Purpose & Performance

    Bringing balance to a busy personal and professional life is challenging. In order to accomplish all that is considered important and necessary, most people resolve to work harder and faster. Therefore, individuals and families are increasingly experiencing a time crunch. The result is mounting stress and compromised health and vitality.
 
    And yet, despite their best efforts, many express frustration about not being able to bring tasks to completion or having enough time to focus on what or who is most important to them. No doubt, time is the most precious limited resource we have. In fact, the majority of people responding to a Wall St. Journal/Gallup poll indicated that if they had a choice, they would pick having more time over having more money. In your own life, you will find that one of the biggest factors that contributes to your life satisfaction is to gain (or regain) a sense of control over how you spend your time.
In Take Back Your Life: Smart Ways to Simplify Your Daily Living, author Odette Pollar recommends that the best way to do more is to do less. For example, don’t keep trying to jam more and more into your over-crowded schedule; determine to drop several items instead. However, you will first need to analyze your priorities.

In Getting Things Done, author and productivity guru David Allen wrote: “Purpose and principles furnish the impetus and the monitoring, but vision provides the actual blueprint of the final result. This is the ‘what’ instead of the ‘why.’ We know that the focus we hold in our minds affects what we perceive and how we perform.” Once you are clear on what is most important to you, then you can drop additional demands that don’t fit that criteria.  Saying “no” more often will allow you to say “yes” to your priorities.