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Wealth is the accumulation of riches. There are seven types of wealth: financial capital (money), social capital (your network of personal and professional relationships), intellectual capital (your ideas), experiential capital (lessons learned from your life's experiences), spiritual capital (having a sense of purpose in what you do), energy (your capacity to move into action) and time.

Of these, time is the most precious because it perishes for all of us at the same rate every day. You simply cannot generate more time or retrieve lost time. We all get the same amount. No more and no less.

Consequently, the greatest challenge to maximizing wealth is maximizing the use of time. We can't manage time by saying we need 36 hours next Tuesday, but only 12 hours this Friday. We can only manage what we do within a given hour. I suggest you make three lists on a sheet of paper (I learned this concept in my all-time favorite book: "Good To Great" by Jim Collins):

1. My highest priority outcomes for this week:

2. My To Do List (The activities that will generate these outcomes):

3. My Stop Doing List (The activities that I will stop doing so that I will have the time do what is necessary to generate my highest priority outcomes:

The hardest and longest list to generate is the third one. While there may be three key things you can do to generate any specific outcome, there are literally hundreds of things you can do at any given point in time. The real work is not doing an activity. The real work is not allowing your self to do the myriad of things that will have no real impact on driving better results.

Here's a partial list of activities I suggest you consider dropping if they are still happening during the course of your day:

Reading or sending SPAM e-mail (Virtually every e-mail that gets forwarded to me gets forwarded to trash. Sorry, but the one in 100 that is worth reading is not worth searching for if I have to read the other 99. Of course, that doesn't include you forwarding this e-mail to someone else.)

Complaining (It doesn't matter whether you're complaining about your boss, the economy, the stock market, your customers or your competition. Common old complaining is just simply a waste of time. You don't feel better when you're done and you're no closer to achieving your desired outcomes. A close cousin to complaining is gossiping. Again, this is cotton candy. Feels good for a few minutes and then bad the rest of the day.)

Meaningless Meetings (Be much stricter about the meetings you attend. Don't go just because your boss says you have to go. Challenge your boss to clarify the connection between this meeting and better results in the organization's highest priority outcomes.)

Virtual Reality Leagues (These things can suck hours and days out of your life. Ask yourself if they are really worth investing your most precious resource into.)

Keep searching and eliminating time wasters. (After you've cleared the decks, you can always come back and add something back to your calendar.) Then pour a reasonable number of hours each week into doing the few things that will accelerate your highest priority outcomes.

Take care and have a great month!

Dan Coughlin

Accelerate Update This section is always current to the current month

I suppose every book changes an author's life to a certain degree. My first book, which was self-published in 1995, was called Inside Out: A Catalyst for Conscious Living. It's out of print now for a number of good reasons. The layout, which yours truly did, looks like something a first grader could do today. And the ideas are very theoretical, which doesn't fit my approach anymore. However, I read the book a few months ago, and I was pleased by how clearly I had explained my early thoughts on improving performance.

My second book, Corporate Catalysts: How to Make Your Company More Successful, Whatever Your Title, Income, or Authority was published in 2005 by Career Press. That book was a step forward in clarifying my ideas on improving performance and understanding how to write a whole book. It's one thing to dream about getting a book contract and another thing to write a 70,000 word manuscript.

My third book, ACCELERATE: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Momentum, which was published in May 2007 by Kaplan Publishing, has changed my business dramatically. Up until that book was published, I mostly did projects for four companies: McDonald's, Marriott, GSD&M, and Toyota. In the past 12 months, I've worked with business owners, executives, and managers within dozens of small, medium, and massive organizations in more than 20 industries ranging from boats to banks to software to financial services to trucking to lighting to home healthcare to hospitals to optometrists. It's been an exciting adventure.

If you want to see my speaking calendar for 2008, which we'll try to update every two weeks, please click here.

Currently, I have 66 speeches scheduled for 2008. If you would like for me to speak at one of your events in 2008 or 2009, feel free to contact me at dan@thecoughlincompany.com and I will be glad to see if we can make it work.

If you want to see my speaking topics and a video of footage from some of my keynote speeches, please click here.

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