Commitment is essential to progress. If you can’t commit… if you can’t keep your promises, it will be impossible to achieve your goals. We all think, of course I keep my promises; when I promise someone I’ll do something, then I always do it. Can you say the same thing about promises you make to yourself? All progress comes from change and change requires you to commit to moving out of your comfort zone.

I just finished the first draft and first revision of my new book (working title, The Maximum Productivity Makeover for Creative Geniuses). I set a goal to write a book in 2010, but I knew I had to start long before December or it wasn’t going to happen.

Of course, as an entrepreneur, things come up. Emergencies happen and life gets in the way. After one month and then another zipped by with no progress made on my book, I realized I needed to buckle down.

I intended to honor my commitment to myself, but when I spotted an opportunity to reinforce my commitment by adding some external accountability, I jumped at it. Accountability is an extremely powerful tool to help you focus and take action. I enrolled in a coaching program where a group of potential authors gets together offer instruction, tips and encouragement to each other with the objective being for each participant to write a book in a weekend!

I didn’t really expect to complete my book in a weekend, but I thought that with that kind of rocket launch start to writing my book, I could finish the first draft within a month. Did I need to pay an $800 enrollment fee for a program to get this done? Probably not! So why did I?

Commitment is a powerful energizer, especially if you’ve invested heart and pocketbook! The program included four group-coaching sessions by phone during the weekend, a follow-up session a month later and 24 pages of information you need to know to become a published author.

Even the most successful people don’t have money to throw away so my $800 payment guaranteed I’d make space in my agenda to work through the program. I canceled everything for the long weekend, prepared meals in advance and made sure I accumulated enough sleep and exercise ahead of time so I’d be prepared to take full advantage of this weekend as a springboard for my writing project. And it worked!

Using the momentum I created that weekend, I continued to make space in my agenda to complete the book. More than 250 pages and one month later, the first draft is finished! Yes, it was an intense month, but I stayed focused because I wanted the investment to pay off.

That’s the power of commitment. And just a small sample of what you can accomplish when you honor your most important commitments, the promises you make to yourself.

How can you solidify your commitment to yourself?

What do you need to do to carve out time to complete that long-delayed strategic project?

In the comments, I’d love to hear the strategies you use to keep your commitments to yourself.

If you’d like to start keep your commitment to yourself and double your productivity, join The Maximum Productivity Makeover for Entrepreneurs!. It starts in May.

I watched Elvis Costello’s interview with U2’s Bono and The Edge the other night.  It was a thoroughly enjoyable show, particularly for a fan of both U2 and Elvis Costello.  At one point in the interview, Bono was speaking about the U2 members’ decision to form a band and he mentioned that they had decided to form U2 before they could even play any instruments.  That month, Bono also met his now-wife for the first time.  As he said, “That was a big month!”  That was thirty years ago, and both U2 and Bono’s marriage have lasted.

Bono went on to explain that the band just learned as they went along, acting on complete faith, listening to the music they liked and taking their influences from industry greats to create their own unique sound. They knew talent and ability had to be there as well, but as Bono said, “We just never considered that we might not have any talent or ability.”

He went on to relate some embarrassing moments; once they began to take off, they had the opportunity to meet Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.  Keith played along on one of U2’s songs, and then invited U2 to play a Stones song with them.  U2 had to decline the invitation, explaining that they couldn’t play along because they hadn’t learned to play any music but their own yet!  Of course, today, we consider then all extraordinary musicians, but what they realized is that the power of a dream comes from the ability to see yourself as an extraordinary musician before there’s any evidence to back you up.

Every entrepreneur faces that same moment.  The moment when you see something, a possibility, that no one else sees.  What decides your future is what you do at that moment.  Do you wait until you know how to build a business, or until you conduct enough market research that you’re sure it’ll work?  Or do you make a decision?

No one can decide for you.  And you can’t wait until you’re sure it will work before you decide.  The only way it works, the only way it has ever worked, is that you decide, and then you MAKE IT WORK.

A decision, belief in yourself, and the power of your dream, makes all the difference.

If you want to increase your productivity, spend more time thinking than doing.  And when you’re thinking, think about what not to do!

We must focus to succeed, as an entrepreneur, or in any endeavor, and the easiest way to focus is to eliminate all distractions.  There will always be more to do than the time available, so that’s what draws our attention.  We ask, “Ok, what do I do?  What do I do first?  And what do I do after that?  Then what?”

Staring at a crowded agenda and ever-growing To Do list (book?!), trying to spot the commitments and tasks that are most likely to help grow your business right now is challenging at best.  You “can’t see the forest for the trees,” and you end up constantly busy but not making significant progress toward your goals.

Productivity isn’t just a question of efficiency.  It’s a question of effectiveness.  Is what you’re doing making a difference?  The Pareto Principle states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort.  It’s great to be efficient, getting things done quickly and with the minimum expended effort, but that’s only useful if you’re doing things than advance you toward your goals.

When you have overwhelming demands on your time, it’s very difficult to target the 20% of activities that will result in 80% of your progress.  Strategic, deep thinking demands both time and energy.  For entrepreneurs, your time and your energy are very limited resources.  Depleting your resources in the trenches is not effective.

To improve your focus, clear some trees.  When you sit down to plan your week and decide which of your many To Do list tasks you will assign to a precious spot in your agenda, make a habit of eliminating at least one item from your To Do list each time.  That is, take it off your To Do list and DON’T schedule it in your agenda.

We’ll look at options for those tasks in future articles.  For now, however, you can save a lot of time by eliminating tasks that don’t contribute to your goals (your goals have changed or you shouldn’t have accepted the tasks in the first place).  If you’re feeling ambitious, delegate tasks that someone else can do almost as well as you can and outsource tasks you’ve been “too cheap” to pay someone to do.

What tasks did you find hiding on your To Do list, adding to your stress without contributing to your bottom line?  What was the most surprising task you found?  What was the most creative solution you found for eliminating a task?

When you’re spending time with your loved ones, what do you think about?  Are you still thinking about work?  Can’t relax or get your mind off the job when you’re worried about things left undone? Improving your work-life balance is usually a question of improving your productivity.

Most people just try to do more.  Constantly running, multitasking, never taking breaks (most North Americans don’t even take all their allotted vacation!) they rush through everything.  And if something goes wrong?  They still work more hours!

There will always be more to do, and things do go wrong occasionally.  Since you only have a finite number of hours, you need a better strategy if you hope to achieve work-life balance.

One of the biggest drains on your productivity is time spent transitioning between tasks.  You must stop thinking about one thing, put your things away (if you remember to do that instead of letting your desk slowly disappear under mounds of debris!), get out what you need, and start thinking about the next task.

The entrepreneurs I work with struggle with productivity, though you can be amazingly productive when you stick with an activity long enough to achieve a state of hyperfocus.  Switching between tasks wastes time because you can’t pay full attention to any task.  There’s no productivity without action, but action without attention is worthless.

While most people focus on the time they spend on something, you must learn to value attention.  Concentrate only on how much time you spend doing things and your productivity goes into freefall. Instead, use strategies that increase your ability to pay attention to what you’re doing and your productivity will skyrocket:

• leave your office to work uninterrupted,
• never multitask, and
• tackle mentally demanding tasks only during your most productive periods.

You’ve heard it’s better to work smarter than to work harder.  People who choose to work smarter rather than harder squeeze a better return out of each hour.  With practice, you can even accomplish more while working less.  If working smarter sounds like the right thing to do, you’ll be happy to learn it’s the only thing that works for entrepreneurs like you.

To learn how to apply this and other strategies to double (or more!) your productivity, improve your work-life balance (your wife will fall in love with you all over again!) get Grow With the Flow for Entrepreneurs©.

If a pill could cure procrastination, every entrepreneur would want one.  Of course, there’s no procrastination pill because procrastination is a symptom of many different root problems.  Without addressing the root cause, you can’t solve the problem.

An entrepreneur’s first challenge with procrastination often stems from a fear of failure.  Delays in presenting your business plan, publishing your Web site or submitting your proposal are really ways of avoiding putting your business to the test.

If you don’t send your proposal, you can’t lose the sale because your strategy doesn’t measure up.  Perhaps you worry that if you do get a contract, you won’t be able to deliver.  Or maybe you struggle with perfectionism.

Each of these appears as procrastination but demands a different solution.  And should you recognize perfectionism as a delaying tactic you still need to overcome several mechanisms that may slow your progress:

1. Do you constantly circle back and edit as you’re writing?
2. Are you struggling with formatting and presentation more than the writing?
3. Or do you know it’s done, but you’re dotting “I”’s and crossing “T”’s, never satisfied that it’s good enough.

Break the cycle by asking yourself this question: “What are the criteria for success?”

In the case of your proposal, success is landing the sale.  However, you can’t possibly get the deal unless you deliver the proposal on time.  Once you see the problem in terms of success criteria, you’re more likely to see solutions that let you meet those criteria:

1. Write a rough draft and leave the editing until the end or even delegate it.
2. Outsource quality control, final formatting and polishing (virtual assistants are great at this).
3. Block out a set time for a final edit and stick to it.

Procrastination plagues so many entrepreneurs that it seems insurmountable, but where platitudes fail, strategies that attack the root of the problem can help you finally conquer procrastination.