After watching Laura Vanderkam’s: How to gain control of your free time Ted Talk, it inspired me to move my butt off the couch and come upstairs to write this post. While a relatively benign title, the content of the talk really resonated with me.
Takeaways
- “I don’t have time really means that’s not a priority to me”. This is a good reminder for what I had learned early in life and what hopefully is obvious to everyone. Laura gave an example of how a homeowner had their hot water heater break and water leak all over. The homeowner spent 7 hours cleaning up the mess and fixing the issue. Laura then went on to say with this person so busy how did he or she find 7 hours in one week to resolve this.
- When setting goals, set goals across different areas of your life. Her recommendation was setting goals across “Career / Profession, Relationships, and Self”. To me, that’s brilliant because that encompasses the major life areas. If I had to add one, it may be “environment”.
Laura definitely has me rethinking my Goals & Priorities. As someone whose goals and priorities frequently change, I thought I’d write them down and share them. This will allow me to reflect on what things are a priority or not and have a greater likelihood of commitment and attainment.
Goals & Priorities
Happy & Healthy Family
Having a happy and healthy family is by far my biggest priority and goal. There will be unhappy and unhealthy times but striving for this is where it’s at.
How will I do this? By “making it so” as Captain Picard used to say. And by allocating time for family, and by providing for them, and by doing the right thing.
I thought about including weight loss but I’m actually quite happy with my body and health so this isn’t a priority for me.
Relationships
Relationships with people is where there’s opportunity for great improvement. I tend to be a loner. A guy who likes to read, learn, analyze and tinker with things. Lately though, I’ve found that spending quality time with people brings great pleasure and fulfillment to my life. As a result, I will take every opportunity that comes my way.
Helping Others
Helping others is another priority for me. This reminds me of a “Walking Dead” scene where Carol asks King Ezekiel “Why are you helping me?” and he responds “because it makes me feel good”.
One way I’m doing this is by mentoring a junior in high school in his independent study class to learn Object Oriented programming and design to help build a 2D game engine he’s been wanting to build. I have to brush up on my C++ but am really looking forward to this. I wish I had a programming mentor when I was in high school.
Provide Best Service To Customers
Providing the best service possible to my customers is very important to me. If you’re paying me to do a job, you’re getting the best I have to offer each and every moment!
To a Lesser Extent
- Keep Learning and collaborating with others.
- Minimize complaining and take action to eliminate the complaint. This is something that I’ve done a lot more in recent years. It’s better to try to fix the complaint than endlessly talk about it.
- Become a certified Salesforce Technical Architect.
What are your goals and priorities?