Creating Permanence for What Matters Most
Creating Permanence for What Matters Most
Treating events in our lives with the appropriate level of intention
Creating Permanence for What Matters Most
Lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.
Tony Robbins
If we don’t think about time proactively, we’re forced to make compromises.
Certain events on our calendar are concrete and immovable. These events, like working hours, meals, dinners with friends, parties, appointments, etc., go onto our calendars with ink. Everything else must work around those keystone events, or our day falls apart.
Despite the fervor we use to protect these events, they’re often not the things we should spend our time on. Paradoxically, we have a tendency to protect the things we “have to do” at the expense of things we “should do.”
For example, most of us would never skip a day of work because we had a lot of other things to get done, but it’s likely we’ve all skipped a day at the gym or time with our family to work.
After we add up work, sleep, meals, showers, and all of the obligations we “have to do” on our calendar in ink, we’re left with a surprisingly limited number of hours each day, but these hours are what define us. What’s left over is the time we have to live our lives and pursue independent ventures.
Most of us pencil in events for this leftover time or neglect to think about or plan for it entirely.
We might have noble intentions when we plan to wake up early and go to the gym or read a book instead of watching tv after dinner, but we write it on our calendars in pencil because we know in the back of our minds it’s not a true priority.
We all have activities that we prioritize over everything else and activities that always get overrun. The difference between them is often as simple as our attitude towards them. If we don’t plan something proactively and make time for it, then it’s not really important to us. And if we can’t decline alternate plans to protect time saved for something, then something else will always come up.
As long as we write things in pencil, we’re setting ourselves up for failure. If something is truly important to us, we need to commit to permanence and accept the consequences.
Prompts
What is something you pencil in frequently but always end up erasing?
When you don’t get around to everything you’d like to do, what are the common reasons? Do you run out of time in the day? Agree to do something else instead? Forget to do these things entirely?
What is one step you can take to protect one worthwhile activity in the upcoming week in the same way you would protect an activity written in ink?
Deep Dive
The Guilt-Free Guide to Saying No
Protecting our time often means declining others’ invitations. This is an awesome guide with some scripts to steal for declining invites so we can focus on what’s important.
A quick rule to decide if something should be written with pencil or ink.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.
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