Click here for Prioritising for Productivity (Part 1)
OK, so now you’ve looked through your life and at all the things that you need to be doing to achieve your mission and long term goals, and you’ve eliminated all the activities that were wasting your time or don’t serve your goals. So what should you do with the rest of that long to-do list? Where do you start?
Create a Timeline
The first step is to look at the timeline of what you need to do to progress towards your long-term goals to work out your priorities in terms of time.
Break your goals down into smaller steps, so you know what you need to achieve in a year, then a month and then the current week. Doing this will put your activities in perspective and remove many of them from your focus for the time being, so you can just concentrate on what needs to be done now.
When you get down to the level of what you need to do this week, there will be some things that have to be done on specific days, such as appointments and regular meetings, which will already be blocked out on your calendar. There may also be some tasks that you can only do on certain days, due to the need for them to coincide with a particular event, so you can mark them as tasks for those specific days.
Internet page and the same old heartrending stories kept re-emerging;‘Ongoing protests against the regime ends in violence’, ‘War and natural disasters leaves millions displaced from their homes’, ‘National obesity levels and crime rates highest in years’, ‘A veto has been passed against the Palestinians as Israeli oppression continues’, ‘Poverty soars as thousands in need of food and water’, ‘Conflict within the region causes disunity amongst the people’. I closed the page. That was enough heartache for the evening. I felt frustrated, so far detached from these global and local affairs, as well as helpless, unsure of what impact I could make from my enclosed dwelling.
