Original article, June 8, 2021, by Patience Phillips
Edited January 1, 2024, for Goodreads review post
Business Learner Series. Volume 1: Article 5
Welcome to Simple One Step Success, Your Value Expands Your Brand blog. With empowering happiness through literacy expert, Patience Phillips @AskMissPatience, on knowledge to understand for the wisdom of insight in choices guidance. Inviting you to participate in this year's series. Where Patience and top-level experts share how to value and expand your brand elevation. Taking life and business to the next level forecasting dreams to reality.
The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present ~ Paul Saffo
A sole proprietor to a brick and mortar mogul wants the same thing, success.
This series will provide many tools and connections to gain momentum. Based on feedback the follow-up series will provide strategies and demonstrations for building with tools necessary in business today.
No matter if an influencer with a million followers or a youth living on the streets with a dream. We all begin somewhere. In this blog, the focus is ‘When do I have time’ successfully?
This series of Simple One Step Success blogs answers many questions I’ve had personally, clients repeat, and listened to publishing buddies struggle with over the years. The purpose is transformative.
When you have a deadline it’s like a storm ahead of you or having a truck around the corner. It’s menacing and it’s approaching, so you focus heavily on the task – Eldar Shafir
Parkinson's law says work expands to fill the time available for its completion. This idea exposes why the concept of time sabotages productivity. Reminds us that time is a metric that cannot be trusted or blamed. We are the thread in the stitching of responsibility.
What I know for sure is "How do I forecast for dreams?" is not going to happen on its own with a clock alone. Alarms may trigger, but alerts with a snooze button are built in.
What would life be like without clocks?
Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live ~ Albert Einstein
This blog is chock full of ideas. The movement toward more room for a happy life. Break blaming habits not serving the forecast to dream ritual ability to get to where you want to be.
Designing a guide to forecast goals to dream rituals. Without reinventing bandwidth. This means recreating what others suggest or following how things have always been.
Unless this is the best way to become an author, build a business, create a parenting management calendar that does not drive people crazy, stress oneself out (my hand raised from experience:) and so much more.
Results from this blog:
White space on the calendar for what is important. Such as creativity and happiness
Discovery of ideas from the reference section
Free guide pages manifest personalizing forecasts to dreams do come true ideas
In short, assistance making time work for, instead of against, you.
Design time. Who knew?
How I began morphed over time:
For about three decades beginning before the first Covey training for 24 weeks have used a mission statement. Eventually, one that is designed with research and studies in a binder approach.
The binder cover lists the word of the year. Mission and vision statements. Summary of ways to accomplish this.
Inside a printed month-at-a-glance calendar. Big rocks are listed first. The rest of the year filled in around this. Big rock categories become the F words listed in blog one here.
Each of the big rocks was followed on a list of the projected needs and outcomes.
It began with a quarterly check followed by an annual review. Transformed into a daily question, "Is what I'm doing now helping the purpose-driven goals?"
There was even a birthday list of what people like to weave into searching for or making the perfect gift for their special day every single year to help maintain relationship goal connections.
Any sort of list that would help me keep track of success added.
Over time this morphed into trying different planning strategies. From online tools to pencil-in schedules using a pocket planner.
Everyone is different. The important aspect of all this is what works for one person does not always work for another. If you are someone who digs a fill-in-the-blank outline the downloads will help train your brain to think in new terms easily. If you are someone who prefers more "professional" tools there are many out there from Trello to Franklin Covey or even Google to Outlook.
Regardless of what is picked they all require a little patience, practice, and practicality.
The main objective is always how to design a life virtually free of stress based on priority management. Discovering there are enough hours in the day to write a book, become a triathlete, and always enough for self-care or anything is what forecasting is about.
Outliers: The Story of Success regarding spending an average of 10,000 hours and more over a lifetime to become the best at something strategy will work as well for you as it does for a single parent looking to accomplish a college diploma to a musician who hopes to become good enough for paid gigs and so much more then try this (mostly) proven strategy.
Prioritizing is key and learning is everything
Whatever your dream crafting a schedule weaving in the elements to what happiness looks like is key to creating this and a life worth living.
Different aspects of time affect our days. Big rocks or those super important must include items that fill the calendar first under self-care.
Even on a micro level daily. Eating to walking the dog all take a measure of bandwidth.
For fun created this average day outlook example. Understanding a basic day can help know what remains to dedicate for big rocks.
If the dream is becoming an author while working a full-time gig, finding time daily to dedicate toward this goal is not as simple as prioritizing it in the first place as essential.
The time is in front of you. No finding is required.
A writing buddy, Chad, sets aside space on his calendar. Elon Musk uses an entire day for a certain focus. Everyone is different.
Tiers of forecasting dreams that work for me in terms of time blocking include hour, day, week, month, quarter, and year: one, three, five, ten, and twenty.
Each year moves up and repeats the tier structure.
The guide assists in thinking in the simplest terms. Is what I am doing now impacting what I want to accomplish twenty years from now?
Evaluating what success looks like regularly assists with focusing on forecasting outcomes. Create space making dreams come true one task at a time mindfully. Compel's choices.
Once an overview of an average day is inventoried follow the guide principles similarly. Download the planner here.
There are no rules. You decide. These are fun ideas put together to encourage thoughtful consideration adding to your happiness in each moment.
The eleven pages including the day and 1st through 31st-day view are a guided suggestion. How these are used is completely subjective. The purpose is to forecast how to make room for what makes you happy with no regrets excluding excuses.
Complaining of fatigue and busyness will melt into white space for exploration and excelling toward what you wanna be when you grow up. Even if you are middle-aged or three-quarters of a century or older there are always possibilities.
Growing older notice what was once important transformed into less relevant. That means the most now is white space to pursue who and what makes me happy. This does not mean perfect. Sometimes happiness is being able to hold the hand of a loved one who is ill over rushing to another meeting or event.
Some say patience is what life needs to get there. I say impatience because if this tool makes mastery of choices obvious there is no waiting required. Procrastination is a method for others to self-doubt and obsess. Impatience is a tool to build now rather than later.
Making statements, "Time goes by so fast," "Life is too short," There's never enough time," are lies. This is the context created to cause sadness, anxiety, and fear.
There is just as much time in every day for me as there is for you. How we decide to move through the space of each day is purely our personal decision.
Blaming a teacher, boss, spouse, children, whoever is a cop-out. Being the crafter of success is to own choices made. Even when problems occur there are ways to manage shifting our schedules.
Click here if you missed blog three, What do I do when crap hits the fan ...?
If life is busy at the moment, from college or children, illness, and more, there is hope. The guide can be a dream forecaster. Fill out the pages of what the ideal year would look like to follow the dream to reality. Then compare what is true now. Find one item that can be reworked, moved, or eliminated, and ask for help to do so. Take the space created to begin including the dream.
In the words of Nike, #JustDoIt
Make another decision to replace one choice with the dream experience. Such as, if school is concluding in two months dream the new schedule and think "What if I _______ then ______. This preparation helps step into the dream sequence once the previous activity is concluded.
Parkinson's law defines it as "work expands to fill the time available for its completion." This idea exposes why time sabotages productivity. Reminds us that time is a metric that cannot be trusted. More matters less. It is our actions that drive time not clocks or deadlines.
Though remember, deadlines are moments that must be marked with completion. Our integrity requires this. Even if less than our definition of perfect. This is the beauty of the editing department and personal growth and development.
If you google "Parkinson's Law" will find many articles describing the problems, it allows and ways to adjust. Little rituals that slowly take back our dreams of living our best lives.
Whether you use the ideas I had fun creating for exploration to seed your pot of hope or design your strategy to any number of other guides from many of the authors mentioned and more in the reference section.
To thine own self be true, says Polonius in Hamlet.
What this means to me is knowing limits, creating a yes environment, and being as happy as possible at the end of our life once we fill up our dash. The space between the day we are born and die will be added to our gravestone.
What are your thoughts on time? Did you find any of the insights in this post especially useful? What books or clips not in the reference section would you recommend, and why?
Have a question for me? Connect on LinkedIn and Goodreads. If I am not able to assist am happy to refer you to someone who may be able to. If you know anyone else who may benefit from this post, please be sure to pass this blog on.
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