Making Time for Personal Growth – Pt. 2

“It’s about priorities.” One of my mentors once told me that if I kept a journal of my time he could find out what I considered most important. He was right. I said I wanted to improve my personal growth, lose weight, and spend more time with my family but my time log said something much different. It wasn’t that I intentionally neglected the areas I wanted to improve in. It was just that I wasn’t making them a priority in my daily life. On Monday, I gave you some tips to make time for some growth in listening to audio books that will improve your life. Today let’s talk about our time and how our mastering it will help us grow.

Notice I did not say “Time Management” but rather “Master”. Time mastery is all important because our lives will always have interruptions. You must plan for these as you plan to improve yourself. Do this..Get a small notebook, I don’t care what kind just so long as you use it, and track your time for one week. When you check email, write it down. Facebook? Yep! Everything. Now, at the end of the week, take a look at where you spend hours of your time and tell me there isn’t a way you could work 30 minutes into your busy schedule to take a brisk walk and/or exercise. Are there some things you could cut out to get you to your goal? I recently cut a majority of my cable channels back because I simply wasn’t watching them. I read a lot and this is a habit that is valuable to me. More valuable than wasting away on a couch with a bag of Doritos catching up on the shows I recorded on my DVR. No, I cut back to only a few programs I truly want to see. I then eliminated the rest and took away the temptation to watch more by killing the extra channels. Not only did I gain some valuable hours for other things but I saved money in the process.

I get up a bit earlier now than I used to. That means my bedtime routine has changed slightly. I still do late night dates with my wife but we try to plan them better to allow for an earlier sleep time for me so I can get up earlier to walk or jog. My quite time with my Bible is still a priority so I had to adjust my schedule to accommodate the jog and my quiet time. After a few months of the new routine (I’ve waited to write about it through the summer), I can now say it’s working fine and because I’m not watching as many shows on the DVR, I have more time for my graduate school work, my family, and my health. It’s about being intentional with what’s most important for you.

What steps can you take right now to change your life? What small changes can you make that will pay big dividends before the trees begin to bloom with the coming spring? You can do it! You have the time to make a plan and go for it. NOW is the time to do it. Just take the time and move forward. You will not regret it.

~Til Friday

Plan Your Next Great Achievement!

Good plans shape good decisions. That’s why good planning helps to make elusive dreams come true.
- Lester Robert Bittel

Many people have dreams. Few achieve them. In my short life I’ve seen both the good and bad in people’s life planning. I look back at my earliest years as a married adult and realize there was more I should have done to plan in advance for where I was headed. In my own experience, I came to the planning party late and wish I would have done it sooner. The bible is clear in “where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov. 29:18). For several years I floundered around seeking what was next before I finally stopped, began to write some goals down, and put together a plan to achieve them. I started small but then God called me to even bigger goals. I began to dream and put my dreams on paper. More good things happened. Today, I have written down some of the wildest goals ever. Do I achieve every one? No..but I achieve many of them and the fact is I wouldn’t achieve if I never wrote them down. You might think something as simple as putting goals on paper is silly but it truly is a powerful motivator. Try this simple exercise:

1. Write down a few goals you have for your own life. For me these goals generally fall into four areas; financial, personal, relational, and spiritual. See if you can identify just two goals for each area and then look at the eight goals you’ve written down.
2. Now, pick three of them. You can add more later but pick three that have the most meaning to you. List them in any order of your choosing from one to three.
3. Now, for each goal, list a series of actions that will help you get started in achieving them. If you’ve thought about education for your personal growth, the first step will be to go to a college and get the needed paperwork started NOW. Don’t hesitate. Whatever the goal, identify meaningful tasks for it.
4. Put the tasks down on your to-do list and make these of primary importance for your day. If you pick just one action from each of your three goals, you now have three very significant actions to take today to get started in achieving them. DO THEM!

This system works if you really do it. How do I know? It’s how I started years ago. Sure, I’ve added things since then but the basics are always enough for you to get started. Fall is not too far away. August is a good month to start an annual life plan. So far, I’ve identified goals in all four areas I’ve mentioned plus a few! I’ve already put actions down and have my week’s vital actions listed. Once you get the hang of this, it becomes addicting. There is no silver bullet to achievement. You have to do the work. But I will tell you from experience that once you do, your life will never be the same.

Now, GET STARTED!

How I Use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIN

I’ve had a few friends ask me about my use of social media and how I use it for my benefit. If you search this blog you’ll find other articles I’ve written about how to sharpen your use of tools like Twitter and how best to get a worthwhile benefit from them. My thoughts can change here and there given new developments but for now, I limit myself to using the three services mentioned above: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Each has its own value but are different in how they benefit me.

I have a lot of friends on Facebook but they can range from ministry friends, business friends, school and college friends, and even teens or young adults who know my kids.  Twitter is largely more business and ministry people looking for value in Tweets much like myself. Linked In is a professional network focused more on work related information. It’s also where I have the fewest “connections” because of its professional nature of its service. That’s expected but each of those connections has great value to me.

So how do I use each service? First, and I’ve mentioned this before, you need a tool to manage things smoothly. For me, that tool is Hootsuite. It’s a free tool (You CAN pay for increased services) that is web based and it allows me to add all of the networks above plus others (Yes, MySpace is still alive).  Once you’ve done that, you can add an app for your web browser that allows you to share ideas and links with one click. Not only that, but you can also select where you share the items. Some items I share only on Facebook while others I will share only on Linked In. It depends on their nature. I see Facebook as more of a relaxed network where you can have a little fun so I might add links to song videos, funny ideas, and more lighter fare although I do include a bunch of useful stuff too.

Twitter has evolved into more of a sharing and idea network. At least for me, that’s how I see it. My Twitter stream includes many links to others’ work, some blog posts of mine, and instant communication. My thoughts on how to leverage twitter can be found elsewhere on this blog but in short, I limit my Tweets to things I find of value that others might enjoy. With so much information coming at us these days, I want quality in what I post so people will want to follow me and not dread having a pile of tweets coming at them in rapid succession that they have to sort through. This brings up another value to a program like Hootsuite. It allows me to schedule my Tweets throughout the day. Rather than slap up a bunch of stuff in one sitting. I take that same amount of time and schedule Tweets to post over a much longer period through the day so my Tweets come to my followers over a period of hours through the day and not just in one short burst. I may choose to share some of this information on the other networks (Facebook or LinkedIn) but I still can control the time that the information is released. I’ve had friends who don’t understand this concept think that I’m sitting somewhere constantly online when in reality, I can schedule an entire day’s worth of Tweets in about 15 minutes.

As for LinkedIn, I limit it to business only ideas. If I’m reading a good book that would have value to others or come across a handy application from someone else you’ll find it on my Linked In stream. Of course this blog is also linked to the site so updated posts will find their way there also.

So now you know how I do it (at least for now!) If you follow me on just one of these networks you likely will not get everything I post. So if you follow me on Facebook and want to see what else I’m sharing on Twitter you can follow me by clicking on the button in the top right of this blog. In face, I have links to all of my networks there so it’s easy to find me.

Are there other ideas you can share? If so, email or comment below and share them here for all to benefit!

Setting Priorities

Prioritizing your goals, related tasks, and day-to-day activities can be an overwhelming undertaking. Many people choose to put together a simple to-do list and leave it at that not wanting to create any headaches for themselves.

Face it. There are things you know you need to get done that you put off for the simple reason that they seem to be so complicated and time consuming. Instead, you’ll do smaller things and more of them so you’ll feel like you achieved more during the day. In the end, you wind up frustrated as those nagging items continue to gnaw at your psyche day in and day out.

So what can you do to better prioritize your life? Myron Rush presents an excellent tool in his 2002 book, “Management: A Biblical Approach”. He calls it his “Priority Scale” (pp. 153-156) and it’s a tool you can use to help you put items on your to-do list in a more prioritized order. Without getting too wordy, the tool works like this: You list your to-do items on a sheet of paper and then assign numbers to each one. You then systematically go down your list and add the numbers of the other items on your to-do list next to each item. The next step is to work through the list asking yourself how important each item is in relation to the others (There’s a full description of this process in the book). As you do this, you will make notes of the other numbered tasks and then tally a list seeing which items scored highest. You can then re-organize your list by priority and get to work knocking out the things you know you need to get done.

For others, A simpler approach might work better. I sometimes use standard index cards to list items and then build a “task deck” of cards and prioritize them by how I stack the deck. This approach works well if you have other items coming at you during the day and you need to reshuffle the “deck” and put other items at the top of your list. Whatever you do, you really should give more thought to how important some of your to-do items are before simply listing them on your smartphones, planners, and such. If you have been feeling a bit uneasy about items that need completion, you know you need to do better and knocking out harder items so you can move on with less stress.

Take some time today to plan your week. Figure out what goals you want to achieve and prioritize them! Put these tools to work right away and feel better instantly. Let me know if I can be of any help to you as your begin this process!

Have a great week!