BUT LETS TALK ABOUT YOU... Does your cocktail party repartee come across as sophisticated conversation, or a confused meandering string of meaningless babble? Whether you like it or not, your conversation as well as your language skills tell world about your background, even your intelligence.

In a study which polled top executives in fifty-eight of America's largest companies, every single executive named personal communications skills as major factor in their advancement

You may feel you are stuck with your current education or intrinsic intelligence. While that may be partially true, you are not stuck with your current verbal and conversation skills.

Remember - The race is not to swift, but to verbal - spellbinding orator - silver-tongued seducer. You learn skills in a matter of weeks, sometimes days. It's largely a matter of making that decision and commitment. Call it a Masters in Verbology.

Run a Crisis Management Log Crisis management for most part is when deadline has snuck up upon you and robbed you of choice, you have to respond and you are a slave to clock. Crisis management is generally poor time management because you're rushing, quality of your performance suffers, your stress level is elevated, and, most important, you are often having to go back and re-do what was done in first place. "If you want to manage it, measure it." Run a Crisis Management Log for a week. After encountering every crisis, log it in on a piece of paper. After a week of accumulating data, go back through every crisis that occurred and ask yourself, "Which one of these could have been avoided?" and start to take corrective steps to stop their reoccurrence and buy back some "smarter" time for your weeks ahead.

Become a Speed Reader The average person reads about two hours per day at a rate of about 200 words per minute. (We get more information exposures in one day today than people in year 1900 received in a lifetime.) Speed-reading is a simple skill that is easy to learn and improves with consistent practice. The average person can easily double their reading rate and thereby cut their reading time in half or double volume of reading material they can go through in same amount of time.

Do Daily Planning "A stitch in time saves 9." Every grandmother knows this. Every minute of planning will save you nine minutes in execution. Walt Whitman, poet, said it best, "The most powerful time is when we are alone, thinking about what we are to do." Daily Planning helps us to focus on what is really crucial and important in our day to come and permits us to identify time wasters in advance to avoid them and use that time more productively.