Extreme control over your day via scheduling, goal setting, and scripting has just the opposite effect that most people think. It is liberating and freedom producing, not restrictive and tedious.

Controlling your activities based on your priorites, and outlined by a scheduled actually gives you the most freedom of any approach. It liberates you to do what is productive and important TO YOU.

Everyone who thinks that is mistaken. By exercising complete control over your actions and schedule, you choose the thing to do that are most important to you, allocating your time the way YOU know it should be spent. It may come across as self-centered to be so concerned about what YOU want to do with your time but if you are scheduling your time in line with the correct priorities, then you are actually being completely unselfish.

Why? Because other people and "life" will rob you of all your time if you allow them. The "selfishness" comes from other people who will gladly keep you from doing the important things you should do, and instead concentrate on the urgent, unimportant things they want. Remember, other people, and your own laziness will gladly rob you of your most precious commodity: time.

If you did not plan your time yesterday, most likely it was wasted away on other people's interuptions. It is gone forever, thrown away. That time was liberated, but your life wasn't.

If you schedule your day out, then YOU have control over it instead of allowing life to just "happen" to you. Other people and other circumstances don't care about what it important to you and they will gladly change your priorities for you. My rigid, "anal" schedule today is going to allow me to focus on and do what is most important to me. If someone interupts me with an urgent, but unimportant request, I simply tell them I cannot fit it in today.

My use of a scheduling is not selfish, or a way to boast. It is a way to allow me to end each day knowing that I used my time to get done the IMPORTANT things in my life and that I am making progress on my goals. It means I don't have to be frustrated that I used my whole day doing the "urgent" but not the important.

The greatest freedom of all is going to sleep knowing that my priorities are correct, and my schedule reflected them - God, marriage, kids, business.

That's a typical "business day". On weekends or holidays, use the same scheduling technique to make sure those days are not just wasted away but filled up with meaningful, life-fulfilling, important things... even if those important things are rest, fun, play and family time. ESPECIALLY if they are those things.

I have a VIP Group program (http://www.gbrentriggsvipgroup.com/) where we talk often about these things. It's a great program. I hope you'll check it out.