Commitments, appointments, errands, tasks, projects — call them what you will — the busyness of our lives is comprised of a wide variety of activities that quickly expand to fill up every available minute on our calendar.
Activities are the things that we DO with our lives. They may be related to work or leisure; they may be pleasant and relaxing, or stressful and taxing; but — one way or another — our lives are defined and consumed by our activities.
The important question is this: are your activities helping you to achieve those goals you believe are important to you? Put another way, are you wasting valuable time on activities that aren’t tied to your most important goals?
Take a moment to think about this: the real point of time management is to help you align your activities with your goals in a way that produces a more satisfying and productive life.
Consider this: if you are spending the majority of your time on activities that aren’t related to your true goals, then are you actually making any progress?
There is a phenomenon known as the Red Queen’s Race. Do you remember the Red Queen, who Alice encountered through the looking glass? She and Alice began to run together, and Alice was puzzled to notice that as fast as they ran, they always seemed to stay in the same place:
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
If you spend all of your time on activities that are not tied to your stated goals, you are simply running to stand still.
If goals define our destination, activities become the road map that points the way to our destination. Activities are the tasks you must pursue and complete every day if you want to achieve your goals. Activities help you to measure your progress and ensure you are focused on doing that which is most important to gaining success.
In addition, by consciously tracking your activities, you will improve your ability to respond productively to changes and new situations, because you will be more aware of your purpose, capabilities and limitations.
There are two ways of looking at activities:
1) The activities that you purposely plan and pursue in order to help you achieve your important goals
2) Other activities that arise and compete for your attention throughout the day because of changing circumstances and/or the needs of others
Take a moment to estimate the percentage of available time you devote each day to working on activities that you plan and/or carry out in order to help you achieve your goals, versus activities that you must carry out for other reasons.
It may be helpful to make a list of all your daily activities and determine how much time is spent on each one. Be certain to distinguish between activities that help you achieve your important goals and those that don’t.
Activities that you deal with during the day that are not related to achieving your important goals are sometimes called interruptions. They can steal a lot of time away from the pursuit of more important activities.
Are you satisfied with the percentage of time you are able to devote every day to activities that will help you achieve your goals? Do you want or need to be spending more time pursuing important goals?
How can you minimize or eliminate unnecessary activities and interruptions to focus on activities that will actually get you somewhere?
Baker Communications offers leading edge time management and personal productivity solutions that will help you address the goals and achieve the outcomes addressed in this article. For more information about how your organization can achieve immediate and lasting behavior change that will help your team members consistently achieve their high value goals while eliminating time wasted on interruptions and distractions click here.
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