Yes, You Can Have The Day That You Want. First, You Have To Design It.
Designing our day at the start allows us to reach our desired destination before we hit the bed.
Yes, I believe all of us can have the day we want. It has to come from deliberate design. How do we do that, and what does design really mean?
First, before we can have the day we want, we need to know what we want. I break that down into 2 areas: -
- What I want to do. The only measurement is having done with, versus not doing it.
- How well I want to do something. It is about hitting the target with precision.
These are 2 different discussion points, each requiring different levels of time commitment and skill proficiency.
But first, one thing.
We cannot be talking about having the day that we want without first tackling obligations we must fulfill.
Our obligations and goals compete for our time. We need to ensure that they are taken care of. Otherwise, they become boat anchors preventing us from moving towards our goals.
Obligations In A Nutshell.
Obligations are what we hate to do, and unfortunately, we have to do it.
I dislike talking about obligations. What I do is acknowledge that they exist and they have to be taken care of. This is my list: -
- Household expenses: Utilities, food & beverage consumption, disposables, other foreseeable discretionary expenditure.
- Human-related expenditure: Funding parent’s sunset years, unexpected medical expenses, and kids if you have.
This is a long list, and just writing them in point form makes me tired.
We have to acknowledge our obligations, not deny their existence. They have a nasty habit of biting our ass from behind when we do not take care of them.
Let us take, for example, the goal of financial freedom.
We will not achieve financial freedom if we do not have excess money to invest. We do not have the funds for investment because we cannot sock away additional money on top of our living expenses.
I do not think it is a good idea to skip dinner to spare $5.00 for investment.
The medical cost down the line will outweigh that little benefit that we get today.
A Good Day Starts With Knowing What We Want To Do.
To-Do lists can be used here because it is designed to tell us what we have to do.
Okay, let me paraphrase that.
To-Do lists work because it tells us the following: -
- The tasks we have to do.
- And those tasks we WANT to do.
See the difference?
It is easy to forget what we want to do because it gets buried under the long list of what we have to do.
That is why we have to write what we want to do at the start of the day. This is especially so when we are trying to cultivate new habits. And because they are unnatural to our daily life, it gets conveniently forgotten.
We have to keep reminding ourselves to do that task. Let me use the example of running.
When we are new to running, we put it on our back burner when the demands of life suck away all our attention. We need to keep checking our To-Do list to remind ourselves to run until we cross it out.
When can we stop writing it into our To-Do list?
When we have cultivated that habit.
How do we that we have successfully cultivated that habit?
When we feel weird from not running the day before.
When It Comes To Results — Specificity Is Required.
If we want to achieve something, — We have to go beyond getting it done.
We have to do it plus do it well.
That means having a target and hitting it.
These are the examples that I can think of, based on my daily life: -
- Run a 5-kilometer run faster than 20 minutes.
- Earn $300 from trading the financial markets today.
These descriptions go beyond having them executed. I can run a 5-kilometer run without hitting my timing goal. I can complete a run below 5 kilometers due to time constraints. However, these variations do not help me get the results I set out to achieve.
They have to be executed, be on point for hitting the target. Yes, I do not hit my targets all the time. However, we know how much we fall short of our targets when we attempt to hit them accurately.
We can work backward and understand whether we are having a bad day in terms of fitness or we need to get back to the drawing board.
A Day We Want Does Not Come To Us. We Need to Make it Happen.
We need to make time for our pursuits, over and above our obligations.
And because obligations tend to suck away our time, we have to constantly remind ourselves to do what we want to do and how well we want to do it.
One point to note — We also have to design parameters for the tasks coming from our obligations. When it is time to stop working on our day job, we have to stop.
There is no end to that.
Even pulling the plug requires effort and design.
Otherwise, we will be caught in the hamster wheel of working endlessly in a job that we do not appreciate.
Time is fair. One second spent cannot be utilized on other activities. Take note of that.
Aldric
About the Author:
As a content contributor, I write my observations from daily life and my business exposure.
Because our life experience is the bedrock of our unique perspectives.