BEING HUMAN MEANS A SIMPLE LIFE WITH GOOD FAITH AND ACTION
Overcoming obstacles to
balance
By incorporating health,
relationships, and
purpose into every day, you make sure
to keep
yourself fed and thriving, so you can
keep
getting better and better, and
happier and
happier.
Taking care of yourself is a
commitment. When
you think about tending your health,
relationships, and purpose every day,
do you
feel anxious about when you’ll find
the time?
Most of us are overtaxed and
stressed,
scheduled to the max and rushed
during most
of our time. That, too, is an
obstacle to
happiness.
The problem with life is that it’s
finite. You
can’t do everything—it’s impossible.
A lot of us
act as if this isn’t the case, but it
is.
If you can’t do everything, some
things have to
go. You’ll never get to them.
Shouldn’t those
be the things that are less
important?
65
A lot of us don’t really consider the
relative
importance of the things we do, we
just do
whatever is most urgent, or whatever
is
easiest, or whatever somebody has
nagged us
about most recently. But the fact is,
many of
the urgent or easy tasks are really
not that
important. If you want time to take
care of
yourself, build your relationships,
and do
meaningful work, you may have to cut
out
some things that are less important.
That’s
what it takes to improve your life.
When looking for things to cut, some
prime
areas are meetings, web surfing,
email, and
television. These four activities are
huge time
wasters for many people. A more
systematic
approach is what I call the to-quit
list. If you’re
like most people, you probably have a
long list
of things you’re supposed to do,
either in your
head, on a piece of paper, in a
computer file,
or on a flurry of Post-It notes stuck
everywhere. Gather the whole list
together in
one place and give it a good, hard
look. How
many of those things give you a
feeling of
dread or aversion when you think
about them?
Start a new list called your “to-quit
list” and
put all those things on it.
Of course, if you quit everything on
the list
right now, there will probably be
some pretty
bad consequences. It’s tempting to
say “I can’t
just quit my job!” or “I can’t quit
the X
committee—the whole thing would fall
apart!”
But the fact is, it’s not a matter of
“can’t.”
What if you were in an accident that lan
No comments:
Post a Comment