With everything flying towards us each day, we can be forgiven for dropping tasks we know are important, but are not screaming at us to be completed. Tasks such as checking in with a customer or spending some time with our partner to see if they are okay.

The problem here is not the occasional dropping of these types of tasks; we stop doing them altogether. We never seem to have time to do them. There's always an excuse.

As Jim Rohn pointed out:

"Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practised every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure."

How difficult is it to dedicate thirty minutes each day to speaking with your partner about their life or how they feel? How would your work improve if you dedicated thirty minutes daily to talking to your customers to ensure they are happy with your product or service?

One way to ensure you are doing these critical tasks is to make them a non-negotiable part of your day. To give you an example of something simple yet powerful in my day:

I commit one hour each day to dealing with my communications. It's a non-negotiable part of my day. Email is a constant stream of messages; if I don't dedicate an hour to responding to my messages each day, the next day will require two hours. If I skip it for three days, it will take three hours to get under control.

I don't have a three-hour block of time to get my email under control, but I know if I spend an hour each day responding to my emails, I will always be on top of it, and it will never get out of control.

Hopefully, you will have taken my Areas Of Focus mini-course, or at the very least downloaded my Free Areas of Focus Workbook, and identified what is important to you and what steps you need to take regularly to keep them balanced. These simple daily or weekly disciplines will ensure you manage your important areas of life so they don't blow up in your face and develop into a crisis.

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