Mark Forster

Success at a project is very rarely a matter of ‘willpower’. It’s usually a matter of having set up a good structure to support the carrying out of the project. Your project needs the mental and physical equivalents of the government’s controlling structures

Tackling one thing at a time, getting it right and then moving on to the next thing, has always been the way that successful people have advanced.

Exercise
Take a sheet of paper and make a list of all the things you intend to get around to some day. Include your work and your private life. Don’t include anything that you have to get done by a certain date. Ideally they should be the sort of things that won’t get done at all unless you make a conscious resolve to do them.
Select one out of the list – the one you are going to get done first. To start off, you may want to make it something fairly small.
Once you have decided on the one, you need to make two resolutions. The first is that you are going to concentrate on this one

Exercise
Take a sheet of paper and make a list of all the things you intend to get around to some day. Include your work and your private life. Don’t include anything that you have to get done by a certain date. Ideally they should be the sort of things that won’t get done at all unless you make a conscious resolve to do them.
Select one out of the list – the one you are going to get done first. To start off, you may want to make it something fairly small.
Once you have decided on the one, you need to make two resolutions. The first is that you are going to concentrate on this one project until it is complete. The second is that you will not touch any of the others until you have finished the first one.
You can run this exercise repeatedly. You may find that a lot of things succeed in getting do

Every time we do something that wasn’t in our plan for the day, we have allowed a random factor

Every time we do something that wasn’t in our plan for the day, we have allowed a random factor to come in and disrupt our work.

Random factors are the real killers for a day’s work. A lot of random input into our day means that our day starts to run us rather than us running it. T

The real problem with randomness is that things tend to get done or not done almost exclusively according to how much they attract our attention – in other words, how much noise they are making. Of all the ways open to us for prioritising our work, prioritising by noise is probably the least sensible

Now I am not saying that there is anything wrong with having interests. A person without any interests would be very dull. But it is immensely important to distinguish between having an interest in something and having a commitment to something. It is commitment that will make the real difference in your life and work.
K

Often when making day-to-day decisions we come up against the rational and reactive brains pulling in opposite directions. This usually presents itself as a conflict between immediate gratification and long-term gain. For example:
I want to be slim but I also want to eat a slice of chocolate cake.
I want to be out of debt but I also want to buy that new DVD recorder.
I want to write my book but I also want to watch the television.
The question to ask yourself here is: ‘How will I feel once I’ve done it?’