Daily Progress Report w/ To Do List

This proactive Daily Progress Report with To Do List takes your personal values, purpose, your 90-day goals, and your unfinished tasks, and translates them into DAILY ACTIVITIES and ACTION STEPS.

Time management is a skill you can learn that enables you to efficiently use the minutes in your day to focus on achieving high-value priorities. Remember: Life is a series of choices. You can choose to live with order, productivity, effectiveness, excitement, and less stress. All of this begins with learning how to structure your daily activities by deciding what is most important for you to accomplish each day.

5 before 11
Your Daily Top Priority “To-Do” List
Your 5 before 11 micro-action list is one of the planning activities you will do on a daily basis. Just before you leave the office for the afternoon, turn to tomorrow’s Daily Progress Report and make a prioritized list of the five highest-value activities that you are willing to commit to completing before 11:00 a.m. the next morning. Your life will be radically different if you start every day knowing what five specific action steps you must take that morning in order to get closer to reaching your goals. This process makes every day count.

Imagine walking into a clean and uncluttered office and placing only one object on your desk. That thing is The 7 Minute Life® Daily Planner opened to today’s date with your five highest-priority tasks listed. Your job is to simply complete these five tasks before 11 o’clock. This means beginning and COMPLETELY finishing each one.

This single concept will keep you from living in a constant state of reaction by giving you a proactive, daily written plan. At the end of each day you will look at your 5 before 11® list and answer with a “yes” or “no” if you accomplished each one. It’s that simple.

During the week your 5 before 11 list is likely to be geared toward helping you achieve your work goals. On the weekend you may focus on social or civic obligations and household duties.

Workweek 5 before 11 examples:

Create Meeting Agenda for new conference
Contact Heather regarding new account documentation
Schedule meeting to introduce new product
Send contract to attorney
Meet with Susan regarding proposal deadline.

Weekend 5 before 11 examples:

Complete cardio workout
Clean out kitchen drawer
Write thank you letter to Ann
Pay bills
Return book to library.

The first step in changing your life is choosing to change. When you do, you will find yourself on a new path to a better life. But after taking that giant leap to a new path, you must then take small steps in order to successfully meet your goals. As you know, we call these small steps micro-actions. The power of this one tool cannot be overstated. Because businessmen and women live in a constant state of reaction, there is little time to proactively determine which daily activities are advancing your goals. Micro-actions are a tool that turns your 90-day goals into daily activities.

The 7 Minute Life® is about taking small steps toward your goals every day. It is the EVERY DAY part that proves to be most difficult. The 5 before 11® schedule enables you to commit to small, daily activities that will propel you toward success. The small “wins” keep you motivated.

“7 Minute Life” Connections
In this segment of the Daily Progress Report you will list three people you would like to connect with today. This might be a prospective customer, someone you could network with or even a friend. Go back to your complete list of “7 Minute Life” Connections and transfer three names.

Make Daily Contacts
It’s often said that, “Successful people are simply willing to do what unsuccessful people are not.” Business is about contact—daily contact. If you are a corporate leader, you must be in contact with your managers, vendors and, most important, your customers every day. If you are in sales, your success depends on the number of people to whom you present your product and how well you deliver customer service.

Tracking your Daily Contacts
The 7 Minute Life Daily Progress Report is designed to help you track the people you contact and speak with every day. On the left side of the Daily Contact section you will see a series of dashes. These dashes allow you to track how many people you attempt to contact. You have no control over the number of people you actually contact, but you do have control over how many people with whom you try to get in touch.

The 7 Minute Life Daily Progress Report offers you a point system to help account for the amount of time different activities take by assigning them values.

1 point for an attempted outgoing call
1 point for an incoming call
5 points for a face-to-face appointment or meeting
5 points for a telephone appointment
5 points for attending a networking event
25 points for a seminar

If you agree that business is about contact, then daily contact with your clients, prospects, vendors and co-workers is key to your success.

Only you can decide what the correct number of Daily Contacts is for you and for your team. For some the number of contacts may be five, while for others it might be 10, for people in sales the number might be 25. The number is not as critical as committing to a daily plan of action to consistently reach whatever number you choose. Set your goal at earning a specific number of contact points per day. If you finish the day with a number of points less than what you have established, you did not achieve your personal goal that day.

Page 2 of The Daily Progress Report
Page two of the Daily Progress Report is divided into four sections with space to track your appointments and/or how you actually spent your day. There is also a place to track the thank you notes you write. Thank you notes should be handwritten and mailed. Make it a choice to take just five or 10 minutes every day to let people know that you appreciate their skills, efforts and abilities. This may seem like a small thing, but it has huge benefits.

On page two of the Daily Progress Report there is also room to list all of your voicemail messages, and a large area for you to take any notes from the day. Remember that one of the keys to increasing your organizational skills is to have one safe place to keep all of your daily information.

Is it really possible to simplify your life down to one question? Did I do what I said I would do?

Yes. Not only is it possible, but also it’s necessary in order to meet your goals. Once you have clearly defined your priorities, articulated your purpose in life, and established written goals and action steps to fulfill your purpose, then the only thing left for you to do is do it!

The 7 Minute Life Daily Progress Report is a proactive
daily planning worksheet that empowers you to say what you want to do and do what you say you’ll do. When you set a goal, you are creating an emotional commitment between yourself and that goal. It is the tiny “wins”—the small daily accomplishments—that encourage you to continue making the right choices, like choosing how much sleep you will get, what you will eat, how much water you will drink, and finishing your 5 before 11®. It really is as simple as doing what you say you will do. This is simplicity. And simplicity brings an incredible sense of joy.