Welcome to the first Sunday of the last month of 2023. There are only four more of these in 2023. Kind of hard to believe isn’t it. Like where did the time go?
It’s a rainy, bleary, day in my neck of the woods, custom built for bundling up (not that it’s all that cold here yet) and hanging around inside, watching Rugby.
Because it’s Sunday, the first day of the week, it’s also time to rework my To-Do lists for the day and the week ahead. Which sparked a thought.
I’ve been listening to the High Performance Podcast (Staying current, and running through the back catalogue) and one of their guests last month was Shane Parrish and he said something interesting in that interview (Well, he said a lot of interesting things in that interview, but this one bubbled to the surface this morning) that got me thinking.
What he said was this: Don’t tell me what your priorities are, show me your calendar. Show me your calendar and I’ll tell you what your priorities are.
I heard that and I thought, Hah, I’ve got you there I don’t use my calendar for much.
Then another part of my brain went, “Nope you don’t, you cheeky bastard, but YOU DO use those To-Do lists.”
I was out on a walk at that time and this nearly made me stumble. I do use To-Do lists. If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know I love me a good To-Do list and, it was with great trepidation – knowing what I’d find ahead of time – that I looked at my most recent To-Do list, to see what my priorities were.
Currently, according to the recurring things that hit the To-Do list, my priorities are Learning Welsh (Ok), Self Promo (Oookaay), and this blog – Which is different from Self-Promo, but there’s a little bit of an overlap. (A little more Ok than Self Promo, but still).
Writing is on the list, but I don’t tick that off nearly as much as I should. Time with Family and Friends, Exercise, Down time/Recovery time for myself, READING, All of that and more don’t even make the list.
Now you might be thinking that, of course those things aren’t on the list. Those are the things that you don’t NEED to put on a To-Do list. You do those things consistently already.
But am I?
Look, I’ll be the first to tell you that those Higher-Tier items like sleep, are some of the first things to get cut when the squeeze is on. Those things are the things that I should be protecting at all costs, yet they fall to lesser things.
If you were to take a look at the things that I daily and weekly jot down as things that are important to take care of…I’m not on that list – not directly.
And it’s time for that to change. What about you? If I were to look at your calendar, or your diary/journal, or your To-Do list, would you feature regularly, if at all?
Thanks for reading. Be safe out there. Be Excellent to Each other – and yourself.
I’ll see you on Thursday.
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