It takes a lot of discipline to do less. Doing less allows focus. Focus allows creativity to emerge and quality of work product to exponentially increase. Even a 20-minute block of time with no distractions can catapult your productivity to a new height because you are being one with a single activity — applying your skill, ability and knowledge to it. The key is no interruption and focus for several short blocks of time. With this in mind here are three steps to doing less and keeping your focus on success:

1. Develop a professional definition of success in addition to a set of goals.
Those who are best at staying focused know their definition of success and whether a goal fits into it or not. If it doesn’t, they have the discipline to keep themselves from adding the goal to their list. They also say no to demands on their time that will pull them away from being successful according to their definition.

2. Live in the reality of 24 hours in a day.
Keep track by using an electronic calendar, paper calendar and pencil or both. The key is not what you use to keep track, the key is to actually do it. Absent hard data, the brain will continue to allow over commitment and poor estimates of how long things take to do. Lawyers and accountants have to keep track by the minute if they want to accurately bill hours. Their clients would be quite upset with invoices that said, “I think I spent this much time on this.” Keeping track of time that you predicted you would need and then time actually spent is a discipline lacking in most organizations, top-down. Be as transparent as you possibly can for three months, keeping track of your time. You will have everything you need from that information to eliminate the “I’m too busy, overcommitted or overwhelmed” mantra from your life if that is what is going on.

3. The pen is your friend.
Write everything down that you say you are going to do during the day. Including the things you say to yourself that you need to get to. At the end of the day circle back to No. 1 above and put a check mark next to everything that fits into your definition of success and then put all of it into your calendar and not on a “to do” list. How much of your time is spent in activity that contributes to your success as you define it and how much is just stuff you have to get to? Do not allow anything on to your calendar that you are not going to do. Give everything a home “in time” and stop dragging a “to do” list around. Before you say yes to doing something — consult your calendar; this is another discipline most professionals lack. Instead, they say “yes” and then try to figure out where to jam the commitment into an already full day, week or month.

Linda Galindo is president of Versera Performance Consulting, LLC. To obtain the Professional Definition of Success tool you can e-mail Linda at Linda.galindo@verseraconsulting.com.