As you may have read last week on my blog dedicated to the late Dr. Barbara Plasker, I have been re-reading her wonderful book, Simple Ways to Transform Your Life.
While much of the book is full of wisdom that we can apply in our everyday lives, I am finding some passages correlate nicely with how I conduct my business.
For example, in Chapter 5, Dr. Plasker speaks of balance. She cited an example in her own life, when she was asked to socialize with her friends. Dr. Plasker felt more comfortable at the moment declining the invite, to spend some quality time with a very important person: herself. Her friends were completely understanding - sometimes, we need our alone time, in order to get back that sense of balance in our lives that is occasionally or often fleeting.
While that advice in itself was good enough to merit the quality of the chapter, Dr. Plasker also included a table that helped the reader to determine if certain activities in their lives were "Too Much", or "Not Enough". I found this table to be brilliant.
I will duplicate the chart here, for your use - exactly the way that she placed it in the book. (Pardon the use of web 1.0 tables, we usually use css styles, divs and html5, but this is just a quick example)
Too Much | Not Enough |
Doing | Being |
Activities that meet other people's needs | Time for myself |
Television watching | Physical activity |
These were the examples that were in the book based on her own experience. But it is very easy to add our own experiences into those boxes.
For instance, in my business life, I find myself lately spending too much time on email. (But then again - to me, despite the 100's of emails I get a day...spending more than 15 minutes a day on email is 14 minutes too much lol) So that is something that I would like to further automate and trim back, so that I can focus on something that I both enjoy and prefer to help grow myself and others -- phone calls.
I'm sure you can plug in your own business or personal examples, and I would recommend you to consider it. Remember, we only have a finite amount of time in this universe before we are headed to the Great Beyond. Make it as valuable to you as possible - not by burning yourself dry24/7 in chase of that bottom dollar, but spending time on the things that fulfill you as a human being. The rest will work itself out.
If you would like to learn more about the late Dr. Barbara Plasker, please visit last week's blog. She was a truly wonderful person in every sense of the word, and I think if you take a few moments per day, you'll be learning from her timeless Wisdom in the years to come.
~ Tom