Do you approach your work, relationships, hobbies, your life by just going through the motions or are you intentional? Did you think of what you wanted to accomplish today? How you can improve? Where or with whom you are going to make a difference? Do you have a purpose? Do you have a positive attitude?
Our time is so valuable. You are investing a moment of your life on what you are doing at this moment. You can just do what is required or you can acknowledge the worth of spending a portion of your life and give it all you have. With gusto, purpose, pizzazz, excellence, and so on.
It doesn’t matter where you are or what you are doing. You can be at work doing the most mundane job, reading a story to a child, attending a pee wee baseball game, or mowing the lawn. All of these tasks can be approached half-way (show up and just get through it) or all in (I’m going to do this with excellence).
The choice is yours. It is your life. How are you going to spend the time? Are you going to be highly effective or will you look back on a life of regrets and missed opportunity? Dig in.
You just spent a minute reading this blog. Take another two minutes and decide what you are now going to do intentionally as a result.
Take a Break
Where do you stand when it comes to taking a vacation or a well-deserved break? There is a spectrum. On one side of the spectrum are those that use up every minute of their vacation, utilize every 15-minute break and have a quality lunch away from their desk. Then there are those that take the minimal amount necessary because they are afraid of asking, worried that they will get behind and the world will end if they step away from their desk or phone for a minute. No breaks and lunch at their desk (if they take lunch at all). Honestly ask yourself where you sit on the spectrum.
It is so important to take time to recharge. In our book, “Juggling Elephants,” we call it an intermission. Taking time off (15 minutes for a walk around the office building, 60 minutes for lunch away from your desk, 1 day for a “mental wellness day”, or a week or two for a vacation) gives your brain a chance to slip into neutral and your body a chance to re-charge. Don’t underestimate the value of time off. Study after study shows that your effectiveness and productivity increase and that your quality of life and health will improve. Schedule some time right now in your calendar to regularly take a break.
Continual Growth
Consider Emily Carr’s quote, “Oh, the glory of growth, silent, mighty, persistent, inevitable! To awaken, to open up like a flower to the light of a fuller consciousness.”
Are you growing or shrinking? Are you staying fresh or going stale? Are you stretching or atrophying? Are you improving your relationships or just checking in on a social media post occasionally (literally or figuratively)? Grow!
Turn the Bell Off!
This is a trap that I find myself completely caught in. I am working on a project on my computer and all of a sudden I hear the familiar “dah duh, dah duh” of my email box announcing that I’ve got mail. Curious, I stop what I am doing and checkout what has just arrived. Or even worse, a little window pops up with, “Message from Wendy”. I wonder, “What does Wendy have to say”. Fifteen minutes later I am finished responding to Wendy and a few other messages that have arrived. I am now totally derailed from what I have been doing on my project. Email is a wonderful tool but it also can be a MAJOR interrupter and time waster. Try turning the bell and popup off. If email is critical to what you do at work, schedule a consistent time (like the top of the hour) to check email. Otherwise, fight the urge to check email too often – maybe only check it 2-3 times a day. You will be surprised how your focus will increase as well as your productivity.
Nature Fills Up a Vacuum
I teach a college class on Leadership, two evenings a week, two semesters a year. I take the summer semester off. My excuse always is that I want to focus on writing in the summer and I feel like I am too busy during school to really concentrate. I love teaching so much but I do find that I look forward to the summer break.
The summer break comes and now I have all this extra time on my hands, zam, boom, bang, zip. It is time for Fall semester and what have I accomplished? Ouch!
Nature truly abhors a vacuum. It is a physics thing, but it also seems real when it comes to managing our time. If you don’t intentionally fill up your time, someone or something else will.