What is the difference between Bill Gates and a beggar?

Bill Gates and a beggar in the street have 24 hours to them in a day, seven days in a week and 12 months in a year. Still we all feel that we should have some more time to do what we wanted to do. Life many a time just slips between our fingers before we know what is really happening.

As a young boy my years were marked with a monsoon that announced the beginning of an academic year and a summer that saw the peon shutting the huge windows of the classrooms and some suppressed tears of lovers indicating the end of the year.

Throughout my schooling I do not remember anyone talking about prioritizing life. Not even my dad who always saw life as black and white and right and wrong. It was kind of a known fact that after finishing the studies one is going to spend the time in dusty benches of a village library watching the neighbouring girls through the window till one got a government job.

Then one day while living in the forests of Bhutan, I learned that whatever we get in life is the result of the choices we make every moment and I could choose the future that I wanted.

Many a time, we just tend to focus only on one aspect of our life and while we are able to achieve that aspect we neglect the other aspects and feel empty at the end of the day. I remember a friend saying once that “we keep focusing on climbing the ladder and what would happen when we realize that the ladder was kept on the wrong wall?” One way to look at life as a whole is to put down various aspects of your life that you want to focus on.

Once you have decided what you really want to do in the next year in various areas, you may like prioritizing them. Are all these areas equally important to you? What is most important and what is least important?
If the most important thing in life to you is your family, why don’t you spend more time with them? The answer is that your activities aren’t in sync with your priorities. We feel best about ourselves when we feel that our everyday activities are a step toward our long-range goals. If we want to do what’s truly important to us, we have to make a conscious and deliberate effort to prioritize.

I’ll give you a simple method to organize yourself so that you spend more time doing what is really important to you and less time getting lost in the clutter of life and not being able to attend to what’s really important. I have a simple four-step process to help us get our actions in line with our priorities:
‚Ä¢¬†¬†¬† Make your action plans realistic and concrete. Make them require some effort, but don’t make them impossible. Be somewhat flexible, and give yourself leeway for your own state of mind. Just don’t give up. Goals are simply statements of how we want things to be. To be helpful, goals should be specific, concrete, and measurable. I want to have more fun–what’s in the way right now? Mostly, right now it’s the nagging back pain that saps my energy. To deal with that, I’d better exercise, diet, and invest in some medical care, even though I’d rather not. To gain a long-term advantage, I have to put myself through some short-term pain.
‚Ä¢¬†¬†¬† Do some of our goals conflict with others? If my most important goal is to run a lean, efficient charitable organization, but I also want to have a big house and vacation in Europe every year, I’m setting myself up for depression. In the long run, we doom ourselves if our goals are in conflict. We are grown-ups and we have to face the fact that we can’t have it all. And it’s necessary to really give up. If you decide that a big house is not a primary goal for you, make a public commitment to giving up that dream. Talk it over with your spouse and friends. Have a ritual: light a fire in the backyard and burn up all the magazines you’ve been saving with beautiful pictures of mansions.
‚Ä¢¬†¬†¬† Then start making action plans about the goals you really do want to accomplish. What are your professional goals for this year? Where would you like to be in five years? At retirement? Do your goals for this year take you closer to your long-range goals? If they don’t, they should. Maybe you have to focus a lot for the present on simple survival strategies. But you will feel better if you can add to your daily activities something that will help you get to your long-term goals. When we feel that our everyday activities are in agreement with our basic values and take us a step further toward who and where we want to be, we add to our self-esteem and we have a little more evidence that we can have an impact on our future.
‚Ä¢¬†¬†¬† Finally, review your goals, and your progress toward them, regularly. Make sure that you have given yourself permission to change your goals. For goals that remain important, look at your action plans. Are there things you should be doing differently? Build some time into your routine when you can review your progress–at new year’s, on your annual vacation, monthly when you pay the bills, on a regular date with your spouse. Give yourself credit for doing what you’ve done, make new plans for doing what could be done better, and let the rest go.

Santhosh Babu focuses on transformations related projects, leadership development and CEO coaching. He looks at organizations as ecological systems and helps you understand hidden inter-connections within your organization. Contact santhosh@odalternatives.com or visit http://www.odalternatives.com.