Wake up, open your eyes and it’s already too late. Too late that is, if there is no plan.
Without a plan for this day, you’ve left it wide open to chance and luck. The world has already decided what your day will be like and you will be reacting, instead of creating. Jim Rohn, the great business and life philosopher says you should never start your day until it’s finished – on paper – the day before.
I’ve been doing this for some time now, though I just got another tip – to prioritize that list, and not just for the business of my day, but for the business of my life in that day.
For example, last night before bed I had my list together on paper and I’m going to get personal and share it with you now as an example:
_ Alarm at 5:15: while the coffee is brewing think about the 3 things that happened the day before for which I am grateful
– Look at my 3 big goals for the year
– Read 5 pages of my book in the morning (I will read 5 more pages before bed, right now that book is Season of Life, by Jeffrey Marx)
– Take my high school daughter and her friends to the bus, which is two miles from our home
– Come back home & write this blog, (I blog 3 days a week, the other 4 days I workout in the early morning),
– Walk the dog
– Get dressed and ready for work.
– Head to the office to begin my work day.
– At work I have a list – on paper – prioritized 1-to-5 of what I need to accomplish in my financial planning practice for it to be a successful day.
– At the end of my work day I create a list of my work activities for tomorrow and whatever I did not accomplish, gets moved to the top of the list for the next day. There will be things I do not accomplish and that’s OK.
– Pick up dinner with my family to take to the home of some friends who are going through some challenging times
– Get back home, help pack lunches for the next day, make sure everyone has done their homework
– Walk the dog
– Watch some baseball with the wife (unless it’s a blowout, then it’s Season 3 of Breaking Bad)
– Review my activities from the day in my daily/weekly/monthly register, mark off what I did and did not accomplish
– Plan tomorrow – I already put the work day together – but my full life day needs to have a plan
– Maybe scan Facebook and other social media
– Read 5 more pages in my book
– Bedtime
Wake up with a plan.
That’s only one day in my life and it’s not perfect, but there is a plan. (And believe me I get help, because my wife has a plan as well and she’s doing plenty of other activities to keep the family on track.) There’s a saying that no plan ever survives the front lines of battle, which is what we go into everyday in life. But even the act of planning makes me feel more in control. With no plan I’m left to spend my day like a tiny metal sphere in a pinball machine, bouncing from here to there, hoping not to drop into the chute at the bottom, where it’s game over.
It all might seem mundane and planned out and it is – because the plan will undoubtedly change – but when it does I can hopefully redirect, improvise and if I’m lucky get back on track – the track I planned out the night before. The bottom line is if there is no plan, when the you-know-what hits the fan, I’m twice as lost with nowhere to land. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail and life will take over in ways you can’t begin to imagine, because you have yet to imagine how to build an ideal life. So what’s your plan?
The planning of that ideal, that dream, that vision, begins with a plan, the smallest of steps, and cannot wait until tomorrow.
Tomorrow begins today – the day before.
Until next time, thanks for taking the time.
Mark
(http://www.talkinggood.com/profiles/MarkBrodinsky)
Mark Brodinsky, Author, Huffington Post Blogger (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-brodinsky/), Financial Services
The #1 Amazon Best-Seller: It Takes 2. Surviving Breast Cancer: A Spouses’s Story (http://www.spouses-story.com/)
Connect with Mark on this blog, on social media, or e-mail: markbrodinsky@gmail.com
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