My old one had suffered a bad drop by yours truly, and the camera no longer worked. Plus the sound quality on calls had been decreasing, so overall it was time to upgrade. The package arrived on a Monday and although I was excited to get into it, set it up and have a working camera again, I waited. I waited till Saturday.
Benefits
My housemates were amazed at my discipline.
They wanted to see the phone and I almost did open the package to show them but then I stopped. My housemates could wait till Saturday too. Ideally the package would have arrived on the Friday and I’d have been able to have a play and get to know the set up over the weekend.
The reason I waited was because I could foresee that it would suck up a lot of my attention. I knew that I would unpack it, goggle at it, set it all up, watch YouTube clips like ‘50+ Amazing Tips to Customize Your Galaxy Note 20 Ultra’ and ‘Samsung Galaxy Note 20 S Pen – 11 Top New Tips’ and really get into it. I know this about myself.
So I knew that to
1) really enjoy the experience of getting to know my new phone, and
2) not derailing my week and achieving what I’d set out to do, that I had to WAIT.
Three Ingredients
So that’s what I did. I popped the package away. Made a calendar appointment with myself that the coming Saturday I’d set up and get to know my new phone and carried on with my week as planned. Saturday rolled around and I’d had a massive week – held my first webinar amongst other things, and had moved ahead on important projects. In the end, unpacking my new phone was a huge reward for having done these things. It was fun and I had the time and space to just enjoy it rather than dealing with that nagging voice that I knew would have chimed up and said ‘You shouldn’t be doing this… you should be prepping!’.
I often speak with clients about the value of knowing yourself, being aware of your current workload, and respecting your time and values. These key ingredients come together to make a very well balanced time management tool kit. Without these ingredients coming together, in my example above, I would have lost the whole of Monday, which would have snowballed into me becoming very anxious about my webinar and letting people down, and I would have fallen behind on project milestones. At the end of the day, these were in place first, they were the priorities. Everything else cropping up had to fall in line and wait their turn.
Of the three ingredients I mentioned here: knowing yourself (your tendencies, your habits, strengths and weaknesses), awareness of your current workload (what do you have on your task list and in your calendar), and respect for your values; which ones do you need to spend more time on to fully flesh out your tool kit?
Christie
PS: Have you HOLA’d? Sometimes you need to carve out a few minutes in your week to really LOOK at your life. Where are you heading? What goals are important to you? What you’re happy with and what do you want to change? Robin S. Sharma says “Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life”. And that’s the inspiration behind my HOLA [Holistic Organising Life Audit] tool. It’s simple in appearance – a one page, fill-it-in, sort out your life kinda tool. But big on impact! Download it here or reply.
