"Time is the only finite resource": that's that is the mantra of Skandia Team GBR's technical manager. Peter Bentley. For those of us who can only sail in our spare time, its an even more limited resource. To achieve our goals, we need to be sure we are investing this resource in areas which are most likely to get us toward our goal. Here are a couple of tools which may help the prioritisation process.

Click here to download Mark's simple profiling tool in excel: sample below.

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For each category, rate your current performance (marks out of 10), and the score you think you need to achieve your major outcome goal this season.

Hopefully this will help you to focus on the things which will make the biggest difference, rather than default to practicing the things you enjoy the most (and are therefore probably best at!). This is by no means an exhaustive list, you could add sub divisions for most of these categories.

To take the management of your sailing development to the next level, take a look at www.goalscape.com, managed by one of Mark's past sailing partners, multi champion Richard Parslow. Here is a screenshot of his master template for success in Merlin racing.