Organize IT

I think for many of us (correct me if I’m wrong), each holiday season and new year represents the ideal time for a little introspection (I’m doing it with the blog, please leave your thoughts). It’s a chance to really recharge your batteries, figure out what you want in life and set goals for achieving it all… in theory anyways. You will probably read plenty of articles about how 2009 can be Your Best Year Yet but how many times have you heard that phrase before? What does it even mean?

100% you say? That’s crazy! That’s like double how good your life is now, right? Don’t worry, there is logic behind the madness. Consider that there are essentially ten areas of your life you can focus on. You can’t put 100% effort into all of them obviously. However, regular readers will no doubt know how I’m a big fan of breaking work down so by having a small goal for each of those ten areas in your life, the results all (theoretically) add up. That’s 10% energy on a goal that improves your health, 10% on one that boosts your relationship, and so on. Below I’ve detailed the ten areas of your life you can focus on, with some ideas on small goals you can do. Further suggestions welcome!

On Monday I mentioned I’d finished the first draft of my book. This was significant for me because it took a year of regular (almost daily) work, something I’d never done before. It took me several years of trying to write anything consistently until I came across a way of working (with a little help from GTD) that allowed me to focus on this long term goal and stick with it. Having gained this experience and knowledge, I thought I’d share it here and see what you thought. Have you tried any of the following tips? Let me know what you think!.

For all the tips and advice on being productive that are out there, it’s all useless if you cant focus on what you’re doing. To be productive is to do your work as efficiently and in as stress-free a way as possible but you can’t do any of that if your mind keeps flicking to other things every five minutes. Having had my own struggles with focus recently (more on that later in the article) I thought I’d share my own tips on how I got back on track.

Not too long ago I came across the concept of raising your consciousness. Any habit or behaviour is a subconscious action, which means you basically do it without thinking about it. That urge to reach for a cigarette, slouching in a chair or calling somebody by a particular name… that’s your subsconscious doing its work. If you had to think through every single thing you did humans probably wouldn’t be around today. Of course, the only problem with that is it can lead to your picking up bad habits.