20 Jan Schedule Your Personal Mission Into Your Week

What is it that you want to be known for in the end?  Do you know what you want to accomplish with the gift of your life?  A younger version of myself sang in choral groups, choirs, and played saxophone in the high school band.  One of the consistent instructions from all of my directors was to play or sing through the note until the end.  That ability to crescendo to the end is one of the marks that separates a good music group from a great music group.  The same goes with a life well lived.  Do you want the lives of the people you love to be better off because of your existence and efforts?  To do so takes intentionality.  I want to crescendo to the end!

All of this sounds good but the practical application is always the difficult part.  I am going to confess, this step is where I get “bogged down.”  I have great intentions.  I already have my Personal Constitution filled with my core values and for the most part see myself as a proactive person.  I truly want to live a life of purpose and achievement, but I honestly struggle with trying to be everything to everybody.  The problem is that I run the risk of doing everything average and accomplishing little.  What does it take to commit and live an exceptional life?  Is there a formula that we can follow?  In his book The One Thing, Gary Keller asks the question, “What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”  What is the one thing, the first and most important thing in each area of your life?  What actions will you have to put into place to see those “one things” come true?  Find those things in your life such that when you do them everything else becomes easier or unnecessary.  When you find them write them down.  It is not about being able to do more things but doing more of the right things.

I really like the way Stephen Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People describes how we can spend our time.  Basically he says we can spend our time in one of 4 ways:

1.  Urgent and Important
2.  Non-urgent and Important
3.  Urgent and Non-important
4.  Non-urgent and Non-important

Urgent and Important (Level 1) tasks are easy to recognize.  They are the obvious hot fires lapping at your door that need to be extinguished immediately.  It could be the taxes that you waited to pay until the last minute.  It could be a spouse that does not feel loved because you did not spend time nurturing the relationship.  These tasks have been left undone for so long that nothing can continue until the problem is fixed.  They are the crises that have been brewing.  They are the tasks you ignored and now have no alternative but to face.  If our task box is dominated by the urgent and important things, “putting out fires” all day,  our lives will be full of unmanageable stress.  Better to spend time preventing these things from becoming urgent.

Urgent and Non-important (Level 3) tasks can be a more difficult to recognize or at least admit to ourselves that they can wait.  The urgent part is easy to see, but sometimes we fail to recognize that the task is not really important.  It could be a phone call while we are having an important conversation with a loved one, a text while driving, our email box when we have important papers to write or file.  Anything that steels our attention and prevents us from doing our life’s mission is counterproductive and thus unimportant.  These tasks may be good things, but if they distract us from the really important things they should be ignored.  As Jim Collins says in Good to Great, “Good is the enemy of great, and that is one of the key reasons why we have so few that become great.  We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government.  Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.”  Multiple times while attempting to write this article, distractions pretending to be important tried to pull me away – my email box, Facebook, a cluttered shelf that needed sorting, etc.  Focus on those things that drive your core mission.  When you say yes to something that is not your core mission, you are saying no to one that is.

Non-urgent and Non-important (Level 4) tasks just need to be ignored.  These are non-productive tasks that don’t contribute to growth.  Some people stay stressed because they spend all day dealing with urgent and important problems.  They spend the remainder of their day doing non-urgent and non-important things because they have no energy left to accomplish anything meaningful.   Non-urgent and non-important task include things like watching TV, playing video games, and reading romance novels.  An occasional respite from reality is fine.   If the majority of your time outside of Level one activities is non-urgent and non-important, then you are not living to your potential.   People like this spend 90% of their lives managing crises and the other 10% recovering.  They live an reactionary life.

Non-urgent and Important (Level 2) tasks should consume the majority of our time, but unfortunately most people spend the least amount of time here.  Like Level one activities, these are also important.  Unlike Level one activities these are easy to ignore since they don’t feel urgent.  They take more intentionality and more initiative to accomplish.  These are the difficult things that we ignore but know we need to do.  “The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do,”  E. M. Gray observed in his book The Common Denominator of Success.  He goes on to say, “They (successful people) don’t like doing them either necessarily, but their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.”  Much like changing the oil in the car, it is very important to do, but not initially a pressing matter (Non-urgent and Important.)  If you don’t change your oil, it becomes a crisis.  Our health follows the same truth.  If you don’t take the time to do preventive maintenance such as exercising, watching your diet, maintaining a healthy weight, getting adequate sleep, and controlling stress, your health will eventually suffer.  Relationships are the same.  Proactive time with your spouse is essential if you want to have a healthy relationship.  My career is easy to schedule.  Somebody else fills my schedule, and I know I have to pay the bills so work is automatic.  I honestly struggle scheduling everything else.  I need to spend more time with family and friends.  I love to read and learn, but I have to be intentional about setting time aside to do so.  If I don’t, my career with consume every waking moment.  Goethe said, “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”  Most of the worthwhile but difficult to do activities are considered level 2 activities.  Most of us procrastinate and fail to do these because they are more difficult.  We keep busy with non-important things.  Focus on the handful of things that most contribute to your mission instead of the thousands of other things that don’t.  Finding time to do the Non-urgent but important things requires that we take time away from Level 3 and Level 4 activities.  If we do all of this correctly, we find that the the number of urgent and important problems diminishes, and our lives become less stressful and productive.

It is easy to talk about things in theory, but now hard choices have to be made.  This is where we select the Non-urgent but Important tasks and intentionally and steadfastly pursue them.  I divided my Life’s Roles into 8 categories: Family, Career, Spiritual, Intellectual, Social, Health, Relaxation, and Finances.  Your roles may be different, and that is o-kay.  Keeping the end in mind, I listed longterm goals for each role.  I then broke down my long-term goals into short-term goals.  My short-term goals were then dissected into specific actions steps.  My long-term goals are consistent with my Personal Mission Statement and assure that in the end my vision, my personal mission, my roles, my priorities, and action steps are all consistent.  Taking a week view at a time, I intentionally schedule action steps for each short-term goal.  Each week a new set of actions step is scheduled and accomplished.  All Roles have to be addressed.  Success in one area does not make up for failure in another.  My objective is to live my life according to my key principles.  Stephen Covey said, “The key is not to prioritize what is on your schedule but to schedule your priorities.”

I am still a work in progress.  I suspect you are too.  Many Urgent and Non-important tasks still compete for my attention, but there are fewer on my calendar now.  Commit to schedule your personal mission into your life.  Live by priority!

Here’s to the Journey!

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(David W. Ball, MD, an Internal Medicine physician, founder of NuVitality Health – a wellness education company, and co-founder of Life Changing Fitness – a fitness facility for Every Body)