5 minutes a day to a better life
Our modern lives are cluttered. Period. Between sales targets and school exams, health checkups and paying bills, today’s human being has to manage so many different aspects of his life. Not only does he have to manage it, he is expected to excel in all the different spheres of his life. He /she is supposed to be a to be a super performer at his job, a great dad/mom, a great child, an ideal citizen, etc etc . the list is endless.
All of the above mentioned dimensions of life require certain activities to be fulfilled. For example, to be an ideal mom, you need to attend PTA meetings regularly or to be an ideal citizen, you need to pay your taxes on time. Bottomline is that your life is a mosaic and you need to fill this mosaic with all the different activities that will help you accomplish your dreams.
However, for most of us, we are so wrapped up in a reactive approach to life that we let life decide what it wants to do to us. For example, we get into an argument with our spouse right before that big meeting with the company’s big boss, when the solution was to do a quick “time out” and resolve the issue over the weekend. The result: (1) Bad impression for the big boss, and (2) the fight with the wife happens anyways (without any solutions to the underlying problem).
While that may make perfect sense from a spiritual “let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may” fatalistic perspective, it can also be a recipe for frustration if you do not end up where you wanted to be. And nothing is more frustrating than a wasted life.
In the next few articles, I will propound my “clarity principle” theory. In this article, I will share with you a small tip that has added immense value to my life- the daily to-do-list.
Here is how to do this list:
1) Take a blank sheet of paper or better still a diary (I still prefer a diary to a PDA)
2) List out all the things you want to do on a given day
3) Divide that list into priorities i.e. if you need to pay your electricity bill to avoid your utility from being disconnected, write a number 1 there, doing the presentation to your boss can be number 2.
4) Now divide the tasks into the following categories: personal, professional, spiritual/social , financial, health, etc. (you can add to these categories)
5) Now divide the sheet into these categories and place each item from your to-do-list into those categories
6) Once you do that, your daily mosaic will emerge.
7) You will then get an idea of how balanced your life is. For example, if you have too many items in the “personal” category, but they are all low priority items, it means that you are spending too much time on items that are not contributing a lot to your life. On the other hand, if you are spending too little time on something critical, for example, your health, it is time to do a little re-thinking on that front.
8) Once you have all these pieces in place, put a time schedule for each of these items. For example, your list might look like this.
Personal
Pay Bills (1) 9:00-10:00 am
Buy groceries (3) 6:00-7:00 pm
Health
Gym (2) 8:00-9:00 pm
Work
Complete analysis on Micronet account (4) 4:00 – 5:00 pm
What this method does is:
1) Helps you plan your day well, while making maximum use of your only real asset: time
2) Helps you free up time for other activities which you always complained you had no time for ex.
Social Work
Find all my old clothes for gifting to the orphanage (5) 9:30- 10:00 pm
3) The biggest advantage of this method is that, over time, it helps you analyze the patterns in our living. Are we more work oriented? Or do we prefer to give more time for personal work? Am I chronic procrastinator? Would I be able to create another revenue stream if I started writing a blog for an hour each night?
At the root of this planning is the realization that we are here for a finite amount of time. It is upto us how to use this time. It is a travesty that people who were less talented and wealthy than most of us, went on to do great things with their lives, while the majority of us continue to suffer from existentialist dilemmas and a feeling of inner void. We have forgotten the value of time. If only we can spend 5 minutes a day, planning our next day, we would be able to add meaningful dimensions to our lives, the kinds we never experienced before.
