Write down your goals, make plans to achieve them, and work on your plans every single day.

You must resolve, from this moment forward, to become a goal-seeking organism, like a guided missile or a homing pigeon, moving unerringly toward the goals that are important to you.

This discipline of systematic time planning can be very helpful to you. Many people have told me that the habit of taking a couple of hours at the end of each week to plan the coming week has increased their productivity dramatically and changed their lives completely. This technique will work for you as well.

Do what you can, with what you have, right where you are.

Make work appointments with yourself and then discipline yourself to keep them. Set aside thirty-, sixty-, and ninety-minute time segments that you use to work on and complete important tasks. Many highly productive people schedule specific activities in preplanned time slots all day long. These people build their work lives around accomplishing key tasks one at a time.

It takes only about 10 to 12 minutes for you to plan out your day, but this small investment of time will save you up to two hours (100 to 120 minutes) in wasted time and diffused effort throughout the day.

Your ability to select your most important task at each moment, and then to get started on that task and to get it done both quickly and well, will probably have more of an impact on your success than any other quality or skill you can develop.

First, make a decision to develop the habit of task completion. Second, discipline yourself to practice the principles you are about to learn over and over until they become automatic. And third, back everything you do with determination until the habit is locked in and becomes a permanent part of your personality.

Whenever you face crunch time in your life or business, mentally call a time-out in the game and focus on getting all the information you can about the situation before you make a decision or overreact.

Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough time.

What sort of a transportation system d'you call this? The more popular it is the slower it goes!... 'You have to devise a system that goes faster the more popular it is, so it can cope! It's perfectly obvious!

What keeps me going is goals.