Design your Week, Control your Time!

In life you have two choices; you either float through it by accident, dragged by its currents and moods, or you can do it on-purpose taking control of the helm and setting a course of your own design.

You can be reactive, or proactive… what’s it going to be?

Of course, I know; you cannot plan for everything. There are events you cannot anticipate, but it is a hell of a lot easier to get to your destination when you are proactive and have your destination in mind; and one great way to approach this strategy is by creating your Ideal Week, kind of a chart and a compass to steer you in the right direction.

I first heard of this concept from author, coach, and speaker Donald Miller, who originally heard it from his coach. The idea is similar to a financial budget; only in this one, you will plan how you will manage your time instead of your money.

Setting your Plan

In anyone’s ideal week –that is, the week you would live if you could control everything that happens to you- should be divided into a simple grid, so each day of the week has a main theme (listed at the top of the planner), and each day also is segmented into blocks, related to a specific focus area.

Themes

For instance, on an Ideal Week, the themes for the days of the week could be:

• Mondays could be Teams (one-on-one meetings, staff meetings, and general planning)

• Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Outside Tasks (travel, extended meetings, client visits, etc.)

• Thursdays could be Problem Solving days

• Fridays could be spent on medium and long-term planning

• Saturdays are for personal/recreational activities

• Sundays for rest, family, and spirituality

Focus Areas

It’s important to notice that there is no limit to the variety of things you can achieve if only you create firm boundaries around your time blocks and focus areas. If you don’t set them apart, work –it is mostly the case- will expand to the time allotted for it.

• Early mornings are reserved for self-nurturing activities (reading, meditating, working out)

• Middle morning to late afternoon is for work.

• The end of the day is reserved for family time and home (cooking, dining, writing, etc.); it’s a time to connect and catch up.

You can use some kind of color scheme to highlight or even chunk things down a little bit more. It’s all subjective, you can create your own scheme, as long as you make sure you’re working on what matters most.

Map your ideal week, and use it constantly to check whether you’re on course, or off course. Not always you’ll accomplish 100% of your weekly goals, but it will give you something to shoot for; and hey, hitting half percent of a perfectly designed week plan is an unbelievable productive week!

If you take on your weekly chunk of activities without knowing what your priorities are, and just ‘move forward’, you’re actually moving sideways or going around in circles. Unless you have a laser focus aim, you’re going to miss your target.

Remember, if you aim small, you’ll miss small.

Stay on target, stay strong!

One of the core values we have as a company is to inspire and empower people in all aspects of their lives. Additionally, if you want to read about our Custom Software Solutions and Consulting Services, please visit www.isucorp.ca

Stay on Top of Your Game

A life of success and fulfillment doesn’t happen overnight, it builds on our everyday actions and decisions. In the long run, success comes down to grit, a strong start, organization, and consistency.

The following are 9 tips you may want to consider in order to stay ahead and develop yourself into the leading force of your own success.

1. Get things started now

Starting strong helps you coast to the finish line with less stress than starting slow and agonizing over whether you will make your numbers or meet your goals.

2. Holidays can wait

Always put responsibilities first. Stop putting off what needs to get done. Procrastination only robs you of the time you desire for leisure activities. Remember why you chose your career and what's required to stand out amongst the best.

3. Perfection is not the name of the game

Business is not designed to be clear, easy or perfect. If you have been giving it all you’ve got, whatever mistakes you make are necessary and perfectly fine as learning experiences. The more mistakes you make, the more you grow, the more you develop your knowledge and expertise.

4. Make time for fun

If your life is all work and no play, you will not have the necessary space from your career to actually enjoy it. You need personal time to gain perspective on the benefits of what you do each day and to stay connected to the reasons that drive you to achieve. Enjoy the ride.

5. Work is not an end

Work isn’t where the fun ends, it’s where all of your new, important adventures begin. There is so much ahead of you that will expand your life. Each step along the way opens new doors of opportunity, which enrich your life in immeasurable ways.

6. Get into the game

If your life is boring, you’re doing something wrong. Always seek ways to get involved -- join groups, build networks, go to the gym, or attend church. Network within your own industry by attending as many in-person events/dinners as possible.

7. Say yes

Each day brings a new opportunity. Say yes to new things that take you outside your comfort zone. Say yes to your personal growth by choosing to do the exact things you fear. Train yourself to risk, and to risk again.

8. Be realistic

You cannot be successful if you consistently feel you’re not measuring up because you don't have enough time or the skills developed to be who you want to be. You will burnout under this pressure. Learn to succeed one imperfect step at a time.

9. Take care of yourself

You must be physically, emotionally and mentally sound to have the energy and brainpower necessary to be as successful as you desire to be; eat clean, get enough sleep, drink water, exercise and take a day off here and there just to relax. You cannot succeed at the expense of your own health.

Take a look at your day now, and see how you can improve it by putting these tips into practice; work on them for a while, and then come back here and tell us about your experience… I bet you’ll have great things to share!

Stay strong!

One of the core values we have as a company is to inspire and empower people in all aspects of their lives. Additionally, if you want to read about our Custom Software Solutions and Consulting Services, please visit www.isucorp.ca

Put Your Procrastination under the Magnifying Glass

We all had fallen into the bottomless pit of procrastination; I know I had, more than once… and I’d bet that you had too.

When it happens, we tend to think of it as just one unique way to avoid something; but if we were to get a magnifying glass and look closely, we would see that there are actually different reasons why we tend to get into procrastination mode.

Before we can work on getting rid of or circumventing our delaying habits, we need to understand where they’re coming from.

Let’s look through that glass and see the main reasons we fall into procrastination, and also some simple ways to overcome them:

1.    Feeling Overwhelmed

There are times when you’re faced with the complexity of a task at hand, and you think “there is no way I can get this done by x time… let’s channel-surf for a while instead”…  
Surely you’re familiar with this kind of Overwhelm-procrastination, which is the urge to avoid tasks that are just too big that you don’t know how to tackle them; you don’t find a way into it, so you put it off for as long as you possibly can, and find all kinds of excuses.

One easy way to overcome this feeling is to break big goals into small, concrete steps (often called “chunks”) you can work on right away.

2.   Fear

There are times when we avoid taking action just because taking that next step requires us to push ourselves into the unknown territory of “the Next Level”. Setting a higher year income, getting into a new market, writing your new chapter, or submitting the book to a publisher… we put these things off because they are Uncertainty incarnated… The Unknown, and we tend to assume the worst.

In this kind of situation, we go into survival mode; something that must have been helpful to the average caveman back in prehistoric times, but it is not for our own state of mind or achievement.

In this case, the best remedy against fear is faith, trust, confidence, and resolution. There is nothing to worry about, what doesn’t go well becomes a learning experience.
Again, tiny first steps are the best way to start; remember: you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take one step at the time.

3.   Lack of Incentive

We, humans, are wired to instinctively seek comfort. In order to motivate us out of the couch, we need a clear benefit –that or a big mean dog chasing our butts into discomfort. In other words, if we don’t think going to the gym is bringing us a tangible value, we won’t do it… why change things when we’re so comfy, right?

If we want to get results when there is no sense of urgency, we have to be able to visualize the potential pain that inaction will bring to us. Pain is a bigger motivator than pleasure, but we also have to envision the rewards of actually taking action.

This way, we have the stick and the carrot that will make us move and keep us moving.

Let’s say you want to lose some weight; it’s much easier to stay watching television and eating ice-cream than it is to face the reality that, if we keep this behavior, in a year or less we might look like the giant rock ball that chased Indiana Jones at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That image alone might be enough to get you to the gym.

Next time you’re faced with a project you just can’t seem to tackle, no matter how many times you write on your planner or put it on your to-do list; you need to figure out exactly why you’re avoiding it.

You need to see things clear first in order to lean the ladder against the right wall.

That way, every step we climb is getting closer to the right place.

When you get there, you will feel really, really good.

Stay strong!

One of the core values we have as a company is to inspire and empower people in all aspects of their lives. Additionally, if you want to read about our Custom Software Solutions and Consulting Services, please visit www.isucorp.ca