The Importance of Evaluation

I spent the day today in a FranklinCovey seminar on "Focus." The first half of the seminar gave us a vision for why we need focus in our lives, the second half gave us practical ways for prioritizing and then maintaining our focus on the things that are truly important. (An hour of which was a blatant infomercial on the FranklinCovey Planner system. Yawn.)

My clear take away from today is that I spend too much of my time reacting and too little time planning. I've made to do lists, but my problem is that I don't check them regularly and evaluate my progress. I set reminders for an item, and then it just nags me and I eventually turn off the reminder and forget about it.

Here are some things I'm committing to do for at LEAST the next three weeks.
• Spend between 10 and 30 minutes each week planning for the upcoming week. For practical reasons, I'm blocking out Saturday mornings for this task.
• Schedule time at work to prioritize and schedule my day.
• Review the days tasks and appointments regularly (need to define what 'regularly' means)
• On worknights, head to bed around 9pm with a goal of sleeping at 10pm.
• Spend 5-10 minutes each evening reviewing my tasks and appointments and planning for the following day.

This is probably going to be a frustrating 3 weeks. Changing habits is difficult. I want to do this so I am the one choosing actively how I spend my time, rather than having it chosen for me.