We all get those days when we feel like we are the rock stars of our life because we manage to get everything done with so much energy, passion, and enthusiasm. There are also days where it feels like it’s the longest day in our life because we are all over the place and nothing is really getting done. Once you define what your relationship with time is, you have complete control over any situation and there will be no resistance to the results you are aiming for. At the end of the day, we all have the same eight hours of work. The only difference is how did you show up for that time?

We all have the same amount of time on our hands. The difference is just a matter of pacing ourselves accordingly to the events that happen during our day. There are days when we feel that we are just spinning the wheel, knowing in the back of our mind that we are not getting anywhere. Bestselling author of Three Feet From Gold, Greg Reid, believes that the power to persevere is the key to keeping the passion to whatever task we have at hand. He explains that there is a difference between adapting, adjusting, and persevering.

The biggest factor of success in that all aspects of life involve the practice of discipline. We need to look at discipline like a muscle that needs exercise in order for it to grow stronger. The stronger discipline gets, the better we respond to the situations in our life, and where some we have no control, we respond to it on reflex. The practice of discipline becomes a practice of excellence. Once we put our mind to a goal and we have mastered the discipline, there is nothing stopping us.

A lot of us think that we get a lot of work done when we multitask. Often times, that is true, but there are also instances when we are just all over the place and get things done halfway. Brian Sidorsky has a billionaire mindset to finish one project at a time. There is no need to split your focus, if you don’t get the work done in the end. The trick is to prioritize, start and complete each task so you can be productive and save time for the next task that needs to be done.

Whatever we do becomes harder when we are resistant. Every effort and energy we put out seems to be magnified when we complain and criticize. Have you ever wondered what the physical cost of resistance is? Resistance hinders us from being present in the moment because we keep choosing that place where we complain, judge, and criticize. Learn how you can take away some nuggets of wisdom in life and in business in a state of resistance.

At one point or another, our work environment has forced us to multitask. We have to take on different functions and wear different hats. Multitasking is actually counterproductive, and this is what Heidi Hanna has been teaching for the last ten years. She says that we only have a limited amount of brain power at any given time. Splitting that up between different tasks decreases how much we have. Different sources competing for your time and energy unnecessarily stress the brain, because it’s not designed to handle multiple things. The problem with doing multiple things at the same time is we don’t do each of them well, so the performance and productivity levels go down. Heidi explains we have to learn how to differentiate multiple priorities from multitasking. The key is building a support of rituals that are going to help us to do just one thing at a time in the moment when we’re feeling the pressure. The change process starts to happen when you train your brain like a muscle and strengthen your ability to single task. We are more successful if we do one thing at a time.

When you are running all over the office, you’d think things are getting done. But the reality of checking things off the list is that it isn’t just inefficient and ineffective, but also unproductive. However, this framework is still debatable because one person’s definition of productivity will differ from the other. We can be in a place where we are both efficient and effective and this is called the Productivity Zone. In this zone, you can also define productivity as a team so that everyone is on the same page, making work lighter, faster and fun.

Ron Klein is known as the grandfather of possibilities. His innovations and creations, things that we don’t really think much about, have become part of our everyday life, like the magnetic strip on the credit card, MLS for real estate, and voice response for the banking industry, among others. He shares that keeping it simple is the key to being an innovator. His innovations stem from the solving a problem and how you go about doing it. What he does when he wants to convey an idea or a concept of how to simplify or come up with a solution to a problem is how he communicates. Get back to the basics, break down the problem and solve it. Everything else is the minutia in the journey.

Time never seems to be enough. But how can we be more efficient and effective with the time we’re given? It really isn’t a question of time management. We’re either over-functioning by being caught up in perfectionism or under-functioning by being caught up in procrastination. Whether we’re procrastinating or we’re in perfectionism, we are in stress. It creates stress for us or it creates stress for other people because we’re not getting into a productive state, and that affects everyone else around us in some shape or form. The book, The Productivity Zone: Stop the Tug of War with Time, talks about the ten core drivers that help us get into and stay in the productivity zone.

As we get older, creating new habits seems to become more difficult. They are especially hard to stick to when they involve any kind of physical exertion. On average, it takes up to 60 days to develop a new habit. You can actually learn to create new habits and stick to it using a technique called habit stacking. Habit stacking simply means stacking a new habit you want to develop onto another habit that you’re already doing. An example would be placing a glass of water right beside your toothbrush if you want to develop the habit of drinking water first thing when you get up. You’re stacking it on the habit of brushing your teeth because it’s right there, and so every day when you brush your teeth, you’re going to see it there and it triggers you to take that glass of water daily.