Manage your time

By Stephen R. Covey

In my experience, most time-management struggles or failures have less to do with skill and techniques, and more to do with people not developing a vision and commitment toward the most important things in their lives - including the principles they want their lives to be built upon. Effective time management, then, is really about life leadership and involves a four-step process:

1. Write a personal mission statement
A personal mission statement embodies the principles you stand for and your vision of your life. Take time to consider those things and relationships you value the most - that bring you a sense of meaning, purpose, peace, happiness, and fulfillment. Think about the principles that will produce the quality of life you seek. Without such anchoring vision, we will inevitably spend our days in the 'thick of thin things' - straining under the 'tyranny of the urgent.'

2. Identify the 5 to 7 main roles of your life
Your roles may include mother, father, wife, husband, vice president of marketing, product manager, committee chairman, friend/neighbour, PTA member, church volunteer. As you think about these roles, you may want to expand your mission statement.

3. Set goals for each role
Do think about long-term yearly goals, but at the beginning of each week, review your mission and roles and set goals for each role, scheduling time to accomplish them during that week.

4. Live with integrity to your vision, roles, and goals
By integrity I mean your ability to make and keep commitments. The key to strengthening personal integrity and discipline is to start small. The best place for most of us to begin is with our body. If you have difficulty arising when the alarm goes off in the morning, commit to retiring at a reasonable hour and arising early for one week. Then commit to another week - then a month. Each time you make one of these small commitments and keep it, you increase your power to make and keep greater ones. Then expand your personal commitment to exercising so many times a week. Continue the next week. Next you might make a commitment regarding your diet and eating habits or perhaps a reading program.

As you continue to make and keep promises to yourself and others, you will find that your power to live with integrity to your mission and vision becomes greater than your moods. Ignoring or procrastinating what is most important to you in the long run would be like trading your diamonds for dust.

As we take time each week to reflect on the few most important roles in our life, and what we would like to accomplish in those roles, we begin to access a powerful inner compass. it is the inner compass of our heart, mind, and spirit that gives us both wisdom and guidance about how to serve and fulfill the needs of those about whom we care most - a spouse, child, friend, neighbor, colleague. It is the inner compass that gives us direction and power to keep commitments, prioritize successfully, inspire us to rise above selfishness, petty smallness, laziness, and indifference, and move us toward our tremendous potential. It is the inner compass that enables us to say no to the good or less-than-good and say yes to the best. It is the inner compass that enables us to know when to depart form the planned and scheduled things of our lives in favor of a more important need of the moment.

The more we notice and follow the indicators this magnificent inner compass gives us, the stronger and clearer the direction of the compass toward true-north principles becomes. May we all become aware of the great power of this compass and remember that compasses are most effective when we take a few moments to stop running and be still.

Yongth and middle age

'When do you stop being young and start being middle-aged?
when do you pass from middle age into old age?

Most people think youth ends on your 38th birthday. They also think middle age is entered on your 45th birthday.

the problem with age-based definitions of stages in the life cycle is that they shift and shuffle over time.'

Beatles got it just right by Bernard Salt
'The Beatles must have been right when they sang:"Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I'm 64?"