College football is one of the most competitive arenas around—in sports or business. The competition doesn’t just happen on the field, during the season. Recruiting is a brutal business, and training eighteen-year-olds to succeed on both the field and in the classroom is a complicated job.
That’s why what Nick Saban has done since 2000, first at LSU and now at Alabama, is so amazing. Saban’s teams have won four national championships in that span. Only Bear Bryant, Alabama’s coach from 1958 to 1982, won more.
It’s tempting to attribute Saban’s success to great recruiting and superior in-game coaching tactics. But in reality, most of the other power programs handle those parts of the process in a very similar way. And Saban’s offensive and defensive schemes have always been considered pretty straightforward.
What Saban does differently—and what causes his program to be the one that other top schools try to copy—is redefine “success” for each individual player and coach working under him. Coaches and players at Alabama don’t talk about winning and losing. They talk about consistency of preparation and effort, and about consistently excelling at the few core priority tasks they have each day.
Coach Saban doesn’t ask his players and coaches to accomplish everything in a given day, and he doesn’t require them to do everything they possibly can to “improve.” He knows that if players are trying to focus on “everything,” in essence they are focused on nothing. He teaches the fundamentals, and he helps them establish their priorities for the next day—and the next week, and the next season. These priorities become known as “the process.”
In sports or business, the art of improvement comes from the skill of establishing those few daily priorities and benchmarks the same way Coach Saban does. It comes from doing it ahead of time, so you can establish where your attention needs to fall—which gives your conscious and subconscious mind direction and calm.
In our world, we call this process “Organizing Tomorrow Today.”
You’ve probably jotted out a to-do list on a Post-It note and stuck it to the side of your computer monitor. Or maybe you’ve even built an elaborate “to-do” system on your smartphone or calendar. We’re not here to tell you that your method—if you have one—is worthless or wrong. The goal here is to puncture the myth that the highest-achieving people in sports and business are the ones who get the most done, and to get you to stop chasing that as your goal. Coach Saban would be the first one to say that isn’t what works.
One of our favorite quotes comes from Stephen Covey, author of the international bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He said, “The noise of the urgent creates the illusion of importance.” Even the best-intentioned people fall into that trap every day. They confront their own to-do list—either the one in their head or the one they’ve written down somewhere—and put out the fires causing the most smoke, or the ones that are easiest to pick off. There’s no question it can be satisfying to check a particularly troublesome or annoying problem off the list once it’s been handled—or to clean up two or three simple tasks—but that doesn’t mean you’ve spent your time in the most effective way.1
In our experience, those who enjoy the most success are the ones who do the best job prioritizing the day’s activities and accomplishing the most important tasks—not the greatest number of tasks. It’s a skill even the most successful people can lose track of along the way.
In our experience, those who enjoy the most success are the ones who do the best job prioritizing the day’s activities and accomplishing the most important tasks—not the greatest number of tasks.
One of Tom’s most successful clients was rated one of the top ten financial advisors in the country. He has hundreds of millions of dollars under advisement, and a long track record of accomplishing the important tasks in his business. But recently, he called Tom with an urgent request for help—and he wasn’t somebody to call very often.
Here’s how the conversation went:
Tom: What’s going on?
Advisor: My business isn’t where I want it to be. . . . Instead of me running it, it’s running me. I need your help.
Tom: Okay. . . . Today is Thursday. How many days this week have you gone into your office with the names of clients you were going to speak to that day written down, along with a summary of what you wanted to talk about?
Advisor: That’s it! I stopped getting organized for the next day. I forgot. . . . Thank you!
That prioritizing principle was the one adjustment Tom’s client needed to get back to continuing his elite-level performance and feeling in control of his life again.
Another advisor had started her career strong, far exceeding her targets for each of her first three years. But then she hit a wall, and after two years of weak results was in danger of “flunking out” and leaving the business. At the suggestion of her regional leader, she attended class, where she learned to Organize Tomorrow Today.
Over the first few months after the class, she became addicted to organizing her business life. Within a year, she was one of the highest producers in her region, and a few years after that she was given leadership responsibilities with her region. Within five years, she had been promoted to the home office, where she had even more responsibility.
All after changing one thing.
THE PROCESS
Written lists are as old as, well, writing, but there’s solid scientific evidence that they work better than keeping a list in your head—or even tapping one out on a keyboard. Researchers Pam Mueller and Dan Oppenheimer from Princeton University and UCLA found that students who wrote out notes longhand retained more and had a better conceptual understanding of the material than students who typed notes on a keyboard.2
Why? The physical act of writing stimulates an area of the brain called the reticular activating system (RAS), which is responsible for filtering information into the “instant access” and “deep storage” folders in your mind. It tells your brain that the information is important and needs to be kept to the forefront. It also primes your subconscious mind to get to work—which is why you hear so many stories of songwriters and comedians keeping a notepad by the bed to record lyrics or jokes that leap out in the middle of the night.3
Still, to get the full benefit of that fun physiological fact, you have to approach your list-making with some sophistication. You can take your pen and paper and start creating a laundry list of tasks that need to be finished, but unless you learn to impose some important filters on those tasks, you’ll struggle to improve your efficiency.
Ask yourself if this sounds like you. You make out a to-do list with eight or ten items on it, and you start your day with some of the easier items on the list because you want to build some momentum. You’ll handle the more complicated or problematic things a little later—once you’ve had some coffee, or maybe just after lunch. Or maybe at 3:00, when you have a clear window of time to really focus.
It’s a natural tendency. The only problem is, it doesn’t work. What ends up happening is that you put in a full day, checking off item after item, but you get to the end of the day without tackling the most important items. That produces stress and tension for the next day, and the feeling that you’re falling behind—even though you’re as busy as can be.
As we alluded to before, the key point is to understand that high achievers aren’t necessarily completing more tasks. They’re accomplishing more of the ones that matter most. As busy as people are these days, it is no longer possible to get it all done. The key to success has become prioritization. Prioritization may very well be the most underrated skill of the highly successful. It is what will make the single biggest difference between being busy and being productive. Highly successful people never get it all done in any one given day—but they always get the most important things done each day.
Highly successful people never get it all done in any one given day—but they always get the most important things done each day.
It doesn’t matter how organized, efficient, and energized you are. You will never get everything done every single day. That’s just too high a bar to set. But you can resolve to always get to your most important tasks and conversations.
The Organizing Tomorrow Today strategy will help you do this. It starts with getting into the habit of taking about five minutes the day before to identify your priorities for the upcoming day. But instead of creating that laundry list we talked about before, you produce a simple, curated, prioritized list.
The first part of the list is called the “3 Most Important.” It’s just as it sounds—the three most important tasks you need to complete the next day. Your goal is to build out your list of three tasks, along with the time of day you’ll have each one completed.
It’s important to say that the tasks on this list aren’t full-blown projects that must have all of their steps completed in a single day. The tasks can and should be specific component tasks that work as a part of the whole. The key is to list important, ambitious, but realistic tasks that can reasonably be completed during the day. Small, day-to-day successes are the building blocks of achievement.
The second part of the list is called the “1 Must.” Once you’ve determined your “3 Most Important,” you choose the “1 Must” from these three items. It is the single most important task or conversation you need to have that day. Multiple studies in the subfield of quantitative behavioral analysis pioneered by B. F. Skinner in the 1930s have proven what you probably already intuitively feel day-to-day—that if you start moving on a task or a project, it’s easier to keep in motion on that task. It’s the human brain’s version of the classic physics rule of inertia: A body in motion tends to stay in motion, while a body at rest tends to stay at rest. The best way to promote action is to identify just one thing, and then attack. Picking that most important to-do item creates the momentum.4
A body in motion tends to stay in motion, while a body at rest tends to stay at rest.
Unfortunately, many people build a massive list of daily expectations and insist to themselves that they will always get the most important things done. But channel capacity is quickly reached, and you get overwhelmed. Then it gets easier and easier to just cast the list aside with some vague idea that you’ll try again the next day—or lie to yourself and say that, since you accomplished eight or nine “little things,” you had a productive day, even though you didn’t finish anything of true importance.
To set yourself on the right track, ask yourself those two critical questions: (1) What are the three most important things I need to get done tomorrow? and (2) What is the single most important task I must get done? The questions work within your brain’s “channel capacity” to give you direction and prioritization in manageable doses. When you start your day, you know the three most important things you need to get done by the end of the day, and you know which of those three things is the big, glow-in-the-dark priority. You’ll be amazed at how much clearer your decisionmaking becomes—and how much more efficiently you’ll use your time—just by taking this simple organizational step.
Once you’ve created your list, remember that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You can have a big master list somewhere of all the things you want to get done this week, this month, or this year. The “3 Most Important / 1 Must” list is simply the priority filter that goes on top of the master list—the day-to-day action plan that puts things in motion.
To use another analogy from the sports world, a big-picture item on the to-do list for a given baseball season might be to win the division. But on day one, winning the division isn’t a part of an individual player’s “3 Most Important” list. The prioritized list for the day would be something like completing a full stretching routine, taking fifty quality cuts in the batting cage, and playing fifteen minutes of long-toss.
One caveat: With all of this introspection and personal list making, it can be easy to give the human communication part of the “3 Most Important / 1 Must” less attention than it deserves. It’s a common mistake—both for people who don’t have a lot of day-to-day interaction with people outside the office, and those whose businesses rely on things like sales calls or prospect meetings. In either case, it’s tempting to close your door and burrow into your work, communicating mostly by email or text message. But we believe—and strongly recommend—that you reemphasize the personal element of your “3 Most Important / 1 Must” and make those connections directly, either face to face or over the phone. There’s often a direct correlation between in-person communication and your level of success.
PREPARED MEANS CONFIDENT
It’s fair to say that all of us face some level of adversity each and every day. Our clients have recognized that being organized and prepared for adversity significantly increases confidence. To give you an idea of how this works in practice, we’ll use two of our recent clients as an example.
Tina moved out to California with the dream of becoming an actress. She spent years working on her craft and taking side jobs to pay the bills while she waited for that big break. With her talent, natural good looks, and relentless work ethic, she scored a few smaller roles in shows you’ve heard of, but she wasn’t able to find consistent work that would let her put down permanent roots.
One summer, a family friend who knew about Tina’s situation came to her with a job proposition. He owned a health-care company, and he was always on the lookout for charismatic people to work in sales roles. Tina had never given sales much thought—unless waiting tables counts as sales—but her bank account told her she should think seriously about the offer. She came to us to get some sense of how to organize herself and develop the skills she needed to be successful in a sales role. Tina is a naturally confident person, and she felt like she would be a good salesperson—as long as she was able to come into each of the meetings prepared.
We started her with Organize Tomorrow Today (OTT) as one of her first tools. She committed to spending a few minutes at the end of every day writing down the three most important tasks she would undertake the next day. By clearly delineating her priorities and breaking the tasks down into manageable—and accountable—chunks, Tina was able to take in a massive amount of new information and build a variety of new skills without feeling overwhelmed. She never got to the end of the day worried that she was unprepared for what was coming next.
One of Tina’s daily lists looked something like this. Notice where Tina has placed the most important items in her day—at the very beginning:
One of our Major League Baseball clients used the “3 Most Important / 1 Must” technique in the period leading up to becoming a free agent, because his goal was to sign a lucrative multiyear contract that would take him to the end of his career. He knew that the right deal would set his family up financially and carry him through the ten years of Major League service that would guarantee his full pension. He also knew that unless he dedicated all of his energy to improving his performance, it would be tough to find a team that would make a good match.
Michael came to us to get some sense of how to organize himself and sharpen the skills he needed to be successful. He’s a naturally confident person, and he felt like his best pitching was still ahead of him—as long as he was able to come into each day prepared with a game plan for success.
With the OTT tool, Michael committed to spending a few minutes at the end of every day reviewing the three most important tasks he would undertake the next day, and the single most important task he had to complete. His “3 Most Important” looked like this:
Michael’s “1 Must” rotated between the tasks shown above, having conversations with his pitching coach about mechanics, and conferring with the starting catcher on scouting reports of the teams he’d be pitching against. He also reached out to several prominent retired pitchers he knew to get some insight into how they strategized against different kinds of batters. On other days, he talked to team strength coaches and nutritionists to get his body in peak condition.
As a result, Michael was clear on the process he needed to follow to be totally prepared for game day. Having a game plan gave him renewed purpose and passion for the daily work. He felt confident because he had a plan that he knew would work. His increased confidence allowed him to not get caught up in results and to stay calm during the heat of competition.
Michael was able to make a massive amount of measurable improvement while keeping his confidence high. He felt comfortable every day knowing what he needed to do to control his success.
Identifying daily priorities might seem like an obvious or insignificant step to take, but writing your most important tasks down the previous night turns your subconscious mind loose while you sleep and frees you from worrying about being unprepared. You’ll probably find that you wake up with great ideas related to the tasks or conversations that you hadn’t even considered!
It’s important to pay attention to the mechanics of making the lists, because the goal is always to set up a daily habit with as few roadblocks to implementation as possible. If something is pure torture for you to do, you’re probably not going to be able to keep it up over time. And this tool is one you need working for you every day from now own.
DON’T WAIT UNTIL THE END OF THE DAY
To start, don’t wait until the very end of the day to make your list. We’ve used this tool with thousands of clients and conference attendees, and the overwhelming feedback we get is that the closer you get to the end of the day—whether that’s the time you leave your office or before you switch over to family mode at home—the less likely you are to set aside the time to actually do it.
It’s worth repeating: don’t wait until it’s the very last thing in your day to organize for tomorrow. Do it a bit earlier in your day to give yourself a fighting chance to complete it. It’s that important.
It’s worth repeating: don’t wait until it’s the very last thing in your day to organize for tomorrow. Do it a bit earlier in your day to give yourself a fighting chance to complete it. It’s that important.
We’ve found that the window between lunchtime and 3 p.m. seems to be the sweet spot for making the OTT plan. In fact, many of our clients make it a rule not to take the first bite of their lunch until they’ve built out their OTT plan for the next day.
The next big mistake to avoid is drilling too deeply. This tool is designed for you to pick the big, important priorities for the next day. Writing your list should take you about five minutes. If you’re having trouble, keep in mind that the goal isn’t to make an exhaustive list of everything you need to do tomorrow. You’re developing the ability—and the habit—of prioritizing. If you don’t do it for yourself, other people will do it for you—or, more accurately, to you.
It will be difficult at first, but you need to train yourself to understand that checking off everything on your big to-do list isn’t the goal. Highly successful people get the most important things done every day—“3 Most Important,” and “1 Must”—and do their best to get everything else done in the time that’s left. On most days, you’re going to have things pop up that will require your attention at some point. How many times have you closed yourself into your office to really bear down on an important project, only to remember something urgent—but not really important—that you need to take care of?
For example, you forgot to schedule that doctor’s appointment your daughter needs before the beginning of the school year. You tell yourself it will only take a minute, and you go online to look up the doctor’s phone number. You make the call, but you’re placed on hold, so you surf the web for a bit. You finally make the appointment, but in the meantime, you’ve found an interesting article and finish it up. You look up and it’s forty minutes later—and you’ve solved the appointment problem, but haven’t even started any of the day’s most important tasks.
Use your smartphone to create a holding area for those urgent-but-not-overly-important tasks, and resolve to work your way down that list only after you’ve completed the items from your OTT list. If you get to the point where you don’t think you’ll be able to address something from that separate holding-area list, you have the chance to decide if something from that list needs to make it onto the “3 Most Important” for the next day.
What you’re doing is imposing intention onto what you do. Instead of operating day-to-day in reaction to events, you’re setting priorities and getting out in front of things. You’re training yourself to get better at prioritizing. And when you are better at prioritizing, you will be surprised how quickly you get things accomplished: we’ve found that, generally speaking, it takes somewhere between two and three hours of focused attention for a person to complete all three of their most important tasks for a given day.
Does this mean that you’ll never have an emergency or need to put out a fire? Of course not. Life happens. But the most successful people have figured out a simple, effective technique for winning: they plan on emergencies happening every day.
That’s right. The most successful people know that just about every day, surprises will happen, and plans will change. They plan on it, and they aren’t surprised by it.
Emergencies typically don’t start happening until mid to late morning, and that is precisely why successful people get their “3 Most Important / 1 Must” tasks completed early in the day. The majority of our clients have learned the value of completing the most important activities before 9:30 or 10:00 a.m.
It may not be possible to get all three of your most important tasks done that early each day. If a task involves another person, that person may not be an early bird. But we highly suggest that you take advantage of the “get it done early” principle whenever humanly possible.
Surprises are much, much easier to deal with when you have an effective handle on the most important things on your plate. Prioritizing and starting early will give you the energy to fight off a common temptation—to push one of the items on the list off to the next day. And you will be tempted: inevitably, you’ll be right in the middle of something when you realize that you’re up against the time by which you said you’d complete one of your important tasks or conversations. Instead of telling yourself, “I’ll do it later”—which is code for “I’m not going to do it”—refuse to forfeit that score for the day.
Don’t take a zero.
If nothing else, commit to spending one minute on the important task. It will help reinforce the prioritization skills you’re developing. Taking a zero on one of your most important tasks is the equivalent of a professional athlete losing a game by forfeit. Passing altogether on your priorities completely erodes mental toughness. Commit to giving at least one minute of attention to each of your priorities, and you will find yourself, sooner rather than later, developing the mental toughness needed for winning consistently.
Taking a zero on one of your most important tasks is the equivalent of a professional athlete losing a game by forfeit. Passing altogether on your priorities completely erodes mental toughness.
Having that kind of intentional, clear-headed approach to her day-to-day made all the difference for Tina. Within a year, she had become the most successful sales rep at her company. Last year, her bonus was bigger than she had made in any three years as an actress. When she tells the story, she laughs and says she should quit and go back to Hollywood to chase her dream now that she has so much freedom and control.
Michael not only got the big contract, but he’s still pitching to a high level in the major leagues to this day. He’s tuned his body and mind so well that he isn’t remotely considering retiring. He’s having too much success—and too much fun.
WHY IT WORKS: TURN YOUR MIND LOOSE WHILE YOU SLEEP
We ask the folks who take our seminars (or read this book) to start with one rule when they begin the improvement process. In the seminars, the Organize Tomorrow Today rule is the one most people pick to do first. It’s probably because the rule is so satisfying on a day-to-day basis, and because it has such a strong grounding in both science and common sense.
When you go to the effort to make a prioritized list of what you need to do the next day, you’re essentially opening a loop in your mind. As you sleep, your brain will automatically start preparing for the successful closing of those loops. It’s known as the “Zeigarnik Effect.” In the 1920s, Russian psychology researcher Bluma Zeigarnik quantified the phenomenon after her professor, Kurt Lewin, noticed that waiters who hadn’t been paid for an order had much more recall of the details of those orders than they did for orders that had been paid. Working from Zeigarnik’s research, Lewin came up with the concept of “task-specific tension,” which persists in both the conscious and subconscious mind until the task is completed.5
In other words, the mind doesn’t like unfinished business! High-level mathematicians and successful writers have been using this technique for years as a tool for pushing their work forward. Before going to bed, they take a few minutes to read over the mathematical or literary work they did during the day—especially if they’ve reached a plateau or feel stuck. The mind then works all night to close the loop, and they wake up in the morning with “inspiration.” It seems magical, but it isn’t so much magical as it is the result of effective priming of the mental pump.
The OTT principle and prioritization with a list make sense. If you could eliminate—or at least significantly reduce—certain anxieties in your life with a simple, five-minute ritual, why wouldn’t you try it?
USE MOMENTUM AS A CATALYST
If you can go into your next day feeling more prepared and less anxious, you will project that comfort and confidence in what you do. Instead of spinning your wheels early and trying to generate momentum, you’ll come in with momentum already in place. And when you knock off that “1 Must” from the list, you’ll be generating even more momentum—not fooling yourself with little pretend “victories” in the stuff that didn’t really matter in the first place.
You really will be staying in motion.
Organizing Tomorrow Today hones your prioritizing skill—and prioritizing is what will make the single biggest difference between being productive and being busy. Busy people don’t necessarily get much done. Productive people do.
“Busy” isn’t what gets rewarded long-term in the marketplace. “Productive” is.
“Busy” isn’t what gets rewarded long-term in the marketplace. “Productive” is.
You’ll certainly be challenged on a day-to-day basis by the “noise of the urgent,” but having this tool in place will help you make the decisions that will separate you from the average.
The Big Why: The most successful people don’t get everything done. They get the most important things done. By organizing and prioritizing your effort toward the core tasks you need to accomplish, you create momentum and confidence. You go into attack mode.
The Inversion Test: One of our favorite devices to use within each rule is to apply a lesson that Charlie Munger adapted from German mathematician Carl Jacobi: to better understand a principle, invert it. It’s simply looking at the opposite side—in this case, what happens if you don’t organize tomorrow today.6
If you don’t organize, you begin the day on defense. You’re extremely busy, but not very productive. If you want to slow your progress, don’t organize tomorrow today.
Act Now: The mechanics of how you make your lists aren’t as important as actually doing it. You can use a small notebook, a pad of paper, or an app on your smartphone.
Spend three to five minutes preparing your own “3 Most Important” tasks or conversations for tomorrow, and the “1 Must”—or main priority—out of the three. Remember, the goal is to schedule completion of these tasks as early as possible in your day.
Some examples from our clients:
