If you can recapture a wasted hour here and there and redirect it to a more productive use, you can make great increases in your daily productivity.

Here are five of techniques I share in our Time Management seminars, each one of which will help you to get at least one more hour out of your day of additional productive time.

1. Maintain Balance. Your life consists of Seven Vital Areas: Health, Family, Financial, Intellectual, Social, Professional, and Spiritual. You will not spend equal amounts of time in each area or time every day in each area. But, if in long run, you are spending a sufficient quantity and quality of time in each area, then your life will be balanced. But ignore any one of your areas, (never mind two or three!) and you will get out of balance and potentially sabotage your success. Fail to take time now for your health and you will have to take time for illness later on. Ignore your family and then may leave you and cost you a lot of time to re-establish relationships.

2. Get Power of Pen. A faint pen has more power than keenest mind. Get into habit of writing things to do down using one tool (a Day-Timer, pad of paper, Palm Pilot, etc.) Your mind is best used for big picture rather than all details. The details are important, but manage them with pen. If you want to manage it you have to measure it first. Writing things down helps you to more easily remember all that you need to accomplish.

That isn't a bad idea, but it won't work if you JUST tell a joke. Rather, make sure that your joke (or story, or example) fits in with topic of your speech. It's my belief that speeches should be unified from beginning to end. That means that everything should relate to your main point.