(Read Time: 1 minute, and you’ll need a notebook)
READY
The first weeks of January are full of optimism. We come into the year fresh with resolve and ideas about how to make the year ahead the BEST EVER.
We are bursting with focus, energy, determination and goals.
And then a few weeks pass…
Life gets busy and our bright beginning-of-the-year intentions fade. Daily activities and routines once again take firm hold, gently nudging our new goals into a holding area to be addressed later.
SET
As creatures of habit, we love and need our routines. They are important. Routines provide comfort and stability and an anchor in a busy life.
By paying attention to and repurposing the activities that make up our daily routines, we can use what we already do every day to create the new environment necessary for realizing our goals.
Twyla Tharp has great ideas on the subject of routine and accomplishing goals.
In her book ‘The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life’ Twyla Tharp, she talks about the activities that trigger her optimal working environment.
For Twyla Tharp, the trigger for entering her optimal working environment is hailing a taxi to the gym at 5:30AM. That’s when she begins to work through her creative challenges. Her writer friend enters his environment triggered by taking a cup of coffee to the back porch. Beethoven’s trigger was a daily morning walk.
Once in our optimal working environment we are able to actively focus on the activities and plans to achieve our goals.
GO
The first step is to identify the trigger activity that prompt your optimal working environment. Finding your trigger activity isn’t hard, it just requires paying attention to your daily routines.
Here is a checklist to jumpstart the process.
✔ Write down your goal
✔Post the list in your home or work office (we don’t do what we don’t see)
✔Identify your daily routines (getting coffee, commuting to work, the gym, lunchtime)
✔ Find your trigger activity. Where in the daily routine is quiet, uninterrupted time? (Example: waiting for coffee to brew is uninterrupted time)
✔ Put that time on your calendar. This makes the work real
✔ Carry a notebook.Dedicate one small notebook to your goals. Write everything down, organize your thoughts and cross off activities when they are completed (Very satisfying!)
✔ Act on your plans and enjoy the process
Working toward your goals isn’t more work, it is simply a different use of what you already do everyday.
“Action is the foundational key to all success.”
(Pablo Picasso)
Let’s go
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Until next month…