Goals Are Hard

So, in my last post I wrote about goals.

*ahem*

Yeah, so my exercise didn't go so well. I'm too focused on goals.

What?

Okay, my biggest problem with sitting down and writing out a bunch of goals is that those goals have wars with each other. Some goals try to completely destroy other goals by being loud, demanding, and more attractive than the others. It's like Goal High School. Full of drama.

I've been working on my goals. I promise. Just some of them have taken the back seat.

So I feel good about spending so much time on goals. But now I need to plan a schedule, I've discovered. And pray that I can stay focused on it. All of my goals mean something to me. I just need to figure out how to be consistent and more like my wife. That is, I need to be able to manage a billion things at once like she can.

To help me combat this problem, I read a great article on lds.org called "Personal Time Management: One Key to a Leader's Effectiveness"

There are lots of good things in the article. One point was that nobody can manage time. It's fixed, and everyone always has the same number of hours in a day or a week. Rather than thinking of it as time management, we should think of it as personal management.

The article has a great suggestion for starting out with improving personal management. It reads:

"A very valuable exercise in learning better time utilization is the task of keeping a time log for a specific period of time. Try writing down every 15 minutes how you spend your time. Keep this log for a week and total up where you have spent your time in those 15-minute increments. Your summary will usually bring about a great realization that you have not spent your time where you thought you were. With that information, sit down and think through the ideal expenditure of your time as compared to the actual. Make plans and commitments to change you behavior accordingly."

So, that's something I'm going to do the week after Thanksgiving travels and craziness. Sounds hard, but it will be worth it, I think.