This year to start the year off I’ve been sharing some suggestions on how you can incorporate more success into your life. The first week I shared about doing just one thing each day. Week two we talked about doing something for you and something for someone else each day. Week three was about doing something in three steps or giving something three tries before you decide it’s good enough to be done or isn’t going to get done. And last week we talked about doing something in each of the four main categories of our lives: home, personal, work, and spiritual/mental health. For our fifth and last week of the first month of the new year we’re going to return to a structure you may remember from your school years: who, when, where, how and why.
The first success category here is something that has to do with someone else. This could be an activity that someone asked you to do or suggested you should do for yourself (i.e. your regular job responsibilities, reading an article they sent you, exercising), or something for them (which could be an activity for your boss or coworker, or a gift for a friend, or something your partner asked you to do around the home), or even something with someone else (like meeting for coffee or going for a hike together). Yes, you are doing an activity and you’ll be able to check something off your list when you’re done, but the reason it’s on your plate to begin with is because of someone else.
Second is to do something that matters when you do it, i.e. it’s time sensitive. This is pretty self explanatory, the goal being that you recognize things that are priority and time sensitive and do one of those each day. It could be emptying the garbage cans around your home into one because it’s garbage day, it could be paying a bill, it could be getting a hair cut or other appearance related activity because you’ve got an event to attend that night or the next day, it could be lining up your notes for a meeting at work that day or the next, you get the idea. It’s important to note that this is only a fifth of the things on our success list for the day and it should be the only extremely time sensitive/time focused one. Yes, there may be an element of time to the others, but this should be the only one that’s time sensitive or you may be running behind on or be delayed on.
The third success category here is something that has to do with a place. For this topic you’re going to a store to pick up the ingredients for dinner, going to a shipping store to send back a return, meeting someone to check out a place local to you, attending a lecture, watching a local performance, attending a sports event, or going to the local recycling center for example. The way to know if something fits in this category is if it’s location specific, in other words could you do the same thing from the comfort of your couch or are you going somewhere for a specific reason?
The fourth category is about how much of something you’re going to accomplish. Some tasks are just too big to get done all in one day. This category gives you the opportunity to work through a section of that extensive task. Maybe it will be that you set a timer and work for a set time on it and stop when the time is up. Maybe it’s something that is in parts or sections and you’ll work on a section. Maybe it’s something that’s done in multiples and you’ll complete one or several depending on how long each takes you to complete. This is a great way to work those bigger tasks into your regular life without feeling like they have to take over or all be done at once.
The last category may be your favorite: why. For this category you’re doing something because you want to do it. Maybe it does have to get done and it is on your to-do list, but you’re doing it not because it’s time sensitive/expiring/late, you’re not doing it because someone else put it on your list, you’re picking something that needs to be done and doing that specific thing because you want to. It’s totally possible this one may correlate or connect with a ‘where’ activity or even a ‘who’ one, but it’s the one each day on your list of 5 must-do’s because you want to do it.
What other ways of planning or structuring your success do you have that help you accomplish consistently or accomplish more?