Life Matters

What Matters Most – How to navigate through each day

One of the most significant challenges when focusing on “what matters most” is the inability to discern between what is urgent (or apparently urgent) and what is truly important. For most of you, reacting to the urgent has become a way of life. And it’s very easy to get caught up in “urgency addiction”, getting your “highs” from handling a crisis. Whenever you do this, you learn to keep yourself in a self–perpetuating crisis mode.

Aside from the negative impact that this kind of reactive lifestyle has on your health, family relationships and personal productivity, the bottom line is you are squandering away a lot of time on things that are pressing but not important. Your life’s story will change dramatically the moment you see your valuable time spent in terms of importance – in terms of “what truly matters most!”

Life offers you two precious gifts; one is time, the other, the freedom of choice – the freedom to buy with your time what you will. The quality of what you “buy” with your time is a clear reflection of the decisions you’ve made along the way.

Here are ten steps to help you navigate through each day:

[1] Plan to connect (and engage) with what’s most important to you each and every day.

[2] Decide that you will always do “first things first.” Learn to work smart!

[3] Don’t immediately react to everything that comes along with an “urgent” tag attached to it. Use your own measure and not other people’s.

[4] Stay within your identified role as an individual, spouse, parent, manager, student, etc. And then remain in your “comfort zone.”

[5] Set daily attainable goals that will free up more time – without you acting irresponsible or negligent in any way.

[6] Plan to do these two things every single day – exercise and read (ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes at night).

[7] Track your time to see where your time spent. And learn to give an account for your time, based on your priorities.

[8] Spend ten minutes today doing something that will make tomorrow better. You can be a little selfish in this exercise.

[9] Anticipate potential problems and see opportunities. Become proactive! You probably have a very good idea about what’s likely to happen each day.

[10] Avoid other people’s urgencies and emergencies. And watch out for whoever’s carrying the “monkey.” Remember, if they don’t respect your time, they don’t respect you.

Chris Demetriou, 28/05/2006