“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When it comes to accomplishing health goals and making the most of each day, being aware of how you spend your time is particularly important. This understanding and managing of time will directly affect personal happiness and life satisfaction. Choosing to live proactively (versus reactively) allows us to decide how we choose to spend our time, get more done, stay on top of various tasks, and make progress toward desired goals and achieve specific outcomes. The intentional management of time allows you to schedule the upcoming week in anticipation of getting everything on your to-do list completed, yet when you have improvement goals taking one extra step will help you continue to make progress.
The word proactive means to create a situation by causing something to happen rather than reacting to something after it happens. Making decisions about how you plan to spend your time ahead of time helps you get everything done while anticipating any foreseeable roadblocks that may occur along the way. Preplanning allows you to take charge and be in the driver’s seat of what you want to do, increasing the chance of successfully hitting your goals.
In ** The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, he explains how the various ways we spend our time will profoundly affect the quality of our lives and ability to achieve goals. He describes a simple chart with four quadrants divided as urgent or not urgent versus important and not important, and everything we do sits in one of these four areas of focus. It explains what activities cause life to be full of drama and chaos, which waste our time where we never seem to make progress, and which actions lead to improvement, success, and happiness. This six-and-a-half-minute YouTube video explains it best!
Where do you spend most of your time?
Is your time consumed in constant damage control, running from one urgent emergency to the next (urgent and important)? What effect does this lifestyle have on your quality of life?
Is your time filled with endless hours of watching TV, scrolling social media, and checking emails (non-urgent and non-important)? What effect does this habit have on your quality of life?
When taking an objective look at all you do throughout the day, consider which quadrant each activity sits. What do you notice about how you spend your time each day?
Are you able to find proactive ways to restructure your time, accomplish more, and make time for the actions that result in personal improvements toward the quality of life you want to live?
It is in quadrant two, the non-urgent yet important actions, where all our health and wellness behaviors sit. Because each small daily practice, such as exercise, eat your vegetables, get a good night’s sleep, and managing stress, do not result in an immediate and visible outcome, these optimal health actions are essentially non-urgent at the moment. Although immediately non-urgent, these same actions are critical because healthy lifestyle choices accumulate over time, resulting in optimal health and fitness or debilitating disease and illness in the future.
For this reason, preplanning, making time for, and doing all the actions that result in optimal health and wellness must become a priority in your life. Specific activities like preplanning your upcoming week to include daily exercise, daily healthy meals, time for stress relief, social connections, and enough quality sleep each night need to become a priority today for your future healthiest self. Continuing to put things off because you don’t have the time, energy or motivation may result in unfavorable consequences in your future.
This week, take stock of your daily habits, behaviors, and actions and determine which quadrant they sit. Then take an objective look at the overall quality of your life, how stressful or peaceful it is, how successful you’ve been at progressing toward your goals, and decide whether you are living your life by design or is life taking you for a ride. Once you’ve become aware of your current behaviors, choose to be proactive about how you spend your time and how you plan to achieve better lifestyle behaviors toward improved health outcomes for your future.
Please check in with us next week Sunday for tips on becoming proactive and intentional about adding more activity and exercise into your day.
If you found this post helpful, please share it with your friends and family and through social media. Please help us help more people improve health through simple LEAN habits.
**Heads up! This is an affiliate link. This means if you purchase this item through the provided link, our company receives a small commission at no additional cost to you. We occasionally use affiliate links to make product recommendations easy for you to find and the small commission helps us help more people live happier, healthier, and purposeful lives! Now...back to the post.
Comments