of things that you
can do.  One thing is to batch projects, and so, if a headline
has to do with a project, then that goes into that specific focus
for that project.  I recommend having specific days or
specific weeks that you focus on specific aspects, specific jigsaw
puzzle pieces of your master project.  Imagine a
piece of paper divided into nine boxes, where each box is a
different component of the project.  Well, in my schedule, my
calendar, Friday is "blow with the wind time".  I don't
schedule... on a rare occasion I will, but for the most part, I
don't schedule any work appointments.  I go out, I'll do
errands, I'll go to the bookstore. On occasion, I may even go to
the movies, but I also have "blow with the wind time" in my
business, and it's usually not at "peak brain power time". 
It's usually like when I'm watching the ballgame, in the evening,
or on a weekend.  That's when I have that master list of "Ooh,
got to make a headline," or "Ooh, got to write that person." 
It goes onto a piece of paper, and I have it actually scheduled as
a block of time on my calendar, to do all of those administrative
pieces of the puzzle.  It's actually really fun because you
get to check off so many things since those are pretty quick
projects. A Few More Tips I used to have 20 or 30
things on my to-do list, and I always felt like such a failure
because I only finished 15 of them.  Then, I
discovered something called "The 6 Most Important List".  This
is actually one of the tips that I wanted to share
today.  You want to streamline your to do list. 
So, you have this big, long to-do list.  You might have 100
items on it; you may have taken and created a master project, and
in that master project, maybe you have 20 or 30 items.  You
can't do them all in one day. Well, I heard this story.  Just
to be brief, the point is, in the early 1900's a productivity
expert went to a major corporation and helped them improve their
bottom line by meeting with each of their executives and telling
them each night before they left work, they were to create a list
of the six, not the 25, but the six most important things on their
to-do list so that they knew what they were going to be focusing on
the next day.  He told them to do this without fail, and not
to do anything else until they finished those six things. 
So, that's become a daily habit for me and something that I
teach the authors that I work with. It's that sense of
satisfaction of shedding things off.  When you work
from a master list, you may not feel like you're making progress
because it seems like an unending list, but when you prioritize
your to-do list, and you pick the six most important things, you're
going to accomplish a great deal.  Even if you work
three days a week, three times six, that can add up.  In 10
weeks, that's 180 things that you just finished, versus spinning
your wheels. What I used to do, I used to feel like I was spinning
in circles.   I would feel like, "Oh, I've got to answer
this email," or "Oh, I've got to work on this headline," and then I
had all of these partially-created projects, like all of these
baking projects in the kitchen, and none of them were getting into
the oven. By deciding you're the boss of your business, you decide,
"What are the six most important things?"  And, I really
encourage you to focus on this.  The bonus tip is to
set your "6 most important things" to-do list before you wrap up
your business day so that when you arrive to work, whether you're
working from home, or working from the road, or working from an
office in town, you'll know what you're going to be focusing on
when you get to work that day.  That's going to allow
you to hit the ground running, and you won't have to think about
what you'll be working on. If a person doesn't have a list, they
don't have a plan, they don't have that road-map for the day in
place, what can easily happen is "Oh, I've got to email this
person.  Well, let me just go ahead and email that
person."  Then you end up checking email, and then you're
like, "Oh, I've got to go over to Facebook," and two hours go by
and you haven't even written your list yet.  This way,
you get to work, and boom, you have your blueprint for the
day. 3 Action Steps What I've done is I prepared
three action steps to support the three tips that we
shared.  It might have sounded like there were a lot
more than three tips, but I'm going to recap it right here so that
you can have a takeaway. The first one is to create a
master project list and break it down.  Identify your
main project, identify future projects, so you can create a
separate page where you can have future projects, and then
everything else, that's not an urgent, present-tense, something
that needs to get done in the foreseeable future, put it on a blank
piece of paper, add it to a "someday, maybe" page, and put it on
your clipboard as the back page.  Every time you think of a
project, moving forward, decide which of these pages it should go
on.  Again, that's your main project page, your future project
page, or your "someday, maybe" page. The second one is to
open up your calendar and schedule recurring appointments when
you'll focus on your business.  I would recommend
that you do that for 90 days.  You may want to try it for 30
days to see how it works.  Well, you know what?  Schedule
it for 90 days.  You can always change your mind, but there
you have it blocked out.  I believe that after 30 days, you're
going to see such momentum, that this could be a long-term business
strategy for you. Thirdly, for the next 21 days, start your
day with the "six most important things" to-do list that you
composed the previous night.   That's the recap of
what we spoke about. Connecting With D'vorah The best way would be
to come to my website at www.ReachMoreReaders.com. Real Fast
Results Community If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love
what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me
a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe
to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be
an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results.
Please share those results with us at
http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results
happen!