Living Life on Purpose – a BLOG

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Do you like to mow the lawn or is it one of those mundane type things that has to be done that just takes up time that you could be doing something more fun like golfing?

Well, my wife loves mowing the lawn, but the reason why might surprise you. She LOVES doing things that give her instant feedback and results. The sight of all of those dark green leaves of grass all out there haphazardly growing at different heights with no regard to order being all set in straight lines, one darker and one lighter and now of all the same height just gives her a great sense of accomplishment.

I must agree too, the sight of a well-striped fairway or green on a golf course in particular, to me, is a beautiful thing. I think we all can enjoy the satisfying feeling that comes from a job well done, but not so sure we all enjoy doing the job.

This week I have been talking to loan officers about time management, more precisely, priority management because no one other than the maker can make any more time, the trick is to make sure you are spending yours in a way that aligns with to what you value.

How are you doing? If the universe gave you 2 more hours in a day, how would you spend it? Would you use it to sleep more, maybe some quality time with your son or daughter? Maybe you could use the time to plan your week or month and create even more time by being more efficient and effective. Some would choose a more specific sales activity that they keep telling themselves they don’t have time for. I make them quit saying that and instead say “I chose not to make it a priority.”

The reality is, you already have that 2 hours, it is just being wasted doing things that are not really that important to you, like perhaps, mowing the lawn. If that is the case, could you not hire someone else to do that for you? Are you wasting hour upon hour on social media just adding to their advertising revenue with no real purpose?

I challenge you to TAKE that 2 hours back, whatever it is that you answered you would do with those 2 more hours, go ahead and do that now and figure out later where that time would come from. It’s like land, they aint making any more of it, it’s your job to use it as it best aligns with your values.

We as humans suffer from an inaccurate view of ourselves. We see others accurately and they see us accurately but we don’t see ourselves accurately. The Freudian observation is “We are not accurate observers of our own behavior”. We give ourselves disproportional credit for when we win and blame outside influences for when we lose.

Often when winning timing and circumstances outside of our control play a big part but we want to take all of the credit. Often when we lose, we want to blame it all on external circumstance when we should take more responsibility for our part. It seems a paradox but in fact it is not. If you place all of the blame on losing on outside circumstances it renders you impotent to be able to effect change. If you take all of the credit for winning you become ungrateful and can distance ourselves from our support team.

That is why coaching can be such an effective method for achievement. Teaming up with an outside agency who’s sole goal is to focus on performance through a higher level of self awareness and setting up the processes to succeed and holding folks accountable to the process.

As a business coach I get to talk to folks all the time about time blocking. See what I did there? 🙂 I get a lot of push back on why folks don’t want to do it and trust me I get it completely. It is one of those things that can be seen as tedious or even painful. For some sales folks who tend to be of the fly by night type of personalities, telling them they need to schedule themselves in blocks goes against their very nature.

My director of coaching Tim Davis will tell you though that there is always going to be the pain, it’s either the pain of disciplining yourself to do the things that you know you need to do or the pain of the consequences of not doing them. The pain of not time blocking is living a life of reacting instead of acting. Time blocking is simply budgeting of time.

Dave Ramsey says a budget is simply telling each dollar that you make what to do. Folks often have a challenge with the concept of budgeting because they think it means that they can no longer spend money on some of the simple pleasures they enjoy like golf, hunting or shopping or watching your favorite tv show. It means no such think, it is just being proactive as to what you are spending your dollars on. So, time blocking does not meant that you don’t schedule time to relax or blow off steam or flex time. It simply means budgeting your time proactively to spend the amount of time that you determine appropriate based on the importance of and the time required to do the task. So like budgeting is telling each dollar what to do, time blocking is telling each segment of time what you want it to do.

Time blocking is like scheduling an appointment with yourself to achieve a specific outcome or for a specific purpose. Once you are convinced that you need to time block it is important to understand what types of things get blocked and how to protect your time block so other things don’t interfere. Stay tuned for the next post on what kinds of things need to be time blocked and how to protect your time block.

Time Management is a Myth or at least a misnomer. There is no managing of time. It keeps ticking away with complete disregard to you and I. There have been hundreds of books written on the subject and I have purchased and read more than a few of them. What I have learned from my efforts is that there is no such thing as managing time. We can be more efficient with our use of it with methods like time blocking but the most important skill that we can develop to help us lead successful and productive lives is spending the appropriate amount of time on the right activities and that is the definition of prioritization.

To me and some others, prioritization evokes visions of some great fire breathing dragon ready to eat up all of the time we might spend doing things we enjoy like golf, fishing or other hobbies and consume it all with the work that is not fulfilling. If you have job to do or a career that you don’t enjoy that could be the case but there is a greater meaning of prioritization. It is dealing with a series of items in regards to their relative importance so the only reason that your should feel like you did not accomplish anything of importance is that you never took the time to order the importance of the things in your life or you did, and the order is no longer valid so you need to re-order or re-prioritize your life.

I would say that prioritization is one of the most effective uses of your time and a task that is best done early before the day really gets started so the first thing when you get into the office before anyone else is there. It may require you getting up 15 or 30 minutes earlier but the time to plan your day before your day starts planning you is the most likely way to get something of significance done. The more string of days like this that you put together, the more likely that you will be doing more important things, working with more leverage and having more free time than you did previously.

“If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard, just keep putting off doing it.”

Olin Miller

How is this so you may ask? As you are going about your prioritization and it is either the first time that you have done it or it has been awhile since you have done it you will inevitably have a number of items that are very urgent to be taken care of because of your procrastination. The have become important not because they actually are all that important but because there are penalties associated with them when they are not done in a timely manner. A great example of that would be paying your property taxes. It is really no big deal until it is the last minute and you have not paid them and the penalty could be a larger assessment or fines related to late payment or even a lien placed on your property, all because you did not take 2 minutes to write our a mail a check. Another good example are things like changing the oil in your car, having antifreeze checked before it freezes or getting new brakes when the old ones start to wear. There are huge penalties you may have to pay if you don’t do simple things at the right time. There are always things like this, some work and some personal that we need to get done on a daily basis so it is important to have schedules of when things get done.

One method that I use to deal with this is what I call Busy Mom Method. It involves doing some of the tasks that you have to do in groupings based on the type of brainpower and time needed to do them or allowing things things of a similar nature stack up and picking a time to do them all at once. You’ve probably also heard this called time blocking. I like call it Busy Mom Method based on some of the simple systems I have seen busy moms use to manage the things they have to do more effectively.

One thing that we is prepare breakfasts and the main meat for all of the weeks meals on the weekend. I like to grill with charcoal so when I go to the trouble of getting it ready, I don’t just cook the meal we are about to eat on it, I cook enough for the week so then all we have to do for dinner every night is choose the sides to go with it. Similarly for the kids breakfast they love pancakes so I cook enough pancakes on Saturday morning for the whole week and freeze them. It makes mornings run much more smoothly with that extra time that it would have taken to prepare something.

In essence, time blocking is making an appointment with yourself that you know you will keep to get something that you regard as important done. One of my favorite ways to go about doing this is to set a daily and weekly time block aside to prioritize the day and week. I like to do some brief planning on Sunday evening so my wife and I can get on the same page about the kids activities and our schedules for the week and then every morning before the day starts I pick the 3 most important things that I want to accomplish and block a time to do them. These are scheduled around appointments with others and activities already blocked on my calendar. Ideally, I’d like to have what I call the “3 Big Rocks” knocked out by noon the same day that way I know that I will have a productive day even before the day is halfway done.

In my next post I will go over what makes Time Blocking fail and ways to keep it on track.

Are you just going through the motions of living? Have you ever said I wish this day were over or I wish it were the weekend already? If so, you may have a lack of a clear purpose that you are passionate about in your life. Should that concern you? I guess that depends on your age. Very few people are aware enough of themselves or have had the time to explore the world around them before they are at least in their 30’s or 40’s. Many take longer than that. Some personality types are stimulated by always learning new things, I am one of them but the consequence of that can be not following through with the really important things. What are they, well it’s different for different folks but an exercise called the Wheel of Life can help. I learned it from a a book called What Matters Most by Hyrum Smith.

You can google it and find many examples. What I liked about the version in the book is it allowed you to identify the “roles” that you played that were most important to you in your life and to rate yourself on a 1-10 scale of how you were doing in them. The other versions have set variables to measure like health, family, spiritual, physical etc. Those are good but I like the ability to customize it for my own life.