Deb Weidenhamer, founder of American Auction Company, says that goal-setting, planning, and managing your time wisely are critical for success. Perhaps a message which might not surprise any of us. It sounds sensible and more than reasonable, doesn’t it.

 

However, she also suggests that there’s another important ingredient that shouldn’t be overlooked – do what you dread first!

 

Ah, but how to do this? Easy . . .

Whether it’s a task or a conversation, if it’s the thing that you least want to do, then tackle it first, at the beginning of the day.

 

I guess many of us will know that it takes an enormous amount of discipline to do just that. Starting the day by addressing, and then by completing, the unexciting requires a real determination, tenacity and focus.

 

But Ms Weidenhamer also proposes that by doing this, and especially when we’ve completed what we set out to do, we’ll have achieved something pretty remarkable: we’ll have avoided expending our energy on stressing about what we’ve been trying to avoid. And the end result? That we’ll have opened ourselves up to inspiration, and imagination, and even more time to accomplish greatness.

 

And I’ll go a stage further to suggest that the hardest part is actually working out why we’re prevaricating, putting it off, avoiding the job we really need to do.

 

Once that’s a little clearer, I think that doing the job genuinely becomes less of a chore.