Hello and welcome back to Franklin Covey's on leadership series.

My name is Scott Miller and I serve as your weekly host and interviewer.

Honored today to have the multi best-selling author Michael Hyatt joining us whose recent book,

Free to Focus, A Total Productivity System

to achieve more with less is joining us live from Nashville.

Michael, welcome to On Leadership. Hey Scott, good to be with you.

Great to have you, sir. It's such an honor to have you here on Leadership. You've

written so many books around topics that Franklin Covey is passionate about, so I'm excited to dig right into some of your wisdom.

You know you are a productivity expert.

You have a lifelong history of writing, speaking, hosting,

interviewing, publishing books.

I'd love it if you would just orient the audience

to some of the life experiences, professionally

and personally, that led you to become an expert

on not just this topic,

but kind of all the topics you speak about.

Take a few minutes and tell us a bit about your journey.

Well, first of all, Dr. Covey had a huge, huge impact on me.

Not only the seven habits, I was a Franklin Covey planner user for a number of years and I was the guy like in college, which was a long, long time ago that used a day planner and planned out and scheduled my time and all of that.

When I first started blogging in 2004, I had a blog called Working Smart and it was all about

what I was learning about productivity and also goal setting.

And so this has kind of been by my bread and butter, but I really had to put it to the test in my own life when I became the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, which at the time with the seventh largest book company in the US, later acquired by Harper Collins, and I was trying to manage that very busy job,

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