Guarding your time is critical for your personal goal planning and setting success. Do you give your time away freely putting the needs of others ahead of your own? While this demonstrates a kind and generous spirit, it’s killing your ability to achieve success. You can still do things for others, but only have you have made a conscious decision to do so and you decide when on your terms.

You can’t achieve success if you don’t use your time to get you there. If you don’t respect and value your time neither will others. They will interrupt you and call upon to do things for them at will. All the time you’re giving away is time that you aren’t using to achieve success. If you really want to achieve success you have to get yourself the time you need to get there one way or another.

Success doesn’t happen without a plan. Include time for planning in your plan for success. At some point you need to set aside time to develop your big picture plan for where you want to go with as much detail as possible. Once you have the big picture you then want to break that down into all the things you’ll have to do to get there. These become your goals that you prioritize and work on each and every week. Without a plan you don’t know what you should be doing and consequently you never get to your ideal of success.

Each of us has a peak time for productivity. For some it’s first thing in the morning and for others it’s late at night. Whenever your peak time is guard your most productive time for your most important things. Make it a habit to work on your most important things during your peak times every day. Doing so will incrementally move you close to success.

Guard your time and make your time work for you on your journey to success. Putting yourself and your needs last will make for a very long and very unlikely journey to success. Setting aside your peak time each day to work only on the things that are most important in getting you to your desired success will ensure that each and every day you are moving closer to your ultimate goal.