Follow Your Passions

In my previous post, I talked about the importance of identifying what you feel are the most important themes in your life. If you have accomplished that, I think you’re on a path to living a healthier life filled with success as you yourself define success.

What I would like to suggest you do next is to increase your awareness of how you are spending your time. Keeping your self-defined major themes in mind, begin journalling your days and how you are spending your time from hour to hour, and if appropriate in smaller chunks of time. Try to capture the major things happening during each time period. If you eat dinner while watching television, those are two separate things to journal.

As you are tracking your time, compare how you are spending your time with the major themes you previously identified as the most important to you. How do the activities you are taking part in during the day match up with your themes? Are you spending three or four hours a day watching television? Is “Watch a lot of television” one of the major things you identified as important to you? If so, then great, you’re well in tune with what is important to you. If not, though, maybe it is time to start re-evaluating how you are spending some of your time.

I want to say that I am not saying you need to unplug your TV and toss it out the window! My themes, as I mentioned, included my health, my wife, my family, my work, and my faith. So if I am sitting back watching mindless junk on TV and doing nothing else, then that isn’t very in line with what I say is important to me. But what if I am sitting in the living room with my wife and family, watching Joel Osteen give a sermon on TV, while I answer a few e-mails from work? Now I’m in TOTAL alignment with my passions and I’m multi-tasking extremely effectively.

And that’s one of the big things to take from this exercise. It isn’t just about making sure the thing you are doing is in line with your themes, it is adapting how you already life your life to infuse it with things that build your important themese stronger. In time, you’ll get really good at filtering your decisions on how you spend your time through the question of whether it enhances your life or is ust a distraction (and distractions, some times, are okay – we all need a little time to just chill out and unwind).

You’ll also start to get good at multi-tasking. “How many themes am I strengthening at one time? Can I be doing something right now to add a few of my themes to what I am doing?” This sort of thinking will eventually lead to becoming a much better time manager, and you will be amazed at how much you accomplish in a day’s time.

Next up: “Life is a beach”