Finding time in your day to build the future

You work like crazy all day long. At the end of the day, you worry that you haven't finished all the things you have to do. In addition, you feel remorse for all the great ideas that came about during the day, as well as for your dreams that you worry will never become reality.

You need to learn how to better manage your day-to-day activities: how to register, nurture and make additional things happen in your personal, professional and community life. After all, you enjoy making things happen.

Especially if this these things can improve your life, benefit people around you, and integrate smoothly into your daily schedule. Such work leaves you feeling rewarded and satisfied.

Now is the time to find out how to commit to making things happen. The first commitment is to learn how to dedicate time toward converting your blurry ideas into real actions that will produce value for you. Then, you must use this info to create an innovation agenda that enables you to make great things.

Of course, there are a lot of daily activities that keep your life rolling. You can't ignore these things, but you can still discipline yourself to use some of your time to create and develop all those great ideas that you're currently leaving on the table.

You'll begin to see your life as a set of commitments, already established, and a list of things to be done. This list will help you achieve new levels in every aspect of your life. 

Every new idea has potential, but not every idea is feasible to us to develop. We each have more ideas and needs that we can manage all at once. Building your list, evaluating what can be done, prioritizing tasks and working on these ideas takes time. In addition, some ideas need more time to mature, or they require certain conditions to occur before they become feasible. You should put these ideas on hold while you devote your precious time toward something else, but you still need to keep track of them so they're not entirely abandoned.

If time management seems complicated, I can tell you that managing the creation of the future is much more complicated. We need to train ourselves with effective tools and methods to keep our creative ideas moving forward. We can't build the future if we're too caught up in the present.

To get started, I invite you to build a dashboard of your daily activities, with space to record and manage your future-building activities. My dashboard is inspired by the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) model from the book “Built to Last” written by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras.

For each category of my life (personal, professional, community, business) I identify specific tasks. These tasks are programmed as specific goals to achieve within a week. The next two columns note how well I achieved these goals. For example, if I write "75%" in the Achieved column, the Difference would be 25%.

In addition to my daily activities, I dedicate a space toward my future-building activities setting my BHAG that will be a goal for a long time. At the end of each activity, I should evaluate how close I am to achieve my own BHAG, giving myself a moonshot to strive toward.

If this process seems cumbersome, there are many productivity apps that can help, several of which are free. And keep in mind that in order to meet your long-term goals, you will require some measure of activity and accountability, especially for those future-building goals that go beyond your daily life.

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Special thanks to Sonya Herrera for her help in editing this article