Best Year Yet

What trap? The trap I fall into almost every day is one that I suspect many of us find ourselves in.  My trap is that my day rushes by faster than I can keep up with it.  That I feel like I’m always running just to catch up.  That just when I get focused on a key priority, some interruption arises – and before I can finish dealing with that situation – another one comes up as well — such as being asked to write this article at 10am today!

Interruptions within interruptions drive me crazy.  At the end of the day, my desk is a mess.  I usually have to go looking for my to-do list — you know, the one I hurriedly made this morning to supplement my regular TO DO list for the week now buried under my papers.

Stuff arrives so fast on my desktop now days!  Emails.  New Requests.  Sales inquiries.  Reports.  Un-expected stuff.  And my first instinct is to feel trapped.  Sound familiar?

My life lesson. What I’ve learned in the 40 years since college is that having a great year is not about doing more or even doing less.  It’s not about making huge amounts of money in any one year, although that goal has brought a smile to my face several times.  And it’s not about doing 100 things right because I’ve tried that solution and failed miserably.

Instead it’s about doing no more than 10 of the RIGHT things – all year long.  Among the jumble of stuff, if the 10 right things get done, the year feels GREAT.  Just like in golf, a few shots make all the difference between a great round and one that’s just OK.  Now, the issue is of course WHAT are the 10 Right Things?  And more to the point, how do I keep any focus at all on these 10 Things when I’m lost in the daily trap of too much to do.

Make Haste Slowly. I ran the 440-yard dash in high school, but by the time I turned 30, I preferred the long distance run.  More time to look around.  Less pain.  A 5-mile run got those endorphins coursing through my veins.  And a few good runs every week was sufficient to develop my stamina.  So I learned to apply that lesson to my work.

Break Out of the Trap! Identifying the Top Ten things to do each year became easy by using the Best Year Yet System.  And making some progress each month usually involved doing only a few things each week that I otherwise wouldn’t have done.  In brief, I learned that IF I made time for just a few baby steps on my Top Ten things every week, the rest of my year took care of itself.

Do I still feel overwhelmed?  YES, I do.  Is my life completely organized?  Heck NO.  But I’ve learned to put that chaos into perspective IF I’ve made a few baby steps on my Top Ten most important things to do.  I’ve learned that those baby steps often can be done in just 25 MINUTES per week – or 5 MINUTES a day.  When you learn to use the Best Year Yet Online System, those 5 minutes a day are a magical way of Breaking Out of the Trap!

In 1955, when I was 8 years old, the Elementary School in Takoma Park, Maryland announced a newspaper collection drive open to all students. The Prize for bringing in 370 pounds of newspapers was an American Flag that had flown over the US Capitol Building. To me, earning an American Flag with such a history was a truly worthwhile objective and I was hooked!

When my weekly haul of newspapers was weighed, the record was kept on a Paper Flag that hung in the hallway next to the entrance to Mrs. Geer’s 3rd grade homeroom class. For every 10 pounds, I earned one Red or White Stripe on the American Flag until I reached 13 stripes for the original 13 States. For every 5 pounds thereafter, I earned one Star on the field of Blue. With just 48 States in the Union in 1955, I needed to collect 130 pounds for 13 stripes and 240 pounds for 48 stars for a grand total of 370 pounds.

Every Saturday I pulled my little red wagon around the neighborhood to collect newspapers. Each week I added a few more neighbors to my route, asking them to save their papers for me to collect. When my wagon was full, I’d pull it home and carefully stack the newspapers in the garage so they wouldn’t fall over which would upset my Dad.

Each week my Dad and I would load the newspapers into the trunk of his big black Buick and off we’d go to the school to unload my haul of papers and get them weighed. I made steady progress and my Hallway Flag was a brilliant example of a scorecard for Play the Game. Just one other boy in my class was collecting newspapers so our flags were quite prominent outside our homeroom door and we were both very proud of our achievement.

As the year rolled along, I became impatient to earn my flag. Therefore, to increase my haul, I had to go further from home each week to find new customers and enroll them in my challenge. Guess what – they loved the idea of my collecting and they avidly collected their papers for me. It was hard work but I had to meet my goal.

But because there was a Play the Game chart that was so publicly obvious for tracking my weekly result, I could always calculate how much more I needed to meet my target. Thus, in retrospect, I was using the two rules of Play the Game: I knew EXACTLY what I wanted and every week I knew EXACTLY how much I had collected and therefore EXACTLY how much more I needed. Knowing just those two parameters made the game easy to play.

To this day, I still have my Paper Flag and I still proudly hang my American Flag with just 48 stars on every American holiday. I even flew it on my sailing trip across the Atlantic in 1978, but that’s a “Play the Game” story I’ll write about another time.

Now, more than 50 years later, I realize that I learned an important lesson about making AND KEEPING a public declaration – and that the simple “Play the Game” chart allowed me to track my performance to WIN what I so dearly wanted. And thanks to my wife’s dedicated way of planning, we still make scorecards that allow us to PLAY THE GAME! The rules are simple and IT WORKS, so why not pass on this fun game to your kids?

About Tim: Tim Ditzler is a devotee of effective meetings and having people’s dreams come true.

Having sat through umpteen thousands of meetings – at his own business and while serving on boards of non-profits, trade association boards, even club meetings – he became a devotee of effective meetings. He realized that the goal is to get in & get out quickly and be clear about who agreed to do what by when – with no wasted time or effort. The simple ingredients are: Clear annual and monthly goals, an easy way to keep track of results and the ability to generate a year-end summary of what has been achieved.

So Tim designed Producing Results Online® (PRO), a web tool for tracking team and personal results – annually and monthly, even quarterly and weekly for really motivated users. Now available in 4 languages, it is a cutting edge web tool that supports the Best Year Yet System for Producing Results designed by his wife, Jinny Ditzler.

His love of designing creative uses of the computer began at age 13 when he designed a computer game that calculated bombing targets for guided missiles given a range of choices for initial launch velocities and angles of elevation. That led to several jobs in computer service bureaus, eventually starting his own computer service business in 1979 to provide merge/purge, high volume laser printing and targeted database marketing.

Tim has sailed across the Atlantic in a 22 foot Westerly with a college friend, taking 50 days from Boston to Gibraltar. Since then, he and his wife Jinny have run five marathons side by side, led Lew Epstein Men’s and Women’s Clubs, and taken care of their family. To find out more about Best Year Yet and PRO, visit www.bestyearyet.com

REMINDER! There’s still time to register!
for a FREE July 27 Webinar, “Playing the Game” by Karen Morey

Achieving desired results is a product of having the right mindset, taking actions consistent with that mindset, and having a process of follow-up or accountability. To do that, you must know exactly what it is you want and exactly how you are doing, at all times!

Click here to register

Most of us are waiting.  We don’t realize we’re waiting because we’re so busy.  But if we really look, we’re waiting.

We’re waiting for the right moment to get started on what we really want to do.  Or for the right job.  Or for the right person to join us.  We think to ourselves “Once I get this done, then I’ll really get started doing what I want.”

But before we finish doing what we’re doing, we’re interrupted by another priority that pulls us away and off we go doing that thing, desperately trying to catch up so we can get back to where we were so we can really get started.

This goes on all the time – non-stop — and we become hoodwinked by our busyness.  We become the victim of our own circumstances, with no way out.  We’re stuck.

When we’re stuck, we’re admonished to “Just Do It,” as if more “doing” were the solution.  But more “doing” is not the solution, it’s the problem. Once we recognize we simply can’t get it all done, that we’re tired of being overwhelmed by all there is to do and we’re not getting done what really matters to us, it’s time for a new game plan.

It’s time for the Moment of Change.  It’s time to stop the merry-go-round.  It’s time to stop waiting for the right moment to change our focus.

But in this busy life, how do we ever find the time for this Moment of Change?

That’s actually the easy part: the time for the Moment of Change is Right Now! The Moment of Change occurs when we’re ready to change from being the victim of our circumstances to being the master of our destiny.

That’s actually the most important step.  Congratulations are in order when we make that choice!

Now comes the hard part: what does it look like to become the master of our destiny? That’s surely going to take more time to figure out than we’ve got.  So how do we do that?

The answer is simple: we decide what’s important, we focus on doing what’s important, and we let the other stuff fall away.  Once we know we’re doing the important stuff, then we can let go of having to do the other stuff.  It doesn’t all need to get done, only the important stuff really NEEDS to get done.

OK, so far, so good.  But, how do we decide what’s important?  Using the Best Year Yet System, it’s as easy as answering 10 questions.  Because the answers to these 10 questions identifies what’s important to us – right now – such that if we delivered our plan, life would be fulfilling!

If we really KNEW there was a simple, proven system to help us decide what’s important, and then focus on making it happen, what are we waiting for?

Would you be willing to stop waiting?  Because the Moment of Change begins Right Now!