Recently I have come across two interesting articles: Yes, You Can Be Happy While Pushing Yourself to Success, and Forget Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead. It says, we should focus on the system (the process) rather than the goal. Once you have the plan layout and the habit built, forget about the goal and just follow the plan, focus on the daily habit.
It reminds me my Italian mentor. He used to say, “Fire yourself on Friday night, hire yourself back on Monday morning” – a similar philosophy. After finishing a week, you should celebrate a week of success, then move on to embrace another week of challenge that leads to another success and happiness.
I say, fire yourself every night you get off your work, hire yourself back on the way to work next morning.
You leave office with everything done for the day. I am NOT saying you should not get off unless you get everything on your to-do-list done. I am saying, you get off happily because you have finished everything you planned for the day. There are two very important techniques: Getting Things Done (David Allen, 2002) and Inbox Zero (Merlin Mann).
Get Things Done (GTD)
It is a very simple concept. The essence is to “dispatch” work before actually dealing with it. We all receive more than a hundred of emails every day. If you received an email with your name in the body, read it and decide if you need to take any action. If you can get it done in 2 mins, do it now. If someone else can do it, delegate it. If it does not require any of your action, delete it.
If it takes you more than 2 mins to deal with, flag it, quickly plan when you will do it, and set an alert to remind yourself. Never trust your memory. You can never remember every single trivia in the day – there are too many distractions.
Outlook and OneNote are good tools for GTD. In fact, perhaps they were designed around GTD – You can quickly flag an email to read or reply later, create a task quickly – all of them goes to the to-do list automatically. You can also flag tasks to tomorrow, next week, or even further. You can drag & drop any task to your Outlook calendar to plan your day. Most beautifully, OneNote is so integrated to Outlook that, you do one click on the calendar and then start taking meeting notes in OneNote. Take a deeper look if interested: GTD with Outlook and OneNote (Michael Wheatfill).
Inbox Zero
Another super simple habit: Clean up your inbox and to-do every day. That’s all.
Yea it is nothing difficult nor requires any training. It is just a habit. Apply the same GTD rule above and clean up your inbox every day (Don’t use your inbox as a repository to stack up emails – Do you put the opened letters back to your mailbox? Of course not). Understanding what habit is, how it works, and how it affect us, then you would move “leanly”. A very good book (a bit thick but easy to read) I would recommend: The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg, 2012).
Forget the Goal?
That said, no reason to forget your goal. You may just want to break it into sub goals, sub-sub goals… so you would feel you have lived the day before bed every night.
“A million dollars isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” – Sean Parker in The Social Network.
Celebrate the billion dollars – for sure; also celebrate the million, the thousand, the hundred, even the ten. Live the moment, enjoy winning the day.
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DN.ASOBIBA 