this is the blog post form Asianefficiency.com , please help me read in natural speed. i hope by reading it you can learning something too ^^
Can you see how some of my values are not aligned with my major activities at all? Here’s the same list where you can see which ones were aligned and which ones were not.
Even though I spent a lot of time with my friends, I never saw my family. Due to traveling and working many hours I never made it a priority to have more face time with people who are very important to me. I remember a quote from time management guru Brian Tracy on this matter that changed my mind:
The purpose of time management and getting more done in less time is to enable you to spend more face time with the people you care about and doing the things that give you the greatest amount of joy in life.
Another item where I was out of alignment was “living healthy”. None of my major activities even reflected that. In fact, they are more like the opposite of living healthy. I knew I had to remove worrying and watching TV out of that list and replace these with activities that would align with one or more of my values.
After doing this exercise and realizing how unaligned my actions with my values were, that’s when I changed my life around and things started to take off. This became my new list:
When you are not aligned, you are wasting your time and robbing yourself of energy that could have been channeled more useful. Whenever you catch yourself out of alignment, figure out a way to get back into it and especially pay attention to things you do repeatedly. In other words, your habits. I don’t want you beat yourself up if one of your values is “living healthy” and you one time eat a big juicy hamburger. However, if you repeatedly find yourself in the drive-thru line and ordering junk food, you might have a conflict there. So pay attention to your rituals, not your one-off events. A great and nifty trick to find your major habits is by doing the Sims 3 experiment.
Your values will also change over time depending on many factors and that is totally fine (notice my shift of “girlfriend” to “dating”). Just make sure you are staying in alignment by having your major activities reflect that. Keep the big picture in mind and make sure your actions are aligned with achieving the big picture.
While doing things smarter, faster, saving minutes here and there, using the pomodoro technique, using to do lists, etc, are all good and helpful but it is still not productive if you are using them when you are out of alignment. You are the most productive when your values and goals are aligned with your actions. So let me ask you, what can you do to get yourself in alignment?
Next Actions
Do the exercise as described in the opening paragraphs.
Identify which values are aligned with the appropriate activities.
Identify which values are not aligned.
Figure out which activities you should eliminate and what to replace them with.
Review this exercise every 6 months.
