Create An Activity Calendar

Something that retail corporations (and probably other corporations too) are fond of doing is creating Activity Calendars for the store locations to follow. It may be called by different names at different companies but the purpose is always the same: It's a list of things that "need" done on a specific day sometimes by a specific person. As retail chains have grown larger and money is tight for more corporate personnel, these Activity Calendars have become an easy way for corporations to micro-manage store locations without actually having someone in the stores checking up on whether the tasks were completed. Apparently the store management already being paid for these kind of duties aren't trustworthy enough to handle the responsibility of micro-management.

So what does this have to do with you? Well I've found that an Activity Calendar can be a useful tool in your personal life as well. However, if you are thinking that you can schedule your personal life to the point of assigning specific tasks to specific days, you are completely wrong. Life happens and your schedule will be blown up before it even starts. Jimmy needs to go to soccer practice, Susie needs to go to dance class, Jimmy hurt himself at soccer practice and is now in the emergency room, and it's now 9:00 a night and you just realized that you never did pick up Susie from dance class. The day went by with none of your scheduled tasks getting completed. Find someone or something to blame, then try again tomorrow. By the way it turns out Jimmy was just faking it because he really doesn't like soccer he only plays because you make him. Way to go.

I've found that a much more effective approach to the idea of Activity Calendars is to plan activities, chores, tasks, or whatever you want to call them during the few days leading up to a new week. I don't plan specific times for anything and I don't even try to pick specific days. The tasks get done when I have time during that week. When it happens during that week is irrelevant. Some of those things are on the list every week and some of them are once and done projects. I work the list around my life so that my life doesn't get in the way of a too-structured list. After a few weeks of this kind of approach to my personal life I find that I get in a rhythm and suddenly the things that I never seemed to have time for before are easily handled in manageable chunks.

If it seems like your personal life is a bit out of control then see if using an Activity Calendar can help bring back a certain level of control without trying to control every aspect of every day.

Seeing Your Goals Through To Completion

Some people get writers block, I just get bored. I'm the type of person that can think of many different ideas for projects but then once I get the ball rolling I often lose interest and want to move on to something else. The problem with this approach for people who are working for themselves and not someone who has minions to carry out his wishes, is that there is no one left to carry on the project once the original idea maker has decided to move on.

If you are trying to get out of the rat race then you can't afford this approach to your ideas. You either need to plan for and recognize in advance which ideas are not even feasible, and therefore not waste time pursuing them, or you need to see things through to completion. And completion of a project can mean many different things, including years of hard work depending on what you are attempting to do. You need to be able to honestly ask yourself if that level of dedication is something you want to commit to and if not you need to bale out before you even begin.

Getting more to the heart of what this article is about though, what if you are already committed to an idea? You've dedicated time, resources, and money to a concept and now the day to day drudgery of seeing the idea through to completion is starting to wear you down. Maybe you thought it would be a good idea to make money from a blog and now you've got to have high quality original articles written on time several times a week and let's face it sometimes you just don't feel like it. So do you throw in the towel when the going gets tough?

That would be the easy path to take. The path of least resistance that takes you right back where you started. Right back where you can briefly follow another tangent of an idea instead of really committing yourself to one excellent idea and pursuing it with all you have. I'm preaching to myself here as well, though I've seen others far worse at these things than I am. I've known a couple people that think of lots of ideas and start making investments into the ideas only to abandon them shortly afterwards and sometimes trying to get others to develop their ideas for them for a small cut before the final abandonment happens.

I'm not innocent of this approach to projects either but here's the best advice I know how to give: Slow down, think on it, sleep on it, keep a file on your computer of your really big impossible to accomplish ideas, and then pursue what seems best and leave the rest. Seek advice from others when possible though be aware that anyone is capable of stealing your ideas. The theft of an idea isn't so bad in and of itself, it's the completion of an idea that matters. So don't be so paranoid that you can't lean on others for advice but don't be so trusting that you are easily taken advantage of.

Productivity Update

Well last week was my most successful yet with the Productivity Points project. I had a total of 18 points out of 33 (I added two more possible points through the course of the week). It may not sound like a very good score but my previous high was only 13 so it was a vast improvement. There are still areas though that I haven't been scoring any points in that need some more attention to try to change that but overall it was a very good week. I'm gonna shoot for 20 this week.