What is on your plate right now?

Being busy is our normal state during the working hours. We run around from the office to the lab and back to the office, trying to get things done on our 72-item to do list. Often we wonder why we are not getting anywhere. Why are we still stuck with the same feeling of needing to do more not matter how much we have already done? There is a suspicion lurking in our mind that maybe we are not doing the right or the most important thing?…

It might be that in all our “busyness” we lose the distinction between the important and not so important things. As we keep all the things-to-do in our mind, the thoughts dominate. We cannot tell the difference between the high importance activities and something small like dropping off the internal envelopes at the departmental secretary’s office. …Or picking up a new cartridge from the stores. It all seems important and needs to be done today and even better right now. This can be quite overwhelming.

In this situation it is good to get some clarity on your priorities. A useful tool here would be to get things off your mind and onto a paper. Take a piece of paper and a pen and write (or type on your computer into a word processor) for 15 minutes everything that is on your plate right now. Put everything down starting from needing to contact the landlord to fix the heating in your apartment and “Oh, I wonder if it going to rain this weekend as I planned to go hill walking with my friends” to “How many people are going to show up for my talk” and “I finally need to get the outline of that thesis chapter done”. Put all of that down on paper focusing on this task (no checking Facebook while doing it!).

OK, if you are in this exercise, I’ll assume here you have done the writing part of it. Now let’s see what we can do with this list and how it can help us getting clear on our priorities.

I got a pretty long list of three hand-written pages in 15 minutes. First thing that can be done is to clear few things off this list immediately. We cross off all the things that are completely out of our control. Thing like “Oh, I wonder if it going to rain this weekend as I planned to go hill walking with my friends” and “How many people are going to show up for my talk”. By crossing these items we release them from our mind. I have actually done not too bad as I had only one item that was completely out of my control! 🙂

The next thing is to look though this list for “creative high importance” activities, as Christine Kane calls them. Those that have a lifetime value. These would be your thesis if you are a PhD student, data analysis and paper writing if you are a scientist like me. Anything that brings your closer to the success you desire. These are also the stuff like eating well, physical exercise, getting enough sleep.

We all know that the thing that is going to bring us to our success is not the gossiping with our office mate and not the complaining about the supplier. Sailing through our day reactively, we live unaware of our high importance activities. We have probably not given ourselves a chance to see what the important things are that would bring us closer to our goals.

Well, this is what I have realised after looking through my list again. I have not found many items that I could call “creative high importance activities”. My list was full of small stuff that was just filling my head, occupying space and draining my energy. I had lots of things like “MOT for the car”, “act upon the offence of going on red light”, “I filled the washing machine but we run out of washing tablets”, “council tax payments – check if the problem is solved”, “at work: sort out that program licence, sort out the ppt file reporting an error”.

I went through the list putting a star next to my creative high-important activities. I started to become aware of my priorities, my goals and desires. I began to realise what are the things that would bring me closer to my dreams.

I put a star next to “go to the doctor and sort out my foot”. Mind you, that foot has been hurting for 2 weeks and I have not done anything. As a result of the new awareness I went to a doctor. With an excellent help and advice I have received after a week off work resting at home the pain was gone. And I was back on track full of energy. (Wow, that was powerful!)

I have also added few items to my list that I have realised are my high importance activities but were not even “on my mind”. I have added “incorporate exercise into my life”. I used to do lots of sport earlier in my life, and even after the birth of the first child I did jogging and yoga. But later, having two children and working full-time, I had “no time” to do exercise, or I should rather say “I have not made any time” for this.

As a result of defining my high importance activity and focusing on this defined task for a lengths of time I am all ready to start exercising. I have now a membership in the sports club right here at my campus. I have also bought new sports outfit. I went to an induction course for the gym. And this Thursday is my scheduled day for the start of the physical exercise! Hold me accountable on this! 🙂

So what is on your plate right now? And what are your high importance activities?

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