- Plan ahead
You can’t always blame outside circumstances for your troubles. For example, you can’t blame the rain for your flu or subway for your lateness. You should plan to dress appropriately and just leave 15 minutes earlier. Look at what you can control and take action.
- Look at the long term
Take charge of your self-care. When a plane undergoes maintenance, it is not flying and not generating income for the airline. Skipping maintenance once will likely not have any effect, but skipping it on a regular basis will dramatically boost the airline’s profitability in the short-term but increase the risk of a catastrophe in the long-term. Same goes for the human body: Don’t wait until it is too late to maintain it through regular meals, sleep, and exercise.
- Assign priorities
Prioritize and re-prioritize regularly where your attention and energy is going. No matter how much you want it, you can’t do everything at the same time. If you don’t decide by yourself how much time you will allocate to each activity, events will decide for you and you will be spending your time attending to crises, unable to complete all your tasks well and on time while also alienating people waiting for you.
- Relinquish control
Learn to let go and delegate. Your time is very precious. It is your most valuable asset of a limited supply. By insisting on doing everything yourself, you ensure you control all the small details…but in the process lose control of the big picture. To gain control of your life, you have to allow yourself to ‘let go’ and lose control of its smaller components.
