Most successful business leaders tend to agree on one thing. Setting aside some quiet thinking time every week allows for significantly improved strategy, decision making and overall productivity.
Taking 20 minutes to set up the Purpose Planner’s weekly dashboard on a Monday morning, is doing exactly that. Setting aside the time to strategize your week. To think through the “must dos” and the “would be nice to get dones”. Establishing the priorities that will underpin your week and make it meaningful. Thinking about how what you do connects back to what you want. By doing so, you have set out how you will commit to spending your time, making it that much easier to say yes or no to any unplanned distractions.
I have found that tracking actions, checking off things that are done or even migrating actions that I couldn’t get around to, to be incredibly self-assuring. Just because I didn’t get around to finishing a non-urgent task is not the end of the world. I simply migrate it across to the next week. Admin tasks tend to be my “migrated” to-do’s that I am trying to improve on.
By planning my time in this manner, the number of ‘fires’ I need to fight have been dramatically reduced. Taking those 20 strategy minutes on a Monday morning, I acknowledge potential fires on the horizon, attend to important tasks sooner and in doing so clear space in my schedule to focus on other things.
