Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [64]
With goals in order, you can turn to the active projects on which you’re moving forward at least every week or two. Consider how many active projects for which you actually have time at the moment if you’re going to be successful with any of them.
Decide on what you want or need to be working now and confirm that all of the projects on your list are really about you and what you should be doing. Be sure to include creative, artistic, or fun projects on your list to keep a good balance in your life. Consider your inactive projects long enough to confirm that the right stuff is getting your attention and swap active and inactive status on projects as necessary.
At this point, you are ready to get down to the specific tasks, which are the steps in completing these projects. It’s easy to spend most of our days down in the trenches putting together the components of our bigger ideas. When you return from a vacation, take advantage of your higher perspective to see the whole landscape and confirm that the details are still in line with the blueprint for yourself.
Some last things to contemplate while you’re looking at the big picture are “roadblocks” and “tools.”
Are you facing roadblocks right now? Anything hanging you up, actually or mentally? You can often tease out the answers to this question by considering what problem you most want solved this week, what interferes the most with working on your top priorities, and what work you most dread. Sometimes the roadblocks take the form of barriers to trust, collaboration, commitment, or success within a team. Reframe those problems as projects and find actions that you can take to reduce that barrier.
Do you have the tools and processes you need for sustainable success? Look at how you track what needs to be done for your active projects, what you may want to do later on inactive projects, and how you get the inactive stuff out of your head so you can focus on the active. Examine the method by which you decide what to do next and bring it closer to flowing naturally from your big-picture decisions instead of just being whatever falls into your lap because it’s quick and easy, next in your calendar or inbox, the pet topic of a squeaky wheel, or the most stale. Take the temperature on where your time goes and keep it in the hot zone of your top priorities.
Now choose the next five actions that will drive forward what is most important and write them down.
Calmly, without beating yourself up, think back on some things that went wrong or were not as you’d hoped. Find common patterns and brainstorm on how those patterns can start to change. In all this relaxed thinking, and with the knowledge that the world didn’t stop turning while you were on vacation, see if you’ve uncovered something you could start delegating, a meeting that you no longer need to attend or could make shorter or less frequent.
Lastly, from this point of perspective, ask yourself if there is anything about which you’ve been caring that doesn’t fit in; if so, give yourself permission to stop caring about that. Maybe it’s a dream you’ve dropped, something that really ought to be parked on a someday-maybe list (or crossed off of one), or an obstacle that’s nonexistent or insignificant on which it’s time to stop fixating needlessly.
What do you do on vacation that you would enjoy doing a little bit every week? Find something unrewarding to cut, and replace that with your favorite soul-restoring time. For many people, it is sitting down and losing yourself in a book for a while. Wall off some time to feed your stock of ideas.
Take a deep breath and remember yourself in this mental space of clear perception. The next time things get crazy—and after a vacation it often can come fast—remember that you have the capability to get back here.
Vacation lessons year round: precuperate
Preparing isn’t only a useful trick when leaving town. You can take the