Theme of the day – How are you spending your time?
Points: How you spend your time is how you spend your life
- How you spend your time reveals your priorities.
- Don’t let your greatest priorities become your biggest excuses (i.e. family taking your time away from accomplishing your goals, etc.)
The exercise:
Draw a circle – put a 12 at the top, a 6 at the bottom, and use the circle as the face of a clock to chart out how you’re spending your day.
Execution:
I first tried this exercise in college using columns for days of the week. I’m always shocked to see the amount of time it takes me to transition between tasks. For example, I might work out for 30-45 minutes but then it takes at least an hour to transition from my work out to the next productive task.
Personal Notes:
Always useful to evaluate how I’m spending my time! The first time I saw someone plot out the execution of their day was in high school on an evening field trip. A group from my choir class went to see a Broadway musical and over dinner before the show, a classmate was bemoaning the amount of upcoming papers she had to complete over Thanksgiving break. Her mother, the chaperone of the group, calmly walked her through the best way to pace out the week ahead to make the most of her time and write four papers over five days.
This showed me clearly that everything can be scheduled! Your level of commitment and planning determines the likely success of your operation. The trick is to get started and hold yourself accountable along the way.