I’m a voracious reader. There have been some years when I read nearly 400 books… and worked full time and slept fewer than 4 hours a night. I love reading.

That was then… And now my body wants more sleep, and my reading has dropped off. So I use my reading time even more focused. 20 percent for pleasure and 80 percent for the joy of new ideas that I can take to my clients.

I don’t usually take the entire book or article for them to read. I extract the core idea, perhaps even a quote, and take it into a discussion to illustrate a new way of thinking about their challenge.

I have favorites that I give to management teams whose companies are facing growth challenges, leadership practices, and marketing. Those include the

• Harvard Business Review article by Larry Greiner “Evolution & Revolution as organizations grow” (I prefer the original version, not the updated one),
• Fast Company’s piece called “Measure What Matters”
• Inc Magazine’s “Cold Fish, Hot Data, New Profis”
• Fast Company’s “Start With Nothing”
• And Fortune Magazine’s “Making The Lord’s Copies”

If you get yourself a copy of these, you’ll find the following core ideas:

The changes you make to improve operations, at one stage of your company’s growth, actually create the seeds of the breakdowns that will happen during its next stages. Every time, guaranteed. So never announce a change is ‘final’ or ‘perfect.’ You WILL be eating your words if your business continues to grow.

Your company’s excellence will outpace the competition by the degree to which you get at the heart of what your customer values, rather than what your industry standard tells you to focus on. Base your metrics on what your clients want you to deliver, and tie individual goals for every person in your organization to those metrics.

If you pay attention to the unusual requests made by clients you may find that you have data at your finger tips that customers will actually pay you for. You might find yourself with a highly profitable new product or service with little need to add infrastructure or staff to satisfy the needs for information.

Beware launching that ‘absolutely perfect’ new business concept. Be it product or service, first interview prospective customers for their reactions and ideas. They may suggest a complete redesign or a highly profitable refinement saving you time and expense down the line.

Even the monks have to rethink their business model. Once upon the time they produced and distributed a fluid call ‘wine.’ Today, it’s printer inks. The same controlled manufacturing of fluids. New markets and profit margins.

Those are just for starters. Last week I quoted a Fortune magazine discussion about performance measurement from Coach Campbell’s playbook. He uses a review system that measures four areas:

1. On-the-job performance
2. Peer group relationships
3. Innovation best practices, and
4. Management & Leadership that develops the people who report to you

I really love when I find ideas in Discover Magazine… Discussions in the world of Science often break through old thinking about systems, relationships, and more.

And I haven’t even started to list my favorite books of the past few years. One of those is Malcolm Gladwell’s fabulous “The Tipping Point.” His explanations of how viruses and fads are spread through the same trigger point has accompanied me into meetings with a luxury desert chef, the VP of marketing of a commodity with a new product to launch, a serial entrepreneur with a real estate concept, and even a regional CPA firm’s head of Audit Services.

One idea – build relationships with people who are connected to a huge pool of relationships – with many applications in many industries from toys to data marketing.

So as I head for my vacation this year, I’ll have my usual stash of magazines from the past couple of weeks to read on the airplane with marking pen in hand. I’ll also have a business book… and two blouse-rippers just for the diversion of it all.

I know that I’ll probably find 30-40 ideas to bring back with me for my teleseminars, coaching clubs, corporate consulting and newsletter articles.

It might be chancy waiting for my next ideas. My suggestion? Subscribe to three periodicals that have nothing to do with your product or industry, keep them in the bathroom next to the toilet or take them with you to read on the gym’s treadmill or bike.

You’ll have your own High Payoff ideas rather than wait for mine.

You’ve got dreams and you’ve got your attention on what it takes to achieve them. You’re ready to roll up your sleeves and eager to start producing massive results.

The problem is, you’re dragging. You put in tons of hours, your desk is piled with papers, and no matter how hard you work, you’re plagued by a To-Do list a mile long and growing. You’re constantly busy yet you get to the end of each week before you get to the end of your list.

Important things fall through the cracks. In fact you’re feeling frustrated, drained and overwhelmed. And you’re doubting what you’ve actually accomplished.

I started coaching this month with two new business leaders and that’s exactly what they were facing, every day. They were wondering how they’ll ever achieve their big goals when they can’t seem to dig themselves out from under their avalanche of tasks and ‘have to get done’s’.

So I gave them a To Do list Makeover. We turned that time and energy sucking list of “To Do’s” into “Ta Da’s!” they can smile about. And you can use it too!

So what’s a Ta Da! List?

Have you ever noticed that your To Do List is a never-ending list of everything you think you should be doing?

We’re all so adept at creating lists of things that need doing. But not all items are created equal—some are simple items to get done, others take major effort. As a result your To Do list is full of busy work all mixed in with the important stuff and even the urgent and critical things your success depends on.

A Ta-Da! list is results focused. It’s a list of High Payoff tasks, that when completed have immediate impact on your results and success. Completing items on your Ta-Da! List results that in energy focuses you and each next effort on accomplishments.

A Ta Da! List is a declaration of what you are committed to getting done. And that means getting it done in the most effective way possible.

Here is a 5 step plan to tame that To Do list:

Step #1: Declare Your Top 3 Priorities.

Your Ta-Da! List needs a clear focus. Every day, start a fresh list with your 3 most important projects or priorities. Don’t let your High Payoff Activities get buried – keep everything else off this list. Clearly focus on the 3 priorities that must get done, no matter what else happens. Let this focus your actions.

Step #2: Dump The Lowest Priority Items.

If everything is equally important then nothing really is. Take a fresh, honest look at your To Do list. Now filter your list for the things that you dream of getting done ‘someday’ and write them down on a separate piece of paper – out of your sight, permanently. Ask yourself “What items on my list fall in the ‘great idea’ category but have very little payoff if I do them? What items have absolutely no consequence if I DON’T do them?” If you’re finding “shoulds” that you keep stalling on because they aren’t aligned with your top priorities, cross them off and be done with them.

Step #3: Delegate. Delegate. Delegate.

Identify anything and everything that must get done, yet could be done by someone else. That means handing it to someone and overseeing their accomplishing it so you stop being the ‘only one’ who could get it done. I teach my clients to use the “If I Ran off to Fiji Test”. If you decided to catch a plane tomorrow, and it still needed to get done, who ought to have it on their list? If you’re concerned it won’t get done to your standards, set-up a formal hand off with a ‘check in’ dates and times to review progress and provide input. But commit to letting someone else handle it all the way to completion.

Step #4: Pencil Out The Week.

Take another look through your list. If there’s anything on your list that doesn’t have to be completed today, but does need to be completed within the next 7 days, pencil it onto the appropriate days. Just knowing you’ve created a time and space for them will free you up to focus on other, more important, priorities right here and right now.

Step #5: Time Block The Rest.

All that should be left on your list are those items that (a) must be done today, (b) are linked to a top priority item and (c) must be done by you and only you. You may want to break them into 45-minute blocks of time, alternating with 15-minute breaks, so you know you’ll accomplish them and also give attention to quick fix items that crop up. Write those blocks of time in your calendar.

And anything else that crops up during your day? Take them through steps 1 through five and get your attention back on your declared focus for the day!

That’s it. 5 simple steps to create your Ta-Da! List. Watch how much more focused and productive you are.

You can join Mark and the others in getting you time ‘spent’ on what matters. Instead of wrestling with time, take a step back and shift your perspective.

Start by changing your To Do’s and you’ll revolutionize your relationship with Time and blast by the folks who are still staring at their calendars in despair.

Ask yourself

Now prioritize the top 5 remaining To Do’s and put them on you calendar today! Everything else needs to be Delegated or Dumped. Call me if get stuck deciding which of those three lists to put things on!

Then ask yourself

“Who ought to be paying attention to this?”

Write the name or job title of that person next to each thing you have on your list. Don’t worry about all the ‘reasons’ you’re certain no one else can handle it because they’re too busy. Start by sitting down with just one other person and discussing how you could hand off that one thing. Then go back to your list and pick the next… then the next,..

Most entrepreneurs are control freaks. And that holds for small business leaders and managers inside businesses alike. You’ve spent a lifetime, since your school days, in fact, being rewarded for taking personal responsibility for getting your assignments done. On your own. No one ever said “Great job handing that assignment off!” when you were in school. And you spent 12 or more years being rewarded for doing it all yourself.Let me ask you this: Would you do just about anything to keep your hand ‘in’ your business, rather than hand the work off to others? Just like my client, Susan, you may be sabotaging your own success.

One of the reasons businesses languish, and even fail, is that the business owner or leader is doing everything themselves. Whether we stepped up in responsibility over time spent in our profession, or started our own business as an entrepreneur, we often think the business success requires keeping our own personal grip on the reins of all the activity. I say “we” because I know it myself – I’ve struggled to decide what I was willing to hand over to others. And Susan is facing that challenge right now.The thing is, as any business grows, the sheer volume and variety of things to be done outpaces what you (or I) can actually accomplish on our own. If you try to run it all, you’ll likely run the business itself into the ground. Why? Because, you’ll take your eyes and mind off of the High Payoff activities that should have your time and attention.

If you want to make more money, have more fun and have time off too, you must get things off of YOUR to do list and get your attention where it belongs. Here’s what I mean. My client Susan is growing her marketing business. She has to hire junior level folks and train them in the services her firm provides. That takes time. And it may take weeks or months for each new hire to demonstrate they can handle all the types of work that needs to be delivered to their particular clients.Along the way Susan runs into the same challenge over and over – to incrementally hand over the client relationship and all the work to the more ‘junior’ person who is becoming experienced in handling the client. Susan’s bump in the road is that she forgets to step back to a leader’s role of empowering her staff. So Susan’s company is even more dependent upon her for all new work. Not only is she diverted from going after new clients, she’s standing in the way of her staff emerging as business developers. They aren’t having a chance to build the client relationships that will let them look for and propose additional work with their existing clients.

Her higher value to her business, and her clients, is in being available to solve complex and strategic issues they run into. When she makes that shift she’ll be able to keep her own attention on marketing and bringing in more business.

You have choices for how to handle it in your role as a business leader. You can hire people and train them and hand work over to them. Or you can outsource it to specialists with proven track records at handling the very stuff you’re ready to delegate. Different decisions, useful at different points in a business’s growth. But each option poses the exact same challenge:What, exactly, is the stuff that you should hand off? The first way to identify it is that it’s

• Stuff you’re not an expert in

• Stuff you’ve never done before

• Stuff that will fill your calendar and not move your business forward

When you get those items off your to do list you recover your attention and you can refocus it on the critical items that demand your involvement. In my own world, I’m outsourcing parts of my own business activity. I’m gradually handing things off to my fabulous assistant. And in time, as the business grows I’ll be handing off more.In my work with Susan and her team this week, one of her staff commented that he found himself wondering what he could do with his time for the last hour every day. He wanted more work. I had everyone, including Susan, identify 5 hours of specific work they would take off their To Do list and hand off to a more junior person. In this way each person will take on new responsibilities and each will also

In my work with Susan and her team this week, one of her staff commented that he found himself wondering what he could do with his time for the last hour every day. He wanted more work. I had everyone, including Susan, identify 5 hours of specific work they would take off their To Do list and hand off to a more junior person. In this way each person will take on new responsibilities and each will also step up into more High Payoff action!