I read this article yesterday about the concept of “busy.” It’s excellent and you can go read it yourself but I love the disclaimer at the bottom:
Being busy, in this context, is not synonymous with being hard working or productive or effective. Also, this article is calling into question busyness for busyness sake. Busyness by necessity, at least for a season, is an entirely different conversation.
Which ties into my idea of a simpler 2014. I was so “busy” in 2013 but what did I accomplish? Were my actions getting me closer to my goals? (What were my goals?!)
Then I came across this blog post by Michael Hyatt (such a stinking blogging ‘genius’ I can’t stand it sometimes!) where he reviewed several apps for monitoring progress towards goals.
Which means you actually have to have, you know, set goals.
So here’s where this is going:
This weekend I’m going to make a list of 4 concrete BIG goals for the year in the 4 largest areas of my life (of course I have tonnes of smaller ones but you’ll find out why 4 in a second).
After that, one of the apps Hyatt mentioned, irunurun, comes in to play. You get 7 “key actions” for the day (or every other day, or just certain days, you can specify frequency) like “go running” or “read X amount of pages.”
Since the app is free (yay free stuff!) and you can only set 7 key actions, I’m dividing it up so 4 of them go towards my 4 goals, and 3 of them go towards establishing a new (or breaking an old) habit.
At the end of the week you get a score out of 100 on how well you did (and you can add different weights to each action so it’s balanced as you like).
I won’t promise to post or bog down the blog with weekly updates (and to be honest I probably wouldn’t want to share my specific actions anyway) but I will occasionally check-in from time to time on how things are going.
I might fall off the wagon, as I do sometimes (okay a lot), but I always feel that if you’re motivated to do something RIGHT NOW then do it. Maybe it’s not long term but trying is better than no action at all.
If you’ve ever used irunurun or a goal tracking app like it, you should tell me. I LOVE apps. (Seriously).
All the best for a better 2014,
xx