Daily Planning ...Habit 3 Put First Things First - From 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

After the course 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I have already drafted the Personal Mission Statement and my vision of what I want to be in future. I have already laid a foundation to prepare daily schedule to keep track of daily activities and decide what the "BIG ROCKS" are and plan out on how to plan evenly without compromising your personal time allocated for your preparation for your dreams, spiritual healing, catching up with friends and families and so on. Though I do not have any complicated or electronic mechanism to keep track easily, I could easily prepare hard copy of excel which serves me good purpose and of course along the way, I would modify it to fine-tune its effectiveness that it serves me.

The lesson I learn from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is to Plan Weekly

Three Steps to Plan Weekly

1) Review Mission and Roles
2) Choose "Big Rocks"
3) Schedule the week

When we talk about the reviewing the missions and roles, identify what the roles you are playing as for example, sportsman, friend to someone, executive in my workplace, foreign deaf correspondent for Deaf Times, etc, you would be able to identify what are the critical tasks associated with the tasks that you have designed for yourself. It could be putting aside a time to spend time with your friend since you have assumed the role as a friend for someone A. It could be a task to write an article for Deaf Time, going for weekly dragon boat training, etc.

Choosing big rocks is essentially what the most important I can do in this role for this week. Big rocks come from:

1) Conscience
2) Mission
3) Goals
4) Key Projects
5) Tasks
6) Appointments
7) Area of focus.

As the saying goes "The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression - Sir John Harvey-Jones"

Then based on these Big Rocks that you identify, you could be able to schedule week to plan evenly where you want to put the Big Rocks and then the remaining time you can utilise for a little pebbles of distraction say reading on spirituality, indulging in idle chat for a while, etc...

"Organizing your life around the many roles you play will help you maintain balance and focus on your key relationships rather than focussing on tasks and things. - Stephen R. Covey"