For most people the biggest killer of their dreams is a silent evil ninja that sneaks up on you when you weren’t paying attention. The Ninja I am talking about is the simple fact of not taking the action that you know you should be taking and losing momentum because of it.

Taking action is rarely easy. We create so many distractions and excuses for not doing it. We all can invent a million reasons why there is no time or why we should wait. The simple fact is that every time you are not taking action, you are slowly killing your dreams.

If you are waiting to take action for any reason, (especially if it sounds like logical for not taking action) then you are killing your dream. To many people think they need to wait to have a certain education or for their stars to be aligned in a certain way. No what you need to do is take some action right now.

Action doesn’t need to start with the biggest thing in the world. You need to condition yourself to take action over time. The best way to do this is start small and build the habit. Even the greatest projects and goals start with the first initial push and often thats the smallest of actions. Many cultures have sayings along the lines of “the journey of a 1000 miles starts with the first step”. Start the step.

Starting small but consistent actions builds momentum. Even an avalanche starts with the smallest snow flake and grows from there. Once you have built the momentum, keeping it going is far easier than having to start again.

By giving your self a fixed black and white measure of what you need to do, you make it very easy to measure did you do it or not. I find one of the best ways to do this is with time. When you write down an action goal, you most certainly underestimate how long it will take you to do it.

For that reason, its better to write down that you will work on this action for a certain period of time. For most people the period of time that works best is somewhere in the range of 25-40 minutes.

As it sit here writing I know that I have 25 minutes to get my ideas down as succinctly and powerfully as possible. I can here the ticking of my Pomodoro timer on my Mac reminding me with ever second that that time is slipping away. But I at the end of the 25 minutes I will have a post and I will have created.

Using Seth Godin’s language I will have something to “ship”( go and read his book Linchpin if you haven’t already). There will be something made that will be going up on my blog. Admittedly I will need to run the spell check and clean it up with some editing, but I have already set aside another block of time later today just for that.

Its important to measure the action that you are taking.  By measuring the actions that you take it helps yourself to develop a momentum, where you can look back and realize how far you have come already.

Often just knowing how far you have come already gives you to motivation to keep going. Measuring also allows you later to see what worked and what didn’t, what areas were truly productive and what was perhaps a waste of time when it came to producing the results that you want.

You can measure simply by keeping a journal or a notebook and writing down what you did.

Set up your environment so that you are able to take the action. As I am writing here, there is nothing that can distract me. Email Client is turned off, twitter is off and absolutely my phone is turned off. I am even using a piece of software which blacks out all of the screen except for what I am typing here, just to make sure I am not distracted by folders on my desktop.

The more you can eliminate distractions and create the environment for you to take action consistently, the more you get your long term goals

Over all there are 3 questions you should ask yourself:

1. What action have I been putting off that I know will get me closer to my dreams/goals?

2. What is the first step on that action that I could do right now (meaning in the next 10 minutes)?

3. How can I measure what I am getting done in relation to this?

Get to it now! Ask yourself the questions and then move to action straight away!!