August is a great time to catch up with yourself!
Stephen Covey who wrote the classic book ‘The 7 habits of highly effective people’ talks about the importance of blocking out time in your diary for ‘important not urgent’ tasks.
He defines important not urgent tasks as:
• Preparation
• Prevention
• Planning
• Relationship building
• Empowerment
• Self-awareness, learning, exploration & development
• Learning new skills
• Creative thinking
• Networking
• Prioritisation
• Training & development
• Exercise
People are naturally better at some of these and less so at others.
What are your goals for each of these areas? Do you block out time in your diary for these things? Most people don’t. They spend most of their time reacting, fire fighting and chasing their tail!
Why not choose August to create some new habits?
Ask yourself these questions and score yourself out of 100% for these key effective habits:
1. How good am I at managing time well and prioritising tasks for maximum results?
2. How good am I at marketing myself in a relevant, consistent and targeted way?
3. How good am I creating better systems, healthy habits and behaviours?
4. How good am I at developing my skills/knowledge to stay one step ahead?
5. How good am I at reflecting, planning, refocusing and follow up?
6. How good am I at setting compelling goals with plans to achieve them?
7. How good am I at creating and building key relationships to help me grow personally and professionally?
If your total core is less than 400, coaching would be very beneficial indeed to protect your current work position and ensure you are planning your future with more competition. If your score is 400-650, coaching would help you to achieve excellent results faster than you can do alone.
The world of work is changing REALLY fast at the moment and there is less time to do these things but they are becoming more important to create a secure long term future for yourself.
Important not urgent things to do in August:
5 tasks I am focusing on this month are:
• Catching up on sleep and de-weeding the allotment
• Reducing the paper mountain that has built up over a few months of writing and doing events
• Identifying and removing the cause of annoying ‘niggles’
• Reviewing my technology
• Mapping key systems and processes to streamline them
Here are 6 more ideas for creating some sunshine in August:
1. Reflect on your achievements and learnings from the last 3 months
2. Review your career strategy
3. Tag your LinkedIn connections
4. Update your CV
5. Follow more followers on Twitter
6. Research networking and training events for the Autumn
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