What is important to you? What’s important to you may not be important to someone else—even someone close to you. Do you have a sense of time and urgency and your spouse doesn’t? Do you work with co-workers who have the “it will get done whenever” attitude?
Let’s see if we can distress your life a little by helping you to focus on the future so you and others around you don’t go through life stressing about every minute of time.
Do you ever feel like you are just “achieving” things instead of enjoying life? Are your “to-do” lists becoming overwhelming? Do you have too much to manage? Are others wanting and needing more from you than ever before?
We all need a break, to be able to take a step back and breathe every now and then (hopefully more than less).
It is all about the choices we make in our life and how much time we dedicate to those choices. You probably feel like you have no choices. Everything is a priority. Not necessarily so if you realize that you have options for every situation.
You can change your thoughts about all those “urgent” things that need to get accomplished (or at least you think they are urgent). Herein lies the problem. You think they are urgent but they really aren’t. What? You read that right.
Sometimes what we think is urgent really is not. You probably take all those little items and make them important because if you look like you have a really busy life you must be an important person, right?
Not so. If you see yourself in this scenario, you need to break this pattern. You need to learn how to stop being reactive and become proactive. Don’t let your environment dictate your life and focus on making things less important.
Here is a great way to break down your tasks:
Urgent and Important. There are unscheduled things that come up in your life and you HAVE to take care of them. A child or family members turns ill, an unexpected event. In other words, these are things that you can’t or didn’t plan on. These things must be dealt with immediately. The other side of this is the tasks that you do plan. You can anticipate things that are important and by planning you can lessen the amount of time you have to spend on that activity.
Urgent, Not important. If this is you, you are probably stressed and constantly making To-Do lists and getting nothing accomplished. Just when you think you are making progress with all of your lists in front of you, you’re interrupted by others demanding that you do things for them. And what do you do? You stop to do these things. Why? You do these things because you believe you have to instead of doing the more important and fulfilling things that need to be accomplished. Learning to say “no” can go a long way to achieving a stress-free life.
Important, Not Urgent. These items are where your primary focus should lie. This category has different important activities from one person to the next. What is important to you? Family activities? More work? Building your business? Reading? Exercising? Thinking? Listening to Music? These items are usually important to us but we never get to them because we are “too busy.” This category can’t be overlooked because you need to make sure that you spend time doing some of these items.
Not Urgent, Not Important. This is the “distraction” and “procrastination” part of your life. If you are stressed, you most likely end up here because you want to do something mindless. You eat when you are not hungry, watch TV when you are not interested or really listening to the show, checking email, playing games, etc. You are in what is called “no man’s land.” You know you can’t be happy here but you’re not unhappy enough to do anything about it.
Take a close look at the different categories and find out where you want to be. Take charge of your life instead of your life taking charge of you.
