Do you ever feel like you spend so much time putting out fires that you have no time left for fire prevention? Or, have you ever been too busy driving around to stop and get gas? I'll bet you can relate. What happens is that the "urgent" things (like a raging fire) will get attended to, but the "important" things (like learning how to prevent the fire in first place) are at the bottom of the list and often omitted for lack of time.

I have discovered an extremely effective way to get to the really important, vital things first. It's one simple concept that I have carried with me and used religiously since I first learned it. The following three steps will help you implement it and make it work for you.

List the top, most important 5 to 6 roles that you play in your life. Sample roles might be: Spouse, parent, business owner, manager, student, writer, community volunteer, friend, family member, brother, artist, teacher, mentor. You also will have one additional role automatically given to you. I will call it "Steward of Myself."

Each and every Sunday (or convenient day before the start of your work week) sit down and ask yourself the following question about each role: "During this next week, what is the single most important thing I could do in my role as ______________ that would have the greatest positive impact on my life?"

When you come up with the activities or actions, actually schedule them in your calendar for the week. Put them in FIRST before the fires begin!

Let me give you a few examples. For next week, in my role as "family member", I wrote, "schedule lunch with my brother." Then, on Monday morning at 9 a.m. in my planner I wrote, "Call Rocky for lunch." (Note: This would be a really easy one to continually put off. Why? Because I could rationalize it by saying, "Oh! I can always have lunch with Rocky. I need to take care of X first.") And let's put it this way, I have NO guarantees that Rocky will always be around. And if something bad happened to him, I don't believe I'd be thinking, "So glad I did everything else and didn't get around to having lunch with him."

In my role as "speaker" I wrote: "read and research one hour per day for five days for my upcoming keynote at the conference in Las Vegas." Then I found the one hour each day in my planner and actually blocked off the time.

In my role as "Steward of Myself", I decided that the most important thing I could do next week that would have the greatest positive impact was to walk 30 minutes 3 times. Again, I then blocked off the time in my planner so it would be right there when I looked at my schedule each day. Again, taking care of yourself always seems to get relegated to the bottom of the list, doesn't it? And let's look at it this way: Spending time recovering from illness or disease is, metaphorically, putting out a fire. Scheduling time to exercise, practice spiritual disciplines and eat well is fire prevention.

So, in the moment of choice, couldn't I just opt out and NOT do what I wrote down? Sure. But the interesting thing is that it is much easier to say "no" to other things when you can honestly say, "This is what is truly important to me. This is a first thing. I decided that it is, and I am choosing to live in alignment with my values."

So, let's do the math. Let's say that you wrote down only seven high value, truly important actions each week, and that you only actually accomplished four of them. Four times 50 weeks would be 200 high impact, vital actions in one year.

Question: could accomplishing those 200 things substantially improve the quality of your life? I believe you would agree that they could.

Fire prevention. A delicate art that you can master.

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Tag line: Linda Larsen, CSP, helps individuals think strategically, communicate effectively, and celebrate success. She is an international keynote speaker, trial consultant and author of the book, True Power, and the best selling audio program, 12 Secrets to High Self-Esteem. She can be reached at www.lindalarsen.com or 941-927-4700.

 

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