Planning Your Time With Purpose

If you're like most people, there's a gap between how you spend your time and what's deeply important to you. Often, people are surprised at how little time they spend doing the things that mean the most to them.

If you the time the to examine your life, your motives, and your "first things," you can come up with a plan that is inclusive of all your desires, giving you more time for the things that you have to do, while at the same time fitting in time for the important things that you want to do.

Time is the most valuable asset that you have. So, in order to maximize your time you must discipline yourself to plan and prioritize every week. This means taking the steps necessary to put together a plan with purpose.

The first step in planning and prioritizing is for you to connect with your mission or your passion. What's your overall purpose in life? What's most important to you? What are the principles that you'd like to use as criteria to evaluate your goals?

The second step is to review your roles. What are your roles? Everyone has several. For example, some of yours might be as a spouse, friend, parent, child, boss, salesperson, manager, club or team member, and the list goes on. These are the areas of your life in which you need to focus your activities and your energy.

What are some of your roles? List some of them, I recommend no more than seven. Now, think of one of your roles. What's the most important thing you want to accomplish in that role in the coming week? Think of the next role, and come up with the most important thing in the next week for that role. Repeat the process with all of them.

The third step in planning and prioritizing is to create a schedule. Look at the coming week and see where you can best allocate and maximize your time to fill all of the roles you listed in step two.

Obviously, it's impossible to follow a schedule to the letter. As you follow your weekly list, you should be aware of other people and their needs. You must always remember that people are more important than schedules. So with that being said; what about the unplanned priorities that inevitably arise?

So, the next step is having a self-dialogue with yourself where you plan moment-by-moment, hour-by-hour and ask yourself some important core questions such as, "Is what I'm doing on target? What's most important here? Is this next? What really counts?

At the end of each week you need to ask yourself important questions to summarize how well the week has gone. Some of the questions you should be asking are, "What did I learn from this past week? Did I focus on the most important items? Look at the unexpected problems and difficulties you faced and ask yourself, "What do I think life is trying to teach me?

If you continue to plan and prioritize your life every week, you'll be amazed at not only how much time you've been able to save at the end of the year but also how much you will have accomplished. There will be a significant difference in the quality of both your personal and professional lives.

Another way to save time, plan and get in touch with the important things in your life is to start your own personal mission journal. This can be a little notebook or a file on your computer, something you carry with you. Keep it with you regularly, and you'll have someplace to record little moments of insight and interesting experiences.

Keeping this journal will change the way you think about life and how you spend your time. It will help you perfect your vision. Having a vision is being able to see your future it's the act of beginning a project with the end in mind. You have a mental picture of it. This mental picture is what guides every decision that you make every day.

When you combine vision with principles, you have the foundation for a mission statement. This is where your journal comes in. Set a date with yourself, block it out in your weekly planning session, to look over some of those recorded insights and thoughts, digest them, and start coming up with your first draft of a personal mission statement.

Here are three things that a good mission statement must have:

• It must represent the deepest and best within you.

• It must fulfill your own unique gifts.

• It must transcend, in other words, it is larger than life, larger than you.

A good mission statement should be based on the principles that produce quality-of-life results. It should have the kind of vision in it that you can actually see in your mind's eye. It should deal with all of the significant roles in your life. It should be written to inspire you, to lift you, to bring the very best out from inside you.

When you begin to set up your personal mission statement and just keep following it, it will become ingrained more deeply within you. As you understand it more fully, it will become part of everything you do. When unexpected setbacks and problems take you off course your mission statement will pull you back on track and you'll end up right where you want to be.

You may be off course most of your life, but so what? Continue planning your time so that you can get the important things done; keep your vision and principles in sight, and keep going back to them. When you discipline yourself do this on a weekly basis you'll achieve more in a few years than most people achieve in a lifetime.

Copyright©2007 by Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.