One of the things I love about my work as a personal coach is that it constantly keeps me on my toes.
The last few weeks, I’ve found myself helping a couple of my clients improve their productivity and reduce their stress levels. And to do this we’ve been working on improving organisation in their daily lives and we have spent some time dealing with procrastination.
Last Friday morning, I sat at my desk and looked at my own ‘to do’ list. Being organised is not one of my natural personality traits; it’s something I have to constantly work at.
As a coach, I work with the theory on a regular basis, but it is one thing to know how to do something, yet quite another to do it.
It is time to ‘walk my talk’ (again)
Some people are ‘list people’ and some people aren’t. I’m in the latter group. In fact for decades I would only sit down and write a ‘to do’ list when I felt overwhelmed or tasks started to really get out of hand.
I like spontaneity in my life, so the idea of sitting down and structuring the day or the week into tasks has never appealed to me. Seeing my week ahead all filled up in the diary made me feel trapped, boxed in ‘? as though I had no control.
It seems quite funny now, because generally speaking, we all like a certain level of structure in our lives. It gives us certainty ‘? we know the sun will come up tomorrow (unless it is cloudy!), we know the dog will want to go for a walk!
The trick for me was to find a way to make it all work.
If you regularly use a ‘to do’ list, but you don’t complete all your daily tasks, your list will grow and grow until you have list overwhelm. (And I’ve had a lot of that too.)
Today, I scheduled a ‘catch up’ morning to do a handful of tasks that I missed last week. One of the items that got carried over from last week’s list was to write a post for this blog – which is why I’m writing this now.
Unfortunately even the best plans can be interrupted and this morning is no exception. In another 60 minutes, the power will go out for the rest of the day as our electricity company does some work in the street. So I’ll have to be quick doing all the things that need electricity.
Anyway… the blog post is done. Now, what’s next on my list?