During this week of Thanksgiving here in the US, many people will be driving or flying to visit family. It is an opportunity to take a few days off and recharge your batteries. Looking back over the year, how have you been spending your time? Are you spending your time on the most valuable things? Are you doing things that make you happy? Are you spending all of your time on work and not taking time for yourself, family and friends? Here are a few ideas on how you can change that from an article called: 5 Ways to Make Space for Joy in Your Life by Carson Tate. This article has some great ideas that you can implement immediately into your day.
- Decline or Shorten a Meeting
- How many meetings have you been attending that seem to have no purpose and don’t accomplish any outcomes?
- Look at the intent of the meeting and if your presence really adds value by being there.
- If you focused differently, could you be done in 30 minutes instead of an hour?
- Clear the Mental Clutter
- Do you find that you have a constant to do list running through your brain taking up space?
- Take the time to write all those things down that are running through your brain. You can do this first thing in the morning or right before bed.
- Getting all those things out of your brain frees up space to be able to come up with new ideas and be more creative.
- Create a Stop Doing List
- This is where you can reflect on what you are doing and stop doing things that aren’t serving you well
- Are there things that you are doing that don’t align with your goals or priorities?
- Are you doing these things because you alway have?
- You can stop these non-value add activities and proactively spend your time on the right things.
- Get into a workflow
- Can you batch your work to focus on certain types of activities vs jumping from thing to thing?
- Here are some examples: Schedule all of your one on one or mentoring meetings on the same day, do all of your administrative work on Fridays, set all of your goals for the week on Sunday night or Monday morning, find an uninterrupted place and turn off phones, emails, etc to put together a new process or strategy recommendation
- Schedule these activities based on the energy that you need to accomplish them. High energy times will be needed when lots of thinking/planning is required and low energy times when you can accomplish things that are easier.
- Stop “Shoulding” all over yourself
- Using the acronym of POWER to just say no to those “should” activities
- POWER stands for Priorities, Opportunities, Who, Expectations and Real (take a look at this section in the article for more details)
- Say no to the shoulds and say yes to the things that are moving you forward
Hopefully this list has given you some ideas of where you can open up some space in your life. Even if you only start to implement one of these ideas, you will start to see changes in how you are spending your time and what you are accomplishing. Leaders need time to think and plan. You can be really busy, but not ever accomplish the things that you need to be doing. Wouldn’t you rather spend your time on the things that add value, align with your priorities and bring you joy?