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.

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©.