We all have busy days, but as the old saying goes, “Work expands to fit the time allocated to it.”

In high school, I usually left my school assignments until the last minute, yet I knew that I had three to four weeks to hand in the paper. I was a master of pulling the “all-nighter,” and so my assignments expanded to fit into the full four weeks.

Similarly, without setting priorities, my staff slows down its work rate if it knows it has a generous amount of time to complete a task, which in turn leaves less time for modifications and corrections.

There is always time to do everything once. If I expand my work to fill the time, the quality of my work will be lower, I will feel exhausted and I won’t improve.

So I ask myself this: How much time do I allocate for work? More importantly, how much time do I allocate for myself?

All of us need a break once in a while. I recently read an article on the subject, which stated that the right side of our brain needs to daydream, imagine or visualize for a few minutes out of every 90-minute cycle. If we don’t allow this, our stress levels double. It also stated that people who don’t daydream several times a day tend to either be exhausted by late afternoon or fall asleep.

Sound familiar?

That is why meetings and seminar presentations lasting longer than 90 minutes are a waste of time.

As a busy entrepreneur, it’s important that I let loose, keep my stress levels down, visualize my dreams each day and make sure my staff members (and myself!) take regular breaks every 90 minutes or so. I try to set time limits to complete tasks and enable my mind and body to recuperate. Otherwise, I might drift through life half asleep and miss out on a lot of things I wished I were awake for.

Out of 2,000 Australian businesses that applied for an Asset Innovation Award, Brian’s company, Proper Advice, won a Silver award in the Sales and Marketing category in 2007. The Asset Innovation Awards honor financial planning companies that differentiate themselves from their competitors and demonstrate a strong commitment to providing valuable service to the public.