Control can also contribute greatly to your personal and other professional goals. Control is a process whereby you:

1. Develop expectations, standards, budgets, and plans.
2. Undertake activity, production, study, and learning.
3. Measure the activity, production, output, and knowledge.
4. Compare actual activity with expected, or budgeted.
5. Modify the activity, behavior, or production to better achieve the desired outcome.
6. Revise expectations and standards in light of actual experience.
7. Continue the process.

The objective is to be confident that the best possible performance is being generated. Most accountants study this process in relation to standard costs, i.e., establish cost standards and compute cost variances.

Consider the following simple example: Every day you rely on control systems implicitly. When you brush or comb your hair, you have expectations about the desired appearance of your hair and the time required to style it. You monitor your progress and make adjustments as appropriate, e.g., brush it a different way or speed up.

Develop and enforce standards in all of your endeavors. Exercise control, implicitly or explicitly. Most endeavors will improve with explicit control. This is particularly true with certification examinations and other academic tests.

Practice your question answering techniques (and develop control) as you prepare answers/solutions to practice questions/problems during your study program. Develop explicit control over your study programs based on the control process discussed above. Think about using more explicit control systems over any and all of your endeavors. Seek continuous improvement to meet your needs given a particular situation or constraint. Additional practice will result in further efficiencies.