For most of my 29 years, I thought the latter was true, hurriedly moving from one thing to the next, often not really stop and contemplate the reasons, directions, and consequences of my actions. Maybe that’s why I suffered a lot of burnouts, or less flatteringly, “Chicken Running with Its Head Cut Off” syndrome. Now I favor pacing myself with bursts of purposeful actions at the appropriate times. It helps to think things through, even write them down.
Using a basketball analogy, Michael Jordan in his early professional years exhibits tremendous raw physical ability to go directly to the hoops, and score. But he paid dearly from the physical punishment by the defending players, resulting in some serious injuries. After his first retirement, and return from baseball, Michael’s shooting game improved drastically with fadeaway jump shots at the top of the Key, less action, but often more effective.
Having a routine really improves self discipline. It helps you do the things that you should do, but sometimes don’t really like. By having it in the morning, you’re able to “get them over with,” and move on to other more enjoy things. Things like exercise, setting goals, and writings are good candidates. The key is to be consistent and build habits by doing them daily.
Buy low, sell high. Screw the market price. Throw enough wild offers, and eventually something’s gonna stick. See example below. Bought the stock recently at $1.40. A couple of days ago, it soared to a peak of $1.97, triggered my sale order, and then plunged back to earth I felt like a 6 year old kid who got locked in a candy store.
Warren Buffet once mentioned:
Bad habits are like chains that are too light to feel until they are too heavy to carry.
That’s pretty profound, isn’t it? If we really exam ourselves carefully, we probably all could find some bad habits. The key though is to find them sooner rather than later and then change them into good habits that will instead empower us.
So do a self examination. What are some of your bad habits that you want to eliminate? And what are habits that you want to build? Do this exercise this daily and soon you will have a habit to build good habits and get rid of the bad.
Does it ever seem that life is moving so fast that it’s like a blur sometimes? This hyperdrive can sometimes make it hard to remember things. Don’t believe me? Ok, just what did you do a couple of weekend ago?
I think that it’s worthwhile to periodically sit down quitely and reflect. It helps me to learn from my experience and and understand how I might improve. Because let’s face it, we’ve all made mistakes. And it’d be a shame & expensive to ignore and repeat them.
The reflection is best done at a quiet place with no distractions and some writing material to make notes. It’s not a time for self-pity, but instead self examination. Try to be objective, and think from a third party perspective if possible, then just write the events down whether in a journal or blog. But the key is to keep things positive. And this could be a tremedously useful tool in life.
Read Tim Ferris’ book, the 4 Hour Work Week, a few months ago. And have thought about how it could be applied to my own entreprenurial life. There are a lot of things that make sense such as outsourcing and focus on the big picture. It definitely gives me a goal to aim as I grow my business. However right now in the infant stage, I still need to improve the business process before I fully trust someone else to take over. And even then, I’d break it into jobs into components so that no one is irreplacable.
Momentum is the best cure for procrastination. Many things seem scary or difficult from far away, but I’ve found them not really that hard once I get started. Action tends to energize my creativity. However I also like to put some thoughts & planning before I get started. But not too much though, otherwise I’d get paralized by the analysis. Overall, my philosphy is aim, shoot, and repeat until I hit the target. And once I have momentum, it’s a lot easier to maintain that course of action. Speaking of which, I need some momentum with this blog!
A good habit that I’ve developed recently has been writing down top 10 of my life & year goals respectively each day. This is a much long term outlook differs from the daily to do list. The exercise keeps me oriented on what’s really important and where I’m heading in life. The funny thing is at first the goals differed widely from day to day, but as I do it often, they become more the same, probably a signal that I’ve internalized them into my subconsciousness. Hopefully the exercise will hasten the realizations of my goals. I’ll revisit this later and provide an update.
This is probably the oldest time management trick in the book, and also the most effective. Instead of running around like the proverberial ”chicken with its head cut off,” this simple daily habbit allows to be much more effective and productive. It also enables a sense of control, which is kind of liberating.
Want to emphaize that writing a task down doesn’t mean getting to it right away. Delay unimportant things while focus on the ones that have the most impact. Finally we get to use procastination in our favor!
At the risk of sounding like a neat freak, I can’t stand in being sloppy, messy and disorganized. It really sucks spending minutes if not hours looking for things. Especially with a bit of effort I can put things away, and mostly know where I can find them again. Plus complexity also adds a mental stress as the brain trys to keep track of everything.
Many people says that organization skill is a born-trait like brown eyes, and black hair, but it’s not hereditary and genetic. And though nurture places a key role, I know, coming from a messy family, in the end, being organized is simply a skill that anyone can acquire with practice.
The key thing is to practice simplicity. When doing something, get rid of distractions, and only keep things are necessary to complete the task. Fluff burdens the mind. Get rid of them.