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A Key Habit To Enable Trusted Decisions

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Does this Sound Familiar?

It’s Monday morning and you enter office exhausted.

Partly because you are dreading the avalanche of emails, memos and instant messages that will be coming your way. And partly because your mind has refused to unwind over the weekend.

It has kept you busy struggling with decisions that seem to go nowhere and with random tasks that you can’t really do anything about from your home.

Suddenly the world, your job seems like too much. You go beyond caring. And take refuge watching YouTube videos.

Is this the leader and ship captain that you had imagined you would be??

Not really.

But it isn’t your fault.

Mindspace & Why It is a Gamechanger for You:

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them” ~ David Allen

Most people believe that their lives will be better if they have more “time”. But here’s the problem:

  1. It is an impossible wish. You can have only 24 hours. No more. No less.
  2. A disorganized person will quickly fill any extra hours with more chaos.

Here’s an epiphany for you – You don’t need time to come up with great new ideas.

You don’t need time to take confident, correct decisions.

You don’t need time to generate ROI – from investments of time, money or efforts.

All you need is space in your mind. Room to think.

And this room gives you the freedom to make a creative mess, be wildly innovative, access the pattern identifying and decision-making capabilities of your brain and most importantly go from firefighting to making trusted choices.

An Easy Way to Create Mindspace:

This applies to all professionals. But is particularly impactful when adopted by leaders, managers and C suite executives.

These individuals are responsible for steering the company ship in the right direction.

It is their job to enable their team to be their best. It is their job to set a progressive vision for the business, take advantage of opportunities and leave competitors behind.

The GTD® Weekly Review is a practice that keeps such leaders clear, current & creative.

Defined as the glue that holds the Getting Things Done system together it is a complete review of what you’ve already accomplished, what you should be doing over the next week and how you can make the most of your attention.

Three Steps to an Effective Weekly Review:

Get Clear – Gather all physical inputs that your week has generated. This may be loose paper, post-it notes or meeting minutes. Next do the same with digital assets. Scour the inbox, make sure you’ve pulled up voice messages and instant messages. Lastly transfer all open loops in your head to an external system. Open loops are unfinished commitments that have your attention.

Result: You start clearing the clutter and becoming aware of all the things that have your attention.

Get Current – Add the Next Actions and projects from your mind-dump in the previous step to the right buckets. Next Actions go to contextualized to-do lists, projects go to your Projects list. While you are at it, you also tick-off everything you’ve already accomplished last week and update your system to be aligned with your priorities.

Result: With your schedule organized you know how crowded your plate is. You can bake in “open” time to tackle emergencies should they arise, you can spot projects and accountabilities that need extra effort and you know for sure where each task stands so you can say “Yes” to opportunities that are worth the while.

Get Creative – With the present sorted, it’s time to embrace the future. Take a step back from the busy plane of today and review your “Someday/Maybe” list – a compilation of ideas, aspirations and projects you’d love to move ahead.

Result: As you include items from your “Someday/Maybe” list into your Next Action and project lists, you’re able to convert what was just a dream into an action plan.

There is no such thing as a born leader. The way to leadership is messy, difficult, full of stubborn obstacles and a lot of overwhelm.

But the person who trusts his decisions knows how to delegate and follow-up and always attends to the important versus the “urgent” has a much better chance of doing something incredible.

Don’t you agree?

 

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