Supercoach - Michael Neill [46]
Word #1: Clarity
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, young Alice has the following exchange with the Cheshire Cat:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
If it does matter to you which way your life goes, then the most important choice you can make is what you choose to make important.
There are a number of excellent systems for this, which I will sum up briefly:
— ABC priorities. This is perhaps the most common piece of time-management wisdom—prioritize your goals and tasks according to a simple ABC system of “Must, Should, Could.” My own slight variation on this is to redefine ABC in terms of real-world consequences:
A = Bad things happen if I don’t.
B = Good things happen if I do.
C = That would be nice.
— The four quadrants. Stephen R. Covey made the four-quadrant approach of Roger and Rebecca Merrill famous in his landmark book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Essentially, every goal or activity can be placed in one of four quadrants:
I. Important and urgent
II. Important but not urgent
III. Not important but urgent
IV. Not important and not urgent
What makes this system different from a simple ABCD is the relative weighting of each quadrant. While Quadrant I activities (important and urgent) still need to be tackled first, the real gold is to be found in Quadrant II—doing what’s important before it becomes urgent.
— The 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule is based on an anomaly first pointed out by the 19th-century economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that 80 percent of a nation’s wealth seemed to be controlled by 20 percent of its people.
Once you start looking, you can find this 80/20 relationship everywhere, and time management is no exception—80 percent of your meaningful results come from 20 percent of your efforts.
The simplest way I have found to apply 80/20 to my goals and tasks is this:
1. Make up a master task list (or goal list)— everything you could possibly think of to do to move forward in your life.
2. Add up the number of items on the list and divide that number by 5. This will be your 80/20 number. (For example, if there are 20 things on the list, your 80/20 number will be 4; if there are 50 items on your list, your 80/20 number will be 10.)
3. Your 80/20 number represents the most important 20 percent of the items on your list. If you were only allowed to focus on this many goals or activities, which ones would you choose? Which ones would fall away?
While any of the above clarification systems are valuable, they are only necessary up to the point where you have clarity. This quality allows you to take the millions of things you could be doing with your time and narrow them down to the one, two, or three things that are really important at any given moment. It lets you choose what matters most so that it will never be at the mercy of what matters least.
But you may have noticed that even when you’re clear about what’s most important, you don’t always manage to get it done. Enter the second word of our three-word system . . .
Word #2: Structure
Have you ever wondered why it is that you never find time to work on your novel or move forward on your “Wow!” goals, but you pretty much always find time to brush your teeth and take out the garbage?
Is it because teeth brushing and garbage dumping matter so much more than expressing your creativity and living the life of your dreams? Or is it because you have a structure in place for getting them done?
There are two kinds of structure that adapt most easily to getting things done effortlessly:
1. External reminders. The reason you probably get the garbage to the curb at roughly the