Applying Your System on a Daily Level.

Last week, I wrote why your projects and tasks need to be flowing from your areas of focus. Those areas of your life you consider to be important. This week, I want to explain why this matters and how it applies to our daily lives.

With so many distractions, opportunities and demands, it is easy to go with the ebbs and flows of the day. To react to what’s happening around us. To jump at every demand that drops into our inboxes and leave the day feeling exhausted yet unfulfilled.

The truth is, when all your days are like that, you are going to arrive at the destination we all will one day arrive at wondering what happened to our lives. We will question what we did with our lives and at that point it will be too late.

This is why spending some time now, wherever you are in your life, writing out what is important to you and making sure all your projects, goals and tasks come from your areas of focus. The things that are important to you.

So, how does this work on a daily basis?

For those who work as an employee or as an employer or a self-employed business owner we will come in to contact with customers and partners. If we are a stay at home parent, we have work associated with raising our kids and around bringing stability to the family home. Many things are coming at us.

Let’s look at the area of focus called “career and business”. Now, in here we have a statement about who we want to be as an employee, employer or business owner. If you like, we have a mission statement.

In the above example, you see a kind of mission statement concerning the way you will conduct yourself and what you want to accomplish. In this example, the writer, wants to learn how to run a business, develop their skills and ultimately build their business.

Next to that statement, there are a number of action items. Some are behavioural — “always be polite, generous and kind towards the people I come into contact with”. Some are actionable — “Start each day with a plan to make sure I stay on top of all my projects”.

As you develop your areas of focus, you can take the actionable items and put them into your Recurring Areas of Focus folder in your task manager. In this example, you would create a daily recurring task “Do my daily planning” and make sure that happens every day.

(For more on the Recurring Areas of Focus folder, take a look at the Time Sector System)

The behaviour type action items can be reviewed as part of your weekly planning session. Alternatively, you can write these out in your journal so you remind yourself of them frequently.

Now, each day as you do your work, you are going to be receiving many inputs. These will be in the form of customer requests, tasks given to you by your boss and tasks that come to you from any projects you are working on. The normal day to day stuff.

If you are clear about what you want to achieve from your career, you will take each of these tasks as developing your career, for learning new things and gaining experience. You give your day-to-day work a purpose.

Most people do not look at work this way. They look at it as a means to receive a pay cheque at the end of the month. They see a demand from a boss or a customer as an inconvenience and not as an opportunity to learn and grow. When you look at your work in this manner, how are you likely to feel at the end of the day?

I get many questions from people asking how to manage hundreds of email each day, demands from bosses and customers and finding time to do their work. And it is a good question. But…

If you only see your work as a means to a pay-cheque, then every new input is going to be an inconvenience to you. All these inputs do not contribute directly to the pay-cheque. It also likely means you hate your work, have no passion for what you are doing and feel pretty miserable at the end of the day. You live for the weekend and you feel depressed on a Sunday night because you have to go back to your workplace on Monday.

If, on the other hand, you see your work as an opportunity to learn, to gain valuable experience and to develop yourself, your attitude to your work will be very different. You will see each new demand, input and request as gaining experience. While your work may not be a joy, it will be a means to a higher goal — to gain as much experience as you can so you will one day be able to start your business.

So, all these inputs are learning experiences. Train yourself to make better decisions on what you should and can do. Learn to delegate, say no and respond quickly. It’s all part of the daily process.

Let’s take another example

In the above example, we have a clear mission statement about what you will do for your financial health. There are a number of action steps too. Putting $1,000 into your savings every month can be moved to your Recurring Areas of Focus folder, likewise putting a call into your financial advisor and reviewing your investments. These may not need to be done weekly, but you may decide to do them every three months.

(You can see how I manage my recurring areas of focus in this video)

There is also a behavioural action step — “do not make impulse purchases”, and when you review your areas each week you will be reminded of this behaviour.

With this example, you have an annual savings target of $12,000, so there is a goal attached to it and this then links to your career area as you will need some form of work for you to be able to save your target amount each month.

Because your actionable steps are being moved into your Recurring Areas of Focus folder in your task manager, you are always making progress on your areas of focus.

What this means is no matter what is being thrown at you each day, you know the important things in your life are being taken care of. They come up on your daily task list when they need acting on. It also helps you prioritise your days and ensures that no matter what is being thrown you, you can make better decisions about what to do based on your overall areas.

A lot of what we receive each day is not critical. We do not have to act. When you have a clear set of areas of focus, the way you see your work and your life, in general, enables you to learn, grow and improve — the Constant And Never-Ending Improvement (CANI) mindset allows you to learn and develop new ways of doing your work so you are more effective with your time. You learn the importance of the word “no”, and you are comfortable using it.

And because you are always seeking to improve your areas they will change over time. When I look at my career and business area of focus today and compare it to five years ago, it is very different. Five years ago I was just starting out on my business journey. I wasn’t completely sure how I was going to develop the business. All I knew at that stage was I wanted to help as many people as I could become better organised and more productive. Today, I have more clarity on where I want to go, how I want to develop my business and where I want to be in five and ten years time.

That’s what developing your areas of focus does for you. It gives you clarity, direction and a purpose. Without knowing your higher areas, you make decisions based on what is the loudest. The loudest tasks are rarely the most important tasks. Often these are the tasks that other people want to push off on to you but are not your responsibility. When you know your areas, you know what to prioritise so your days are productive, fulfilling and a joy.

If you are in the Time Sector Course, I added a new lesson last week explaining this in detail and showing you how to use your notes app to build your areas of focus. If you would like to learn more about the Time Sector Course, you can do so right here.

Thank you for reading my stories! 😊 My purpose is to help 1 million people by the end of 2020 to live the lives they desire. To help people find happiness and become better organised and more productive so they can do more of the important things in life.

If you would like to learn more about the work I do, and how I can help you to become better organised and more productive, you can visit my website or you can say hello on Twitter, YouTube or Facebook and subscribe to my weekly newsletter right here.