Get the Most out of Each Day
Oct 16th, 2007 by Rahul Bhambhani
“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
- Stephen Covey
Have you ever ended your day feeling great, knowing you got a lot done? If so, did this feeling of accomplishment come from the completion of a sequence of urgent tasks, or did it come from the completion of a number of important tasks?
Did you take care of the laundry, do the dishes, watch your favorite TV show, check your e-mail 20 times, and pay the bills? Or did you spend time contributing to your vision and purpose in a variety of different ways?
Now that I’ve got you thinking about your day, I want you to ponder another question. How many of the tasks you complete on a typical day will benefit you 2 years from now? 5 years from now? 10 years from now? For the rest of your life?
How many of your tasks fit the criteria? Two? Five? Ten? None?
Time to optimize
The first time I did this exercise, I was shocked to realize nearly 80% of the tasks I completed during the day were urgent tasks. Completing them gave me a feeling of accomplishment, but they provided only short term benefit. This was my wake up call. I said to myself, “Rahul, it’s time to optimize!” I decided I would focus on more important tasks throughout the day, and put the urgent tasks on the backburner.
This is a process known as “paying yourself first.” The important tasks will contribute to your growth, and in the long run will drastically change your life. The urgent tasks must be handled, but they should only be handled once you’ve completed the important tasks. My task ratio is now made up of 80% important tasks and 20% urgent tasks (because they have to be taken care of sooner or later).
Before you can begin to optimize and focus your attention on the important tasks in your life, you need to first be able to define what’s “important” to you. How do you go about doing this? To start with, you need to have a clear vision of where you’re headed. If you have no idea where you want to be in the future, there’s no way you will be able to decide what steps you need to take today to get there. My article, Create a Powerful Vision, details this process. Please read the article if you haven’t done so already. It will give you the foundation necessary to get the most out of this article.
Execute around your vision
To realize my vision of reforming the education system to help people realize their true potential, I’ve created a detailed action plan. If you read my post on How to Set Challenging Goals, and Reach them, you will know what kind of action plan I am referring to. To fulfill my ultimate vision, there are a number of challenging goals I must achieve along the way.
- I must continuously invest in my own personal development so I can serve as a role model others willingly follow
- I must develop a method or a medium to reach out to a substantial amount of people at one time
- I must transform myself into a role model of high character, so I can inspire others to build their own character
- I must become effective at making a huge impact on people’s lives in a short amount of time, using only a few words
- Finally, I must realize my own true potential before I am able to help others realize theirs
There are certain things I must do on a daily basis to ensure that I am making progress towards attaining these goals. The daily habits I’ve created for myself are:
- Read consciousness raising material for at least 3 hours
- Meditate for 1 hour
- Work on completing a blog article
- Keep a positive mindset at all times
- Focus on one character trait I aim to develop
- Journal at least once
- Tell 10 new people about my blog
- Continue reading a personal development book
- Constantly improve on my fitness/workout
- Step outside of my comfort zone at least once
- Take time to connect with nature in some way
Of course these habits are subject to change over time, but for now, that’s what I’m working with. As new opportunities make themselves available to me, I will build upon this list. As of right now, I’m finding blogging to be an effective medium for reaching out to people. I know I have the potential to reach out and change many lives through my writing. Ultimately, I will get into speaking, and hope to rally people to my cause in a Martin Luther King, Jr. fashion.
What goals do you have to attain in order to translate your ultimate vision into a reality? What things do you have to do every day to ensure you’re making progress towards making your vision real? Ask yourself these questions, and if you can, create a detailed action plan. This will give you a tremendous amount of clarity towards what you should be doing each day. Instead of wasting most of your time on urgent tasks, you will begin to focus on the important tasks in life that will bring you closer to making your vision a reality.
Have a more powerful “yes”
Distractions are for those who lack vision and purpose in life. Purposeful people don’t waste their time, because they’re too busy making progress towards achieving their goals. Purposeful people can easily say “no” to something out of line with their vision, because they have a more powerful “yes” driving them to action.
Here’s some food for thought. If you watch 4 hours of television per day, over the course of a year that equals 2 months of time spent watching TV. Imagine sitting in front of the TV for two months straight each year. I’m assuming you would feel pretty wasteful, wouldn’t you? Apply this formula to any purposeless action you are committed to in life, and observe the staggering result of time wasted. Make the decision right now to stop wasting your time on things that won’t benefit you in the long run. Choose to put urgent tasks on the backburner.
Identify the more powerful “yes” in your life, and don’t let the urgent tasks pull you away from your cause. Choose to focus on what’s important, and be purposeful in your actions. Buddha once said, “A jug fills drop by drop.” Let’s make sure we are actually filling the jug, and not clumsily splattering water on the table. Carry out the daily habits in line with achieving your goals, and take note of that peculiar feeling beginning to tingle inside of you.
The feeling of true productivity.
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While I do like the idea of having the time to doing what I want to do versus what I need to do, if I don’t do what needs to get done, then how does what needs to get done, get done? I rarely get a sense of joy or satisfaction out of driving to work instead of taking mass transit, and I would rather spend that time reading. However, taking mass transit would involve at least two or three hours to get to and from work in addition to having to walk a mile or so through a Polish/Latino ghetto (which is not recommended at 0430). Thus, I find myself just having to play catch up to get get the things done that need to be done to keep a roof over my head and keep me a live long enough to get the next set of things done. Perhaps my mindset is incorrect in that I feel that I am doing things that I do not need to be doing, such as sweeping the dog hair every weekend (but I don’t how will it get done and how will I be able to live with a dog with my allergies?) Perhaps I have put too much on my plate but I do not feel as if I can free up my schedule. I think the same idea to time management applies to budgets and money management. Once you get into a decent about of debt, how do you get out? You pay the mortgage, the utility bills, food/grocery and transportation bills, and what’s left goes toward the debt. Does it make sense to put $20 in a savings account (or even an investment) yielding 2% to 10% (with transfer, setup, and other fees) when your APR is 10% (with additional fees)? The debt will grow faster than the savings will. Thus, without a signifcant change (such as outside intervention, change of income, change of housing, etc), the cycle will continue. Sure, a significant change is needed in such situations, but it comes with a cost, such as lower living standards, increased stresses, etc. I felt that your post did not recognize the give/take or push/pull relationship needed in the attempt to strike a balance between “wants” and “needs.” Then again I did not read your post as detailed as I wished due to time constraints. I am still interested in learning more about your thoughts on how to free yourself enough from needs to achieve the wants (with a higher return). In the end, I believe that in order to make money, you need money and that if you start out taking care of your wants that will yield a long-term benefits to your needs you will be able to take care of more wants and those without such luxuries are usually just damned. Maybe that is why the lottery is such as successful business.
Neeraj
Neeraj,
Thanks a lot for your post. Your questions raise a lot of great points, and give me a chance to cover some of the ideas I missed in the post.
I’m aware that in my article I made it seem like people should put all of their urgent tasks on hold completely. However, I know this is not possible, because certain things DO need to get done. This is why I said about 80% of my daily tasks are important and 20% are urgent. I also know I’m blessed because I stumbled across this idea at such an early age, because I haven’t invested myself heavily in what society believes is necessary to be “secure.”
In my eyes, things such as having a job, and trying to set up financial “security” are not important. Most of the time, a job doesn’t contribute to any substantial human growth over a long period of time (maybe in a limited sense, but that’s about it). If the objective is long term growth (over 2, 5, 10 years), then you MUST invest in the things that are important in life. In order to figure out what is important, you have to have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish in life.
This vision should be one independent of fear. I believe the need for financial “security” is an idea based in fear. What are you working so hard to protect? What are you trying so hard to keep? If you’re not living up to your true potential and doing the great things you’re capable of, in my eyes you really have nothing to begin with.
If your mindset is always based in providing for yourself, and what you “need”, then there will always be fear of losing what you already have. I guess this explains why 68% of people in the U.S. that make more than $39 million a year responded, “I don’t feel financially secure” on a recent survey. Security is a myth, it doesn’t exist in reality. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing, as Helen Keller once said.
I know many are already rooted in the fear mentality of “how can I provide for myself without a job, or without money, or without sacrificing my LIFE doing something I don’t love?” In order to change your life, I believe it’s time to adopt a powerful vision, and then begin taking the action necessary to work towards it. This means focusing on what’s important on a daily basis. Maybe you can start off with 20% important, 80% urgent tasks (urgent meaning things that currently don’t serve your purpose), and then steadily increase until the ratio is 80%/20% in favor of important tasks. Ease into it.
Ultimately, I believe the way you manage your time, your finances, and your relationships is a byproduct of your mentality. If your mentality is one based in fear, all three areas will be present in a restrictive, limiting way. If you’re mindset is based in abundance, and you understand that all of the good things in life are already waiting for you if you’re willing to take the action necessary to achieve them, then all three will be present in a affluent, abundant way. The key is to let go of the fear society has instilled in our minds, that need for “security”. If this means gradually, do so gradually. But make sure it happens.
“Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.”
- Sachs, A.
You say that “Distractions are for those who lack vision and purpose in life. Purposeful people don’t waste their time, because they’re too busy making progress towards achieving their goals.”
Life gets very hectic as we age and get involved in more tasks. Priorities get harder to manage (between work, school, wife, kids, own business, etc..) and it becomes nearly impossible to not get distracted. How does a ‘purposeful person’ deal with this?
Your first two items on the daily habits list equal 4 hours.. are you really putting in that much time daily? Meditating for an hour a day is easy for a week or two, but if you’re in college, have a job and a relationship, and so forth, then you’re going to be skipping a lot of meditating sessions if you know you’re going to have to sit there for an hour.
Many of your posts suffer from the same thing as Scott H Young’s posts. They target the youth. I feel as if every post is directed towards young people fresh out of HS (or younger) with no vision of how things change in the future. Here’s an example, the eating habits you propose are good - but how does a person who wakes up at 6AM, goes to work until 6PM, then goes to work on his own business for 3 hours and finally goes home to his wife and kids to run errands find time to eat healthy, if at all? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but what I’m saying is that these types of people are the ones that NEED self development help.
When I was younger, I meditated an hour a day, I was known for having an extremely strong will, and I only ate what was healthy. I looked down on people who weren’t able to do what I did because I figured they had a weak will. It wasn’t until after marriage and trying to start my own business did I realize that life isn’t that easy.
Derk,
Thank you so much for your insightful comments on this post, as well as my 3 other posts. You have some great points.
Regarding purposeful people, it all depends on what you define as “purposeful” action in your life. You say it’s easy to get “distracted”, but these things may not be a distraction for you if they are in line with your vision. If spending time with family, and building strong relationships with your loved ones is a part of your vision, then I do not see this as a distraction. However, if you’re wasting time at a job that is making no contribution whatsoever to where you are headed in life (only to establish financial security), then I really do view it as purposeless action.
I understand you when you say that these posts are targeted towards a younger population. This is because the younger population may not have fully accepted society’s way of thinking YET, and therefore may be more open to these kinds of mindsets. However, I’m not intending to target a younger audience. Adults are going to require more courage to put what I’m writing about here into action. You may have a secure job, a family to support, and numerous daily “distractions” to tend to. But I really do believe all of these “distractions” fade away if you have a stronger “yes” (a purpose) in your life. This purpose should always be pulling you forward. It should be something so grand that it’s almost impossible to complete in a lifetime.
My uncle is the CEO of one of the largest companies in all of Asia, a great family man, and an extremely healthy person. He’s contributing to society in a powerful way, and he’s making progress every day. He has a very powerful vision, and he executes around it daily. People mistake this purposeful action as “discipline”, and just assume it’s something they don’t have, and that’s why he’s different. They’re wrong. They don’t have as powerful of a vision as he does calling them to action.
Essentially, I believe there may be every excuse under the sun for why we get “distracted” each day. But really I think it comes down to a lack of vision and purpose in our lives.