Meet Mr. X, a corporate professional who's work day takes the lion's share of his time and energy. The other parts of his life, are given the remaining leftovers, despite being equally important. As a result, most of his personal tasks are lagging behind further, and further, and he never seems catch up on them. He understands this imbalance and wants to fix it somehow. Can you relate to Mr. X's situation ?
I certainly do, and was in a similar position, a few months ago. No matter what I did, I just could not find the time to work on my personal life, alongside my professional life. And this imbalance, was clawing away at my conscience.
I realised that because I was doing better professionally, there must be something I am doing right professionally, which I was not doing within the personal sphere of my life.
Upon a careful review day-to-day professional activities, I uncovered the most striking difference :
"Writing down the goals"
Professionally, my day usually starts with an agile morning stand-in meeting. During the stand-in, I always made it a point, to note down the tasks which I need to focus on during the course of the day. Curiously, I had never thought of doing this for my personal goals.
Most people in their professional life will easily swear by written communication, over verbal. But the same set of people, often do not write down their personal goals, as rigorously as their professional ones. I too belonged to this group.
Verbally communicated thoughts and any random thoughts you have while traveling, eating etc. are doomed die out due to lack of attention, eventually. Your brain has limited amount of resources ( attention and focus ), and it will ruthlessly prioritise, whenever necessary. Saving these ideas, and giving them life, is all up to you. But, it will require action.
The reason why writing goals down works, as an engaging reminder is because, on writing down the goals, your brain associates the idea to a tangible physical representation, in the real world.
The brain can easily recall, talk about and visualise tangible objects. However, ideas are intangible strings of thoughts. This makes ideas easy to formulate, but also, easy to forget.
Writing the goals makes ideas/goals tangible, and they can be :
- Better visualised
- Better recalled
- Better managed
Without the above traits, any goal will seem un-achievable. There is no valid reason to give your personal goals a second class treatment. And hence, it becomes essential to write them down.
Pen-and-paper, work the best for this purpose, but I believe that a digital task-list in today's mobile device powered age, can most often be just as tangible as a physical task-list. I would suggest you to look at "Google Tasks", which can seamlessly integrate into your gmail UI. There are apps available for both Android and iOS
Having personally applied this technique, I have seen a marked improvement in terms of the personal goals which I achieved. I believe this seemingly small step can be the giant leap that you were looking for.
Credits : Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash
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