Creativity & Personal Growth

A mind-blowingly simple template to help you succeed in your professional and personal strategies and goals

Because life, careers, and circumstances are always evolving

Change is a given, a constant driving force we need to keep up with.

Running a business is all about embracing evolving trends and tech innovation. Succeeding in a profession is all about adapting to an ever-changing knowledge and skillset base. Building a happy home is all about growth and unfolding states of affairs with your loved ones.

But how do we metamorphosize in these changing currents? How can we transform our habits, behaviors, knowledge, and emotions alongside?

Regardless of the time and intersection of where you’re at in life and work, this simple but effective template will help you succeed.

Do more of, do less of

The concept is super user-friendly: Build a transition in time doing more of something active by doing less of something passive.

A diagram illustrating that doing-more-of active commitments by doing-less-of passive activities can help define a successful path forward, whether in a professional framework or a personal growth phase.

How to start?

Write a log of all your daily, weekly, or monthly activities and involvements that use your energy and resources. These can be tangible items such as your after-work activities, or they can be specific professional duties and projects.

Then tally them all in a template listing each entry according to how you assess their value in terms of your future goal. Do you want to do more of an activity to reach your goal? Do you want to do less of an activity because it does not have much meaning to you anymore, feels burdensome, or makes you feel negative?

Use the do more of and do less of columns to list them out.

My list example

My list includes professional goals and also personal ones. It looks like this:

My list of what I want to do more of and what I want to do less of. My do-less-of list is much longer than the do-more-of list. That’s okay because not all items are action items.

Tallying my activities into columns of do more of or do less of provides me with an immediate pattern of my active behaviors and my passive ones.

Actively, I want to persue more of my writing and creative endeavors while stopping my passive ones like social surfing, TV binging, and having negative thoughts attached with such passive activities.

A plan-of-action for embracing the doing-more-of activities

With the tallies at hand, we can now prioritize three items in each column. These three items need to be high on the want index and/or be easy to implement. Add the number 1, 2, and 3 next to the items, 1 being that of highest priority.

My prioritized list now looks like this:

Three items are prioritized in each column. They don’t need to correlate with each other. The important thing is to identify three items that are doable.

Phew, I already feel a lot better now that I’ve made these decisions. My top priorities are clear. Visiting my granddad is a must, active writing follows as a close second, and studying more about AI is a third.

On the other hand, I will give up TV binging, absolutely, then greatly reduce my social surfing habits, and also, work on changing my mindset. No more feeling negatively.

Changing one’s mindset

The listing and tallying of feelings all around is very important. Feeling positive about one’s goal is a very important motivator and catalyst. On the other hand, if negative feelings creep up and cause worries and hesitation, then we must need to work on these feelings.

Our mindset needs constant reminders that we need to stay in the positive. Positivity will make us overcome hurdles and obstacles.

Commit the time

Now that I’ve tallied my top three priorities on what to do more of, I will need to give myself the time to implement these. I draft a calendar of how I will change my daily hours to include these do-more-of activities.

A simple calendar draft with dedicated time slots for my three prioritized do-more-of activities.

I’m adding 5 hours of active writing, 2 hours of studying AI, and most importantly, I’m scheduling a three-hour visit to granddad for Saturday afternoon.

I am deliberately not overcrowding my calendar. For instance, I add my writing hours in the mornings, and not in the evenings, when my brain is already tired from working. Evening hours are scheduled only twice, and only one hour each time. Sunday is free.

I don’t touch my job work days. I’m not trying to cram an hour of writing into a lunch hour. That would not work for me.

Blocks of time are left open and can be used for a do-more-of activity as need and motivation arise.

Time-boxing

A one-hour time-boxed interval observed regularly can lead to a significant amount of time in the long-term and yield a real change in habit and outcome.

While I might not hit every single writing hour every time, I will adhere to this active schedule in some major ways, and I will achieve measurable results.

The magic of the concept of doing-more-of is replacing passive activities with active ones.

Assess short-term and long-term tallies

Just as I drafted my initial tally and set a weekly calendar, I can do the same assessment of doing-more-of versus doing-less-of with a timeframe of three months, six months, a year, and longer.

Alternatively, if I can’t project beyond the week ahead, I can reassess the tally at the end of every week.

As a change in mindset and output is happening, more difficult strategies, such as financial or educational goals, can be written out.

For instance, in my tally, I had the following items:

Changing my habit from spending less to investing more is a long-term goal. Thus, I will tackle this after I’ve achieved some of the more immediate goals.

This correlating item, spending less and investing more is my personal long-term strategy. It needs research, planning, and executing. This is a more difficult goal to achieve and it should not be taken lightly.

However, writing it out as a change in mindset is an important first step.

Do-more-of/do-less-of takeaways

Conceptualizing of what we want to do more of is an amazing entry into a positive mindset.

Doing less of the activities which bring zero self-worth opens the door to having more time to what we actually want to do in life.

Doing more of active learning, thinking, and creating is definitely worth every second.

I follow this template even if I have only 5 or 10 minutes at the end of every week to fill out and refine the tally. Sticking with it has given me lasting results.

Try it. It’s simple at its core.

Summarize