by | Mar 30, 2022 | Article
3 TIPS FOR PEACEFUL PRODUCTIVITY by Kim Christiansen, The Financial Wellness Coach
1. Be More Proactive
My favorite tip for creating peaceful productivity is to brainstorm all the ways that you can become more proactive. It feels great to get ahead of things!
Peace of mind comes from a sense of knowing what to expect and confidence in your strategies for handling the unexpected.
For me, I work on becoming more proactive by carving out planning time and PROTECTING IT in my calendar. Whether it’s 5 minutes per day, 60 minutes a week, or 90 minutes a month (or all of the above!), putting this time in your calendar is the best way I know to translate your good intentions into commitment.
Creating a plan can be the first step to becoming more proactive. Even if it’s a quick 5-minute plan on what the next 60 minutes looks like.
And… the better you get at short-term planning, the better positioned you are to make strategic plans to accomplish longer-term goals.
Many of us get sucked into the minutiae of our lives, so busy taking care of others and taking care of business, that we forget to zoom out and make conscious choices about the life that we want to have.
I find it helpful to remind myself that I get to decide what I want to focus on.
2. Set Clear Goals
Having specific goals gives you the ability to focus your time, money, and energy on those things that are most important to you. When you slip into the day-to-day routine and you get busy, you may be tempted to take on tasks that don’t necessarily align with your long-term goals.
When creating goals, I like to ask myself, “What is the result that I want to create with this goal?” From a place of creation, I then ask myself, “What are the strategic actions that will get me to that result?”
Once I get really clear on what’s most important to me, and why, making decisions at the day-to-day task level gets so much easier!
It might still be hard to say no to that great opportunity, or when I don’t want to let someone down; however, when I have a sense of the bigger picture and my longer-term priorities, then I am way more inclined to make those tougher day-to-day decisions… and have my own back through the process!
3. Put it on Your Calendar
The best way that I’ve found to convert good intentions into action is to move your to-do list into your calendar.
Moving these tasks into your calendar gives you visibility into your commitments and your capacity.
When a task sits on a list, it feels like it ‘could’ happen. We can easily fool ourselves into believing that we can achieve 30 things in the next hour. And then we’re surprised when we get only one, or none, of them done.
However, when it moves into your calendar, there is a feeling that this ‘will’ happen. This is because it forces us to get real about what we are actually capable of accomplishing in a given time frame. If you find yourself with a ‘rolling task list’ in which the list seems to grow faster than it shrinks, try scheduling more tasks into your calendar.
Using your calendar to schedule your tasks also gives you the opportunity to set aside time for things like planning, thinking time, re-energizing, and process improvement. These are all so important, yet when we’re not intentional about how we plan our time, they can get stuck at the bottom of the to-do list indefinitely.
Make your schedule work for you, instead of the other way around!