How To Take Control Of Your Day

Troy Dooly January 19th, 2008 Archives, Features, Purposeful Living, Troy's Reflections

How do you take control of your day? This is a question that came up during breakfast a few days ago. I was hanging out with my buddies, who all happen to be leaders in different areas of life. One of them brought up the fact he receives feeds (information) from around 90 blogs on a daily basis (It’s part of his career.)

For a second you could hear a pin drop. Then almost in unison these guys seemed to ask the same question “How can you find the time to read all this information, and get your work done? If I took time to read this much, I would never get anything done!”

I love these guys, and each week when we meet I learn different areas of concern that most of us have in common.

So let’s look at the underlying concern from above. We can call it time management, stress management, organizational control, or just plain “I’m married, have kids and my life doesn’t belong to me anymore!

So how can we get back some of the lack of control in our daily schedules and set some new boundaries in our lives? Wouldn’t we all love more time with our family? More time to invest in our hobbies? Or just more time to invest in growing our spiritual lives. In short…Time to get back into Balance in our lives?

Here are some guidelines you can adopt and make a part of your daily rituals.

Start using 3×5 cards! Before you go to bed the night before write down the 5 most important things you must get done the next day. List them in the order of importance.

Start checking your emails at specific times during the day! You can even put in your signature line “You only answer emails during these time periods.” Tim Sanders (Former Chief Solutions Officer of Yahoo) wrote a great Blog on this subject.

Start setting and keeping personal business hours! Think about it for a second. How much does it cost per hour for the services you perform or the counseling your give? What is your time worth? By setting personal business hours you show others that you value your time. When you start valuing your time, they will learn to value your time.

Moms & Wives this is very important for you! Call around and get the cost associated with all the services you provide each day; Personal chef, House Keeper, Nanny, Physiologist, Relationship Counselor, Laundry Service, and most of all these next two… Personal Masseuse, Professional Escort. Now add up what your time is worth and make it clear to your family just how valuable your time is worth. (This is truly my weakness and it is most husbands.)