Productivity EngineerInternet Marketing Tools to Enhance Your Productivity

Are you always reacting to the events and circumstances around you? Is your life being controlled by external forces?

When you allow yourself to live reactively you give up the power to control your destiny.

If you want to achieve more in your life you need to live proactively. As long as you are reactive (always saying “because” instead of “being cause”) you keep yourself in a powerless position.

It is a good practice not to make excuses. Nobody really cares about your excuse, but it needs to go deeper than that.

As long as you are giving yourself reasons, it is doing a disservice to yourself. You need to empower yourself by
thinking of how you can do better next time, instead of dwelling on why you were (in your opinion) “powerless” to get it done last time.

Consider Steven Covey’s quadrants as I discussed in this previous post. Living reactively keeps you in quadrants 1 and 2 where everything is urgent whether it is important or not.  This leaves you no time or energy to do the important work that is not urgent.

You must take control to get what you want out of life.  It sounds difficult when you have ingrained habits of reacting to the events in your life.  The best way to break a bad habit is to replace it with a new (good) habit.  Get in the habit of planning what you should be doing each day the night before and first thing in the morning.

You may find when you think about what you need to do before going to sleep, things will be clearer when you wake up in the morning.

Then make a habit of watching what you are doing.  If you are not doing what you planned, why not?  Are you reacting to something or someone else?

Each time you catch yourself being reactive, take a minute to think of what you could do to prevent this limiting behavior from happening in the future. Make that your habit to replace the habit of reacting to things beyond your control.

Take personal responsibility in everything you do and you will find you can get more done, instead of playing the victim of circumstances all the time. That is what being proactive is all about.