Do you know what you’re doing today? What about tomorrow or next week? If you have an idea of what needs to be done, do you know what your priorities are? Are they getting done?

As a business owner, a calendar should literally rule your life. Your calendar is essentially an agenda or schedule that tells you when and where you need to be, so you aren’t waking up in the morning, walking into your office and saying, “Oh man…so I’m here. What should I do today?” Wrong mentality. That is an employee mentality. You don’t want that.

You need to have the mentality of a leader. The mentality of someone who is driving a business and making things move forward.

If you aren’t paying attention, you can spend an awful lot of time just looking for something to do. Essentially, you will just wander around aimlessly, procrastinating and you will never truly know what needs to get done.

Instead of aimlessly wandering, start managing your “three most important things” to do. List the top three out and always set aside time on your calendar to work on them.

If you really want to maximize your productivity, you need to learn to schedule things ahead of time.

So, what are your three most important things to you when planning your day?

1. Checking your email.
2. Going to the gym.
3. Calls with clients.

Whatever those three most important things are…prioritize them and get them done.

I think we can all agree that email is a major daily priority. But are you always in your email? You want to make sure that you are only checking email at intervals, so that you aren’t stuck in your inbox. Keep things moving forward for the priorities on your list.

Always keep in mind to make sure that you’ve got time for your work/life balance – family, working out, social events, client calls, etc.

When you have random free time blocks (which you always should have), your calendar becomes your compass for knowing what direction you should be going, what you should be doing, and what to expect for that day. If you have random free blocks and you don’t schedule anything for those blocks you will end up surfing Facebook or shopping on Amazon – really just wasting time.

It comes down to 3 Parts.

Part 1
Setting a goal for yourself and your business.

Part 2
Putting it into your calendar and getting it set up.

Part 3
Learning to adhere to it.

Always remember, you can have time set aside to work on a project in your calendar but if you don’t actually do it, you are just as far behind as if you had never done it…or even further behind.

If you are having problems following the steps you need to take, here are two ways to help be accountable.

1. Set up an accountability partner. Ask someone to hold you accountable to your goal. This could be a friend, , co-worker, mastermind leader, business group partner or a paid coach.
2. Set consequences for what will happen if you do not get your priorities done. Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge? People were donating money or getting ice dumped on their head – OR BOTH! But somebody was calling them out and made it happen and it became an epidemic – even famous people were doing it. If you got called out, you were being accountable for continuing the challenge.

If you’re not moving forward or making enough progress in your business – you need to look at where you’re spending your time.

Planning your calendar is one thing but at the end of the day, take five or ten minutes to go back and look at what actually happened. When you understand what you accomplished that was planned versus what wasn’t planned – and what the differences are, then you can manage better.

Let’s recap your todo list:

• Look at your calendar.
• Look at what you’re doing the rest of today.
• Look at the rest of the week.
• Look at your priority list and goals. How can you start to integrate those?
• Plan out tomorrow.
• Plan out the rest of the week.

Lastly, it’s important to pick one day in the week where you block out some time on your calendar to plan your upcoming week. This will ensure that you are always planning and always looking at your calendar.

Ultimately, you’re always moving forward.