The Importance of Evaluation

I spent the day today in a FranklinCovey seminar on "Focus." The first half of the seminar gave us a vision for why we need focus in our lives, the second half gave us practical ways for prioritizing and then maintaining our focus on the things that are truly important. (An hour of which was a blatant infomercial on the FranklinCovey Planner system. Yawn.)

My clear take away from today is that I spend too much of my time reacting and too little time planning. I've made to do lists, but my problem is that I don't check them regularly and evaluate my progress. I set reminders for an item, and then it just nags me and I eventually turn off the reminder and forget about it.

Here are some things I'm committing to do for at LEAST the next three weeks.
• Spend between 10 and 30 minutes each week planning for the upcoming week. For practical reasons, I'm blocking out Saturday mornings for this task.
• Schedule time at work to prioritize and schedule my day.
• Review the days tasks and appointments regularly (need to define what 'regularly' means)
• On worknights, head to bed around 9pm with a goal of sleeping at 10pm.
• Spend 5-10 minutes each evening reviewing my tasks and appointments and planning for the following day.

This is probably going to be a frustrating 3 weeks. Changing habits is difficult. I want to do this so I am the one choosing actively how I spend my time, rather than having it chosen for me.

Jamaican Jams

In my last post I talked about being appreciative of present moments. It's become a theme which I have been more aware of lately. Maybe I should blog more often.

Anyway, in that vein, I had a nice drive in to work this morning that I want to relate. One of the things I enjoy about working downtown is that the bus system is designed to get people there quickly. The bus ride from the Park and Ride station near my house is a straight 20 minute trip, non-stop. When I can, I like to carpool in with some other folks heading downtown. To save time, people will drop by the Park and Ride and pick up riders so they can meet the 2 (or sometimes 3) passenger minimum to take the high occupancy vehicle lane in to work. Besides satisfying my desire to be a cheap bastard (bus is $3, carpool is free), it's also a nice way to meet other folks and do a little networking.

This morning I was waiting in line and a young, pretty black woman pulled up in a Toyota 4-Runner. Her sky-roof was rolled back, her windows were rolled down and her stereo was blaring reggae music. She had her hair up in dreads and her face was pocked with some acne. I completely expected her to speak with some Jamaican accent, but I was disappointed when she asked how I was doing with the standard Houston lilt. We hit the road and the windows and sunroof were closed and the A/C went on. We didn't talk much on the way in and I just sat back and enjoyed the ride. To our right (looking South) the sky was dark with clouds and impending rain. To the Left there were patchy clouds and bright sunshine. The reggae music was playing from a disc in her CD changer and it regularly skipped. At first I just thought it was some production choice. The music was facinating - pretty standard repetitious bouncy reggae - but it had all these synth effects in it that sounded like the laser gun audio effects from the original Star Wars movies. It was like some reggae band playing during a shootout between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire.

Anyway, it was just a cool moment: the heavens undecided about rain, odd reggae music with lasers skipping and popping, and the facinating contrast of a lovely woman with beautiful dreadlocked hair and acne singing along with her favorite songs. It was good stuff.