How to get back control and find time for what’s IMPORTANT to you?
Here is a simple rule. And this can be applied both in professional and personal life:
- Make a list of all the things that you have to do.
- Identify the ROI for each of these activities that you wish to do.
- Now cross out all the things that have no ROI.
- Cross out things that are not in your control
- What’s left is your priority list.
After you got your priority list, the next step is to plan and execute.
Make a plan. Make progress every day. In the long run, you’ll feel good because you are doing the right things. When you do the right things you expend the right energy in the right quantity and you feel good. When you do the wrong things, you lose energy and feel ‘stressed.’ It’s all a matter of focusing on what’s giving you results and weeding out / tuning out what is of no use to you.
Once you got your ‘To Do’ list ready, prioritize further.
- Find what’s most important: Create the 80-20 list for professional life and personal life
- Prioritise: Create goals that reflect the 20% most important activities that you need to focus on
- Schedule better: Create a daily schedule that ensure that the 20% activities are addressed on a daily basis. Ensure that what’s on the schedule gets done.
- Be flexible: Once you decide on your goals and you have achieved some of them, you can take on more goals that are still in the 80 – 20 rule.
- Downsize to simple life: The same rule 80 – 20 rule can be applied when it comes to spending money, spending time with friends, spending time on travel and entertainment etc.
The point is to streamline and not spread yourself thin on multiple things where most things don’t add much value to you.
About Author
Sandhya Reddy is a PCC Accredited Executive Coach and Leadership coach based in Bangalore, India. She is the Founder and Principal Coach at Chapter Two Coaching, a coaching consultancy that specializes in leadership development. She is a Certified Hogan Assessor and Coach. She has over 750+ hours of experience with coaching senior professionals. She has enabled personal transformation for over 1500+ individuals through coaching interventions, workshops, webinars and mentoring.
Chapter Two helps leaders in middle levels and senior levels engage better with their teams, peers and senior stakeholders. We help teams develop a growth and performance mindset, align better with the organizational culture and values and function more cohesively. We are also passionate about women’s leadership development and have developed a practice around it. We enable leadership development through 1:1 coaching interventions and through a set of curated leadership and personal transformational workshops.