Perhaps the greatest single problem that people have today is "time poverty." Working people have too much to do and too little time. Most people feel overwhelmed with responsibilities and activities, and the harder they work, the further behind they fall. This sense of being on a never-ending treadmill can cause you to fall into the "reactive/responsive" mode of living. That is, instead of clearly deciding what you want to do, you continually react to what is happening around you. Pretty soon, you lose all sense of control. You feel that your life is running you, rather than that you are running your life.

On a regular basis, take stock of yourself and what you are doing. You have to stop the clock and do some serious thinking about who you are and where you are going. You have to evaluate your activities in the light of what is really important to you. You must master your time instead of becoming a slave to the constant flow of events and demands on your time. And you must organize your life to achieve balance, harmony, and inner peace.

Sociologist Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University wrote a book titled The Unheavenly City, in which he described one of the most profound studies on success and priority setting ever conducted.

Banfield's goal was to find out how and why some people became financially independent during the course of their working lifetime and others did not. He started off convinced that the answer to the question would be influential contacts or some other concrete factor. What he finally discovered was that the major reason for success in life was a particular attitude of mind.

Banfield called this attitude "long time perspective." He said that men and women who were the most successful in life and the most likely to move up economically were those who took the future into consideration with every decision they made in the present. He found that the longer the period of time a person took into consideration while planning and acting, the more likely it was that he or she would achieve greatness during his or her career.

The key to success in setting priorities is having a long time perspective. You can tell how important something is today by measuring its potential future impact on your life.

Economists say the inability to delay gratification