100 Ways to Motivate Others : How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

The best way out is always through.
—Robert Frost
The number-one topic that leaders ask us to speak
about these days is: How do you motivate others when
you have poor time-management? This was true of Carlos,
who headed up a team of brokers.
“With everything that’s flying at me, everything that’s
coming in, all the calls that I get, all the obligations that I
have, I could really use another 10 hours in my day,” Carlos
said.
We laughed: “This is true of everyone, Carlos. Stop
thinking you are unique. Re-program and bring yourself
into focus. Reboot your mind. Start over.”

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All talented people in this global market have more to
do than they have time to do. That’s not really a problem.
It’s an exciting fact of life.
“But it’s very, very tempting to cave in to a sense of
being overwhelmed,” Carlos said. “It’s tempting to get into
that victim mindset of being ‘swamped.’”
“True enough. So regroup and get the view from 30,000
feet. Rise up. Lift yourself up!”
“But the truth is, I 
am
swamped,” Carlos almost yelled
out. “There’s nothing I can do. I’m overwhelmed. How
can anyone manage this team when you’ve got all this stuff
going on? And right when you think you’re getting ahead
of it, you get a call, you get an e-mail, you get another
request, there’s another program that has to be imple-
mented, there’s another form that has to be filled out, and
I’m about to throw up my hands and say, ‘How do I do
this?’”
“Carlos, listen. Get a grip for now. The simplest sys-
tem that you can come up with for time management will
serve you as a leader. Keep it simple.”
“Why does it have to be simple?” Carlos asked. “It
seems like I need a more complex solution to a complex
set of challenges.”
“Because no matter what you do, you can’t stop this
one truth about leadership: You are going to be hounded,
you’re going to be barraged, and you’re going to be inter-
rupted. And there are two reactions you can choose be-
tween to address this leadership fact of life.”
Carlos said nothing.
“You could just become a victim and say, ‘I can’t handle
it, there’s just too much to do.’ That takes no imagination,
it takes no courage, and it’s simply the easiest way to go—
Do the Worst First

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/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
to complain about your situation. Maybe even complain
to other people, other leaders, other managers, other fam-
ily members; they will all sympathize with you and might
even say, ‘You’ve got to get out of that business.’”
Carlos started nodding in agreement.
“That happens,” Carlos said. “But that doesn’t help
me enjoy my job: to have friends and family feeding back
to me that I ought to get out of the business. That makes it
twice as hard.”
“Right! So there’s another way to go, and this is by
keeping the simplest time-management system possible in
your life. This is the one that we recommend, and it’s the
one that most leaders have had the most luck with. It’s so
simple, you can boil it down to two words, if you have to.
The words are these: 
worst first!
”
“Worst first?”
“Exactly. Write it down!”
We worked with Carlos for a long time to get him to
see that the best way to manage his time was not to think
of it as managing time, but to think of it as managing 
pri-
orities
. Because he can’t really “manage time.” He can’t
add any more time to his day.
But he 
can
manage the priorities and the things that
he chooses to do.
“Worst first,” Carlos said. “Explain it again. What does
it mean?”
“Write down on a piece of paper all the things you’d
like to do in the upcoming day, Carlos. Maybe you were
jotting them down last night, but these are all things that
you know that you would like to do. The list doesn’t have
to be perfect. It can be all kinds of shorthand, and little

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pictures and drawings, all over a scratched-up piece of
paper. Then you