In part 2 of the series, we talked about time wasters. If you have successfully identified and eliminated your time wasters, the next step is to find and set your priorities and roles, write down your goals, and chart your progress to become more productive and efficient with your time.
1) Set your priorities: Differentiating what's important from what is not (First things First).
"The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." - -Stephen Covey
The key to balance in life is finding what our priorities are and centering our lives around them. We need to streamline our lives by eliminating the unnecessary, and setting our priorities straight.
Whenever I think of priorities, I get reminded of Stephen Covey’s four Quadrants from his book “The seven habits of highly effective people”.
Mr. Covey categorizes tasks (or priorities) into four quadrants:
QI - Important and Urgent: This quadrant includes urgent activities that you just can’t ignore, like crisis, projects with deadlines, crying baby etc.
QII - Important but Not Urgent: : This quadrant includes planning and working on your goals, exercising, strengthening relationships, etc.
QIII - Not Important but Urgent : This quadrant includes distractions like phone calls
QIV - Not Important and Not Urgent : An example is time wasters.
The highly effective people are the ones that spend more time and effort on the second quadrant (Important but not urgent). Ask yourself “ What can I do today that will make a positive difference in my life tomorrow?”
"Organize one's values in the order of their worth."Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
When setting your priorities, keep the big picture in mind and review your priorities as often as you can. Life changes with time and so will your priorities so learn to stay flexible.
2) Identify your roles:
Balance, peace, and joy are the fruit of a successful life. It starts with recognizing your talents and finding ways to serve others by using them. Thomas Kinkade (setting priorities and focusing on what matters.)
We all have roles as individuals, and those roles can vary from being a family member, spouse, parent, child, to your role at work or in your community. Sometimes we put too much time and effort into one role, and we neglect the other roles. Identify your roles and make your goals aligned with these roles.
3) Write down your goals:
"People with goals succeed because they know where they're going." Earl Nightingale
After you define your priorities and roles, you need to make a plan for your goals. Goals are like a journey to a destination. If you don’t know where you are heading and don’t make a plan on how to get there, you will be lost aimlessly and forever. To become an achiever, you need to write down your goals and start measuring your progress.
"Goals. There’s no telling what you can do when you get inspired by them. There's no telling what you can do when you believe in them. There's no telling what will happen when you act upon them.'
Jim Rohn
Most of us have goals that we would like to accomplish. Some can be as small as organizing your pantry or as big as getting a PhD. But no matter what your goals are, if you don’t write them down, they will be hard to attain.
The importance of writing down your goals:
A study done at the Dominican University by Dr. Gail Matthews about goal achievement revealed that people who wrote down their goals and shared them with a loved one were 33% more likely to achieve their goals than those who did not. Writing down your goals takes your thoughts and dreams to a new and higher level. They become concrete and a commitment to yourself; I found that to be true even with daily to-do tasks. If I don’t write them down, I go about my whole day feeling a heavy weight on my shoulder and I become irritated not knowing what I need to do first. When you don’t write down your goals and tasks, you start feeling like you have many things to accomplish, yet no time to get them done. It becomes a mental overload. To break down this mental overload, you need to write down your goals. Writing down your goals frees up your mind “to think about things rather than of things”.
In the book “Getting Things Done”, David Allen; a time management guru, outlines a process for accomplishing tasks in 5 steps:
1) Define the purpose
2) Envision the outcome: Begin with the end in mind.
3) Brainstorm: How can you get from here to there?
4) Organize: Sort and prioritize
5) Identify the next action
You need to decide what you want to do or get accomplished (your goal) then figure out what you need to do to achieve that goal.
Goals can be short term (one month or less) or long term goals (6 months or more).
Long term goals: Any goal that takes 6 months or longer to accomplish is a long-term goal. They are the most important and meaningful goals. But given that they are usually far in the future we tend to feel overwhelmed and unable to focus and get them done. That’s where you need short-term goals. You need to be able to break down your long-term goals into short-term goals. Take baby steps, don’t attempt to take one giant leap at a time.
I recently signed up to run a half marathon. I have never even ran a 5K before so it might not seem as a big deal to some of you but to me it is. A half marathon entails running/walking 13.4 miles. It would be very unrealistic of me to get up tomorrow and try to run the 13.1 miles. So I break down this goal into mini goals. Each week, one of my weekly goals is to run 1 mile longer than in the previous week.
Short-term goals:
Daily “To-Do-List”: List three important tasks everyday and a few small ones then focus on getting the first three on your list done before you move on to the small ones. Your most important daily task is a task that will move you closer to your weekly goal. If you start a new task before you get the previous one done, you will lose focus and become overwhelmed.
Procrastination:
“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”
― Mark Twain
I am usually a procrastinator. I keep on thinking that I just need to sit down, have a plan of attack, and get myself in the “right mood” to accomplish that unpleasant task that I am dreading. Well, that merely translates to a big to-do list with many things that keep on getting pushed back because I just can’t find “the perfect moment”. Yep, perfectionism. Didn’t I mention that it was a life leech. What helps with procrastination is focusing on those unpleasant tasks first thing in the morning; if you start by eating a frog then everything else will seem like a cakewalk. When I get my most dreaded task done first thing in the morning, the rest of my day go way smoother and calmer and I feel like I just climbed a mountain (well, sort of :)).
So to start your day and finish it feeling more productive, you need to:
- Write down your to-do-list every day and prioritize: I usually do that the night before, with three important tasks at the most with one task that will get you closer to your goal.
- Start with one task and get it done before you move on to the next task on your list. FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS. Do not multitask. When we try to multitask, our attention is pulled in different directions then we lose focus and become unproductive.
- If you are a procrastinator, start with your most dreaded or hardest task first.
“The hardest thing about being productive is not the work, but the split second it takes to decide to take control.” David Allen
