The Sisyphus Comments

Achieving Your Personal Goals – Part III

In Achieving Your Personal Goals – Part II, I discussed several types of systems that you could use to document all of the tasks that you need to complete in both the professional and personal sides of your life. It is very important that you afford your personal obligations the same degree of importance as you afford your professional obligations. Remember that you are the sum of your professional and personal lives. It is neither healthy or productive to try to turn off your personal life when you walk through the door to the office. The secret is to effectively manage the obligations on both sides of your life.

You will hear many experts say that you should strive to balance your professional and personal lives and devote equal amounts of your energy to both. However, this image of a scale with your professional obligations in perfect balance with your personal obligations quickly dissolves under the weight of budgets, projects and deadlines. Instead of using the analogy of a scale, it may be more useful and accurate to envision a never ending tug-of-war between two equally matched teams consisting of your professional obligations on one side and your personal obligations on the other. Just like in real life, one side or the other may tug a little harder and gain some ground but eventually we want the opposing side to pull things back into balance. In real life, when a big project is ready to launch at work, you may have to devote more of your time and energy to the professional side of your life. On the same hand, if your son is graduating from college, nothing on the professional side is going to prevent you from being present for this special personal event.

Now that we have a clear picture in our minds of what we hope to accomplish, it is time to start working toward our goal. If you have already read Parts I and Part II of this series, you should have already decided which type of system you are going to use, paper or electronic. Remember, you can only have one personal information management system (PIM) and the to-do list is going to be the most important part of your progress toward achieving your personal goals. So let’s get started.

If you work in a hectic environment where you can’t shut out interruptions, you are going to have to set aside time on a Saturday to start your reorganization process. For the purposes of this article, we will assume that you are using a paper-based system but if you are using an electronic system the process will be essentially the same, you will just record your tasks in an electronic to-do list instead of using paper.

The first , and most important, step in the process is to identify everything that you have to do . . . and I mean everything. Since you are using a paper-based PIM system, you have to gather together all of your tasks in a big stack or an in-box. This may include printing off tasks that your boss sent to you via e-mail, tasks that you have written on Post-it notes or napkins and especially those tasks that you are trying to keep track of in your head. Don’t forget to list your personal tasks such as washing the car, picking up dry cleaning or mowing the lawn – include it all! If it is already written down put it in the stack. If your tasks are in your head, write each task on a separate sheet of paper and put it in the stack.

Once you have your stack of tasks, and you are absolutely sure that you have included everything from both the personal and professional sides of your life, take a break and pat yourself on the back because you have just taken a giant step forward.

In Part IV of this series, we will discuss how to organize and prioritize your tasks so that you can begin working toward achieving your personal goals.