Tomorrow is the middle of the week…again. On Sunday, you had big plans to create your priority list and be ready to hit the ground running on Monday. But the weekend was too delicious to spend writing up to dos. Monday morning you’d get to that first thing and then start working your way from top to bottom. Instead, you arrived to a deluge of emails and other distractions that grabbed the reins and ran away with your morning.
After lunch, you started to get to the list but then decided it was better to spend business hours just diving in and doing things as opposed to organizing thoughts on paper. You start in on things based on scribbled post its and random rememberings. The end of the day rolls around and while you have accomplished some actions, you realize that some of the higher priority items that need your attention to be moving you forward now, not six months from now, got ignored. You wrap up your day thinking that once you have had some dinner, you’ll take a quiet moment and make your list for the next day.
It’s Tuesday morning and once again you are list-less and distracted by the phone calls and emails that greet you at the start of each workday. But you know in the back of your mind, you would be more productive and creating more results if you were following planned actions instead of reacting to whatever lands on your desk first.
You’re almost half way through your week. And you’re still creating your day out of reactions instead of planned actions. This could continue the rest of the week OR you could stop right now and realize that the world will not end if you sign off the Internet and let your calls go to voicemail for an hour. It is not too late to get into the driver’s seat instead of careening haphazardly through the rest of your week.
You can rein in those random actions right now and consciously create your plan of action. So close your browser window now, set your ringer to silent and give yourself the opportunity to try a new approach. Meanwhile, I’ll be applying the same approach being the talk…let me know how it goes.
