What is your WHY? Issue #059

It’s clear that scheduling your day is valuable. However, you can’t just throw stuff onto your Cute Kittens calendar and hope for a productive life...

I believe we need a strategy so we can schedule for productivity and get the important work done efficiently. Here are some guiding principles to help you use a schedule efficiently.

Define Your Why

Let’s be honest. Not everything we do during the day is fun. There are definitely tasks we simply don’t want to do. We can rely on determination and willpower to power through, but that just drains energy. Instead, we can find our motivation by defining our Why.

Everybody has a different Why, but don’t forget, it’s the meaning and purpose behind everything we do. This concept was popularized by Simon Sinek in his book Start With Why. Sinek writes that “why” can truly motivate individuals and businesses to reach their goals.

Your Why should be bigger than “Because I need to,” or “Because I was told to do.” For a non-business person, their Why might be to provide a safe life for their children. For businesses, the Why might look more like, “To support people succeed.”

Thus, everything you do as a person or as a company should be in service to that Why.

There are literally thousands of ways we could spend each day. And we can’t do everything. Without priorities, we may find ourselves spending time on tasks that won’t get us anywhere. If you are a team leader or manager, you want to set priorities for your team and let them know what those priorities are, too.

So you need to figure out what you really need to get done in order to achieve your goals in service to your Why. A good way to start is to write down everything you can think of.

Then eliminate anything not related to your Why.

Then put your priorities in order of importance.

Having a direction to go in is just as important as going. A journey without a destination might be interesting, but without a destination in mind, you won’t know where you’ll end up.

Makes sense?

Here are three things I could help you with:

1. Support you figuring out your WHY
2. Proofread all your business documents before they go out “into the world”
3. Explore solutions or possible solutions for issues in your business processes