Brian Tracy Success Tips

What follows comes from Brian Tracy’s “21 Great Ways To Double Your Productivity - Number 5” Podcast.

Everything you do throughout the day fits into one of four categories:

1. Urgent and Important Tasks

You have to complete these tasks immediately. These are in your face. These are things like phone calls and meetings. You can’t put them off without causing serious problems.

Most people spend all day long doing these types of tasks.

2. Important but NOT Urgent Tasks

These task are the most important to get to after the Urgent and Important tasks. Brian Tracy says that these tasks will have the greatest possible long-term consequences in your life.

The tasks in this category include personal renewal, physical fitness and exercise, updating your skills, and spending time with your family.

These can be put off until later, but resist the temptation. According to Brian Tracy, these tasks can have the most long term impact on your life.

Believe me, if you don’t do them now, they’ll become urgent sooner or later. These are things like a term paper at work; or a report for your boss;

3. Urgent but NOT Important Tasks

The tasks in this category include telephone calls, coworkers dropping in, and conversations about TV programs and what you did last night.

Brian Tracy states that performing tasks in this group will have no effect on your success. Sadly, some folks delude themselves into thinking they’re actually working when they’re working on these tasks.

The opposite is in reality the truth. These tasks are great time-wasters. In fact, they’re often great killers of careers. Don’t work on tasks in this arena.

The greatest time wasters of all are those that are:

4. Neither Urgent Nor Important

Stay away from these tasks. They are completely useless; they have no consequences at all. Don’t do things like reading the newspaper or calling home to find out what’s for dinner. You will be contributing nothing to the company goals or to your personal aspirations.

To summarize…

Make sure that you’re first working on the “Most Urgent and Important”. Then move into the Important but Not Urgent” Tasks. You increase your productivity by refusing to do things that are not important at all.

You should always be asking yourself: What are the potential long-term potential consequences of doing this task?

Let the answer to this question guide you in your choice of priorities.