Put first things first | Personal Excellence

To live a more balanced existence, you have to recognize that not doing everything that comes along is okay. There's no need to overextend yourself. All it takes is realizing that it's all right to say no when necessary and then focus on your highest career priorities.

The third habit of highly effective people requires you to organize yourself around your priorities. We all have a lot of things to do every day but when carefully analyzed, we find that most of them are not as important as we think they are. Spending hours on smart phones doing nothing but browsing isn’t as important as your one thing. But we become pleasure centered and allow these outside things to control us and prevent us from doing what matters.

What can you do?

Organize yourself based on Weekly goals and assign each day of the week a single priority. There may be a number of things you have to do on a particular day but you can find the one thing that is most important and get it done as quickly as possible before moving onto the next thing. The thing by which weekly goals are somewhat better than daily goals is you don’t have to decide everything so quickly. You can take one or two hours on Sunday to allocate each activity a day. Weekly goals also take away the burden of not being able to do something on a particular day. You have the whole week and you can do it tomorrow as long as you get it done within 7 days.

When making your schedule you must have the ability to manage your time. The time management quadrant is a helpful tool to use to categorize your tasks within the quadrants of Necessity, Effectiveness, distraction and waste.

Q1: Necessity

What are crisis, problems and emergencies? They are located in this quadrant. We all have these in our lives, however the difference is people who are mainly focused on Q1 will suffer of burnout, stress and continually just putting out fires instead of being proactive.

Q2: Effectiveness

This quadrant is the heart of effective personal management. Activities that are completed in this quadrant includes building relationships, writing a personal mission statement, nurturing your health and activities you know you need to do to maintain your life. The results of spending time here include vision, mission, focusing on what you can control, discipline and commitment.

Q3: Distraction

People who spends too much time in this quadrant spend most of their time reacting to things that are urgent and assume important. You will lack of focus on your goals, crisis management.

Q4: Waste

The results of spending too much time in this area can be disengagement from life, irresponsibility and dependent on other people and institutions for their basic needs.

Now take some time and implement a strategy how you would spend your next week. And most important don’t forget to include your professional goals along with the organizational goals within your schedule.

Plan every week____________________________

1. Connect with mission, roles, and goals

2. Schedule the Big rocks

3. Organize the rest