Permission to Schedule Personal Priorities - Granted
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
In a recent podcast, Marie Forleo shared some of her tips for how she manages her time. One of her tips is to schedule your priorities, including your personal priorities. Marie says, “If it’s not scheduled, it’s not real.” Any activities that she considers non-negotiables in her life (like workouts and dates with her husband) are scheduled on her calendar.
When I train my clients and look at their calendars, the calendars are often completely full of professional meetings. They have personal endeavors that they want to do more in their lives, but they passively let others fill up their calendars for them and don’t block time for the activities they want personally. You most likely won’t magically find the time you need to complete the activities you want in your life, you have to plan and schedule that time. For some of my clients that means blocking 2 hours every morning before their full-time job to write. Some plan and block evenings every couple of weeks to go out with their significant other. Some load all of their children’s home football games as soon as they receive the schedule so they are sure to attend the games. For others, it’s blocking a week every 6 months to go on a retreat to quiet the noise in their lives and think long and deep about how to advance their company. For me, most days, I need to plot my time to exercise, get ready, help my son get ready and to school, relax before my son comes home, and then welcome my son home/help him with homework/eat dinner.
If you have personal priorities that you never seem to accomplish, perhaps it is time to start scheduling those activities on your calendar. You may have to look a few weeks from now if your calendar is already full in the near future, but start blocking your schedule and treat those blocks as non-negotiable. And if you need to move a block to accommodate a pressing professional commitment, replace the personal time somewhere else, don’t erase. Schedule your personal priorities, and start living the life you desire.
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Sincerely Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team