【正文】 m too busy writing. This is proba。re stuck in the state of thinking about what to write instead of actually writing. I don39。s block. Writer39。ll even flip a coin if I have to. When I was in college, I couldn39。ll learn a lot more by doing than you ever will by thinking. Do it now! W. Clement Stone, who built an insurance empire worth hundreds of millions dollars, would make all his employees recite the phrase, Do it now! again and again at the start of each workday. Whenever you feel the tendency towards laziness taking over and you remember something you should be doing, stop and say out loud, Do it now! Do it now! Do it now! I often set this text as my screen saver. There is a tremendous cost in putting things off because you will mentally revisit them again and again, which can add up to an enormous amount of wasted time. Thinking and planning are important, but action is far more important. You don39。ll be hits. They probably won39。ll learn something valuable and can make a better attempt next time. If you look at people who are successful in business today, you will monly see that many of them had a string of dismal failures before finally hitting on something that worked, myself included. And I think most of these people will agree that those early failure experiences were an essential contributing factor in their future successes. My advice to anyone starting a new business is to begin pumping out products or devising services and don39。re excited about achieving a particular goal, but you39。 and Paul Allen39。ve fired once, you have some actual data with which to adjust your aim. Too many people get bogged down in planning and thinking and never get to the point of action. How many potentially great ideas have you passed up because you got stuck in the state of analysis paralysis (. readyaimaimaimaimaim...)? During college I tried a lot of crazy ideas that I thought might save me time. I continued reading time management material and applying what I learned, but I also devised some original ideas. Most of my own ideas were flops, but some of them worked. I was willing to fail again and again for the off chance I might stumble upon something that gave me an extra boost. Understand that failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is an essential part of success. Once you succeed, no one will remember your failures anyway. Microsoft wasn39。t be afraid to experiment in your attempts to increase productivity. Sometimes the quickest way to find out if something will work is to jump right in and do it. You can always make adjustments along the way. It39。d do my general education homework. In this manner I would put my brain into mathmode, programmingmode, writingmode, or artmode and remain in that single mode for as long as possible. Secondly, I believe this habit helped me remain relaxed and unstressed because my mind wasn39。d do all my math homework in a row until it was all done. Then I39。d go to the library in the morning, do the necessary research, and then go back to my dorm room and continue working until the final text was rolling off my printer. If I needed to take a break, I would take a break. It didn39。d plete it, and cross it off the list. If I had a 10hour term paper to write, I would do the whole thing at once instead of breaking it into smaller tasks. I39。re following your plans nicely so far so good and then an unforeseen opportunity arises. Do you stick to your original plan, thereby missing the opportunity, or do you stop and go after the opportunity, thereby throwing yourself off schedule? This is where you have to stop and reconnect with your goals to decide which is the better course. No plan should be followed blindly. As soon as you gain new knowledge that could invalidate the plan, you must exercise integrity in the moment of choice. Sometimes you can reach your goals faster by taking advantage of shortcuts that arise unexpectedly. Other times you should stick to your original plans and avoid minor distractions that would take you further from your goals. Be tight on your goals but flexible on your plans. I believe that having a clear goal is far more important than having a clear plan. In school I was very clear about my end goal graduate college in only three semesters but my plans were in a constant state of flux. Every day I would be informed of new assignments, projects, or tests, and I had to adapt to this everchanging sea of activity. If I tried to make a longterm plan for each semester, it would have been rendered useless within 24 hours. Use single handling. Instead of using some elaborate anizing system, I stuck with a very basic pen and paper todo list. My only anizing tool was a notepad where I wrote down all my assignments and their deadlines. I didn39。ve all heard the statistic that 80% of new businesses fail in their first five years, but a far more interesting statistic is that nearly all of the businesses that succeeded did not do so in the original way they had intended. If you look at successful businesses that started with business plans, you will monly find that their original plans failed miserably and that they only succeeded by trying something else. It is said that no business plan survives contact with the marketplace. I like to generalize this to say that no plan survives contact with the real world. Renowned author and business consultant Stephen Covey often uses the expression, integrity in the moment of choice. What that means is that you should not follow your plans blindly without conscious awareness of your goals. For instance, let39。s a key difference between knowing your destination and knowing the path you will take to get there. A typical mercial airplane is off course 90% of the time, yet it almost always arrives at its destination because it knows exactly w