The Internet brought a great deal of benefits to our life. Access to a lot of free and useful information is, probably, one of the most important out of them. However, this abandon of free information has also become a problem to some extent. You started to spend a little too much time on the Internet. For you emails, chat rooms, messenger services along with aimless web browsing dominate substantial portion of your workdays. As a result you feel that you are loosing control of your working hours, your productivity is decreasing and you are accomplishing far less in a day than you are capable of. This makes you frustrated, miserable and negative. What to do? How to get out of this mess? According to Brian Tracey, a renowned self-help guru, Principle of control is one of the most important factors of life. This principle ascertains that you feel positive about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are in control of your life. The same way, you feel negative about yourself to the degree to which you feel that you are controlled by external forces. The thing is if you don't feel positive about yourself, it would be impossible for you to become successful. This means to become happy and successful you need to regain control of your life. The following suggestions will help you achieve this: Set Goals Goals are like road maps. If you are planning to visit a new place and don't grab a road map of the place with you, most certainly, you will have difficulties in finding the place. A written goal will give you a clear idea of what exactly you would like to achieve. Goals also give you a sense of control over your directions. Goal should be Specific: I would like to become a better online businessman is not a goal. It's a mere statement! Goals should have clear, substantiated and detailed target! Goal should be measurable: I would like to get 100 thousand new visitors to my site within six months is a specific and measurable goal. Goal should be realistic: I want my site to become like Yahoo! within one year is probably a unrealistic and impossible goal. If your goal is too easy to achieve or an impossible one to reach, you will soon loose interest in it. Make sure that your goal is high but attainable. Set a deadline: Each of your goals should have specific deadlines for their achievement. Create a detail plan of action: List every action you have to take in order to achieve a certain goal. List obstacles: Write down all the obstacles that you might encounter on your way to reach this goal. Each time you overcome an obstacle from your list, you will feel good about yourself. This will work as a motivation for you to continue. Make Lists While developing your plan of actions for your goals, make two basic lists, a comprehensive master list and a more specific daily to do list. The master list is a single ongoing list of all things that you plan to do in order to achieve your goals. It does not matter whether it is a major goal achieving work with a year long continuation or a small urgent task you need to finish today. Whenever you have come up with a task that you have to do, you add it to your master list. Each evening create a specific daily to do list for the next work day. Make sure that this list is not too long; and all tasks of this list can be finished within the next working day. If some of the tasks, however, remain untouched at the end of the day, just roll them over to the next day's list. To use this list effectively you have to distribute your tasks according to their priorities. Remember Priorities Since it is impossible to predict whether you will be able to finish all the tasks from your list in one day, and since some of the tasks are more important than others; you should prioritized the tasks according to their importance in achieving your goals. To develop a priority-based to do list, write all the tasks you are planning to carry out the next day. Go through the list carefully and mark each of them according to their priority: A to be the most important and D to be the least important tasks of the list. Reconstruct the list according to the assigned priorities. Start working form the task number one from you list and go down accordingly. This priority-based to do list will be able to guarantee the followings: You will know which tasks should be carried out first. You will always have a comprehensive to do list, allowing you to focus on the things that you need to. However, make sure that you don't have more than three tasks with highest priority. As too many high priority tasks will keep you under stress and will constantly distract you from the job at hand. Focus on One Thing To be successful in any field you need to have many qualities. The ability to focus on the tasks of highest priority and continue working on them until you bring them to their logical end is one of the vital skills of success. Many people of mediocre abilities achieved great success thanks to just this one single quality. Once you made your to do list and prioritized it, concentrate on one task at a time. No matter what we do, our mind can concentrate in one thing at a time only. If you try to do >several things simultaneously, this will only distract you and slower your pace in accomplishing the task with highest priority. These simple and well-known rules can really do miracles to your life! Try them, you won't be disappointed!