Achieve Anything In Just One Year: Be Inspired Daily to Live Your Dreams and Accomplish Your Goals

DAY

228

“Don’t agonize, organize.”

 — Jim Hightower

If you want to achieve, you must do. Don’t spend too much time in the dreaming stages. Taking action is a high priority. In the quote above, Jim Hightower says it perfectly. Don’t agonize, organize. Don’t worry if you’re doing everything perfectly. You’ll never know how things are going to work out until you get organized and do something.

Agonizing over your plans leaves you with nothing. If you spend all of your time fretting over your decisions, what product do you have to show for your worries at the end of the day? Maybe the beginning of an ulcer, but that’s about it. Drop the worrying. It is useless.

Instead, spend your time on something you can hold on to. Organize your thoughts. Plan out how you are going to achieve your goals. You will be surprised at how exhilarating it is to see the process laid out. It will prove to you that you can achieve success. You can attain your dreams. You just need to organize a set of steps to get there.

Organize and get into action. If something doesn’t work, then re-organize and take action again. Concrete steps will give you concrete achievement. Ideas without organization are like dreams. They eventually fade, and you have nothing to prove they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to take this next and very important step in achieving success. You are done dreaming. It’s time to organize and attack.

 

DAY

229

“We give our lives to that which we give our time. I have learned that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to unclutter one’s life by starting at the top of the pile with the idea that the solution is to just get things sorted and better organized. It is nice to get better organized, but that is not enough. Much has to be discarded. We must actually get rid of it. To do this we need to develop a list of basics . . . . [This list] must be the product of inspiration and prayerful judgment between the things we really need and things we just want. It should separate need from greed. It must be our best understanding of those things that are important as opposed to those things that are just interesting.”

 — William R. Bradford

Is your life cluttered? It is much harder to reach success if you allow yourself too many distractions. In order to remove the clutter from your life, you need to do more than organize. You must streamline your life.

Your assignment today is to sit down with a large piece of paper and map out what you did last week. Go through your calendar if that helps you remember, but divide the page into seven days and try, as accurately as possible, to account for all of your time.

How much time did you spend watching TV? How many hours (or minutes) did you dedicate to family? What percentage of your time was spent at work? Did you spend a lot of time surfing the Internet? You can record the events in your seven-day calendar any way you want, but find a clear way to identify the amount of time you spend on various activities throughout the day.

After you have completed this task, take a look at the entire week. Where do you see wasted time? Are there tasks you can cut from your routine to give you more time for creative growth? Part of organization is trimming off the excess. What can you do without?

 

DAY

230

“The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they’re organized for.”

 — Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder offers one final piece of advice for this section on organization: Make sure you do not lose sight of the big picture.

It’s a great idea to get organized. It will prepare the path for success and also help you get there faster than you would if your life was cluttered. However, sometimes you get so wrapped up in the organization that you forget why you’re organizing in the first place.