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Take Control of Your Schedule

Last week we learned about the different ways that our time and effort is spent or invested. This week we will focus on how to establish your personal Roles and how to use them to plan your week.

Before we begin, please download this 7 Habits Weekly Planner in PDF.

This template will allow you lay out your weekly hard landscape at a glance.

Identifying your Roles

Every task that we address and activity that we pursue is an expression of one of the Roles that we play each day of our lives. Whether the role is basic, such as Cook when we make dinner, or more complex, like Husband when I plan and execute our weekend getaway to celebrate our anniversary, every part of our daily lives can be represented by a Role.

When you look over your To-Do list, you should be able to identify which Role each action affects. Some sample Roles:

• Spouse
• Parent
• Mentor
• Home manager
• Spiritual leader
• Office manager
• Team member
• Employee
• Business person/owner
• Writer/painter/creative artist

Each person will have their own list of Roles that they play over the course of their daily life, and the list will change over time as new commitments are added and others are completed. Note also, that the majority of the Roles are described as being part of a relationship with another person or group.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…”
~ John Donne

Look over your list of roles in the context of the coming week, which Roles are affected by up-coming actions? Which Roles would you like to develop or enhance? Write your own list of Roles in the boxes on the left-hand side of the worksheet.

Planning your Week

Assign the action items on your To-Do lists to the appropriate roles, in the second column of the worksheet. Are they balanced? Is there one (or more) roles that carries a preponderance of activities? Is one of the Roles that you identified being neglected?

This neglect, while mostly unintentional, is often the source of much of the stress in our lives. For example, if you listed “Spouse” as a Role knowing that there are actions that you need to take to develop and maintain your relationship with your partner yet there are no actions or activities in that list, you know that there will be a problem for you at the end of the week.

Next, review the actions in the second column in terms of your personal mission statement. Do these actions support your personal goals? Do they fit your principles and values? You may be shocked to discover that you are doing and accomplishing things that you do not want to do, or even need to be doing to achieve your goals. This is a moment for you to Delete or Delegate these activities.

If an activity on your list does not support your personal mission statement, nor fit in with your principles and values, why on earth would you consider doing it?

Bear in mind the 3 types of impact that we discussed in the first post of this series. They are:

1. Direct - situations involving your personal behavior
2. Indirect - situations involving the behavior of others
3. and some are Beyond our control

Look at how each category affects the others. These are relationships.

The failure of prioritizing

This method of breaking down our daily and weekly activities into the relevant roles, rather than simply the Contexts, is a tool for developing our personal relationships and ourselves. Many times we attempt to prioritize our activities without a larger frame of reference, that is, the Role that each activity supports and how the activity impacts our personal mission.

Planning your week according to your Roles and personal mission statement allows you to discover where you may have situations that cause stress via cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is often associated with the tendency for people to resist information that they don’t want to think about, because if they did it would … perhaps require them to act in ways that depart from their comfortable habits. They usually have at least partial awareness of the information, without having moved to full acceptance of it, and are thus in a state of denial about it.

I would submit that this is a state to be avoided, by following your principles and staying true to your values.

Planning your week using this method increases your ability to work and live in the Quadrant 2 area of the Time Management Matrix. This is the portion of your attention where you get to work on the Important things, rather than those that are Urgent, focusing on prevention, preparedness, and personal development.

Advancing your effectiveness

As we discussed last week in part I of this post, Putting First Things First involves using your principles and values to drive your activities in a way that supports and develops your personal integrity.

• The Weekly Planner empowers you to visualize exactly how you invest your time in the pursuit of activities that are truly important and effective.
• Defining your Roles creates a set of rules for prioritizing your activities in a way that enables you to live your life in accordance with your inner values.
• Eliminating activities that do not support your personal mission statement gives value and meaning to the activities that you do pursue, bringing you closer to achieving your long-term goals.
• The Weekly Planner displays, at a glance, the “big picture” view of your life over the next week. The primary focus is on your relationships and the results of your activities, rather than on the time element.

Practical Applications

The following exercises will aid you in fully implementing the Third Habit, Put First Things First, into your daily life. Be sure to review your personal mission statement, and apply the learning principles:

These activities are:

1. Analyze Your Time Expenditure

Take some time at the beginning of the week to draw a Time Management Matrix and estimate the amount of time that you spend or invest in each Quadrant. Log your time in 15- or 30-minute intervals over the next three days to confirm our estimate. Incorporate your new Weekly Planner and your Roles into this practice.

2. Make a Personal Commitment

Commit yourself to defining your Roles and sorting your activities to ensure that they are balanced among your Roles and that the activities are honest and value-driven .

3. Teach to Learn

One of the best ways to establish your own understanding of a new topic is to explain it to another person. Choose someone that you can teach the new habit to, it can be your accountability partner or someone else at work or at home.

Secondary Applications

• Make a list of the activities on your To-Do list that do not support your personal mission statement or values. Where did they come from? Can they be Deleted or Delegated? Think about how you can re-direct these inputs in the future.
• Organize next week with the Weekly Planner, paying careful attention to your Roles.
• Add the Weekly Planning practice to your Weekly Review, or set another appointment with yourself to do it. Make a commitment with your accountability partner to keep this appointment.
• High-level thinking: Write down in detail a long-term goal that will lead toward achieving your personal mission. Choose something to plan that inspires you, something that you have always wanted to accomplish.

Here are all of the posts in the series:

• Habit One - Be Proactive
• Habit Two - Begin with the End in Mind
• Habit Three - Put First Things First, part I
• Habit Three - Put First Things First, part II
• Habit Four - Think Win/Win

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/2azb7v. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen