I promised I would share my journey with you as I seek to get more disciplined however at this point I realize that I’m really just dealing with productivity. I will continue to explore self-discipline as we go along.
I have made my list of tasks, projects and goals. It turns out that it was much harder than I anticipated. I had to examine every part of my life so I’ve got job related tasks, family, recreation, home etc. I keep looking at the list (I used a Word document file in notebook view) and am feeling like I’m missing something. I’ll keep adding items as I go along and think of things.
The next thing I did was start breaking each large task or goal down into components. For instance one of the items was “get my pilot’s license”. So I put some subcategories under it like, get my medical, pay for ground school, and study my aviation books. I know I probably haven’t thought of everything but the system I’m using is flexible enough so I can easily add new items.
After I created the first list, I separated the items into general categories. So I created a new page in the notebook for categories like recreation, renovations, clean-up and unfiled. I also created a page for current work so that I could move tasks to that page and have a todo list for the day.
Even though I hadn’t completed the list yet I did move a few items to the current work page and got going on them on Saturday. It was the most productive Saturday I’ve had in months.
The next thing I’m going to do is start prioritising the list. I need to see how much I can eliminate because it’s just not important. Some of the non-important things didn’t make it onto my list and I won’t add them. Productivity501 has a pretty good article on prioritising things. Check it out.
I will keep you informed as to how it’s going.
What do you think? Do you have any ideas for me? Leave them in the comments.
