Where do things continually get stuck in your life? Do you find that you never have time to do the things you want to do because of the things you have to do? Housework, shopping, taking the kids to school? Or at work, do you find that all the admin gets in the way of doing the interesting or important parts of your job, so you are always having to work late to get finished? If so then do an audit on how you use your time.
Track every activity you do in a week, and determine how much time you spend on each.
Then determine how important these activities are to you by giving them a score on a scale of 0-10.
Think about why it is important to you while you are doing this - it will help you to score them.
Next think about how important it is to someone else - the organisation you work for, your boss, your spouse, your kids, etc.
There is often someone else who has a stake in what we are doing.
Again score on a scale of 0-10 for importance to them.
If no-one else has a stake, then score zero.
Now plot these on a square matrix: importance to you on one axis and importance to others on the other.
Label each activity and annotate with the number of hours you spend doing it in a week.
Where are you spending your time? Are you spending it on things that really matter to you and others.
This is what we call synergy and is a great place to be.
If you are spending more than half your waking hours here you probably feel incredibly fulfilled.
The other great place to be is where you are doing things that are important to you, but not particularly to anyone else.
Hobbies would naturally fall here, but there may be other things too.
Next comes things that matter to others but not necessarily to you.
You might think of these as chores, either at home or at work.
How much time are you spending doing this kind of work? If it is a large part of your week, is it making you unhappy? What can you do about it? Can you delegate some of this work? Can you find another job? Can you ask someone to help you, someone for whom this kind of work is important? Finally there may be activities that are not important to you or anyone else.
This may fall into two types.
Household chores might fall here, although some of you may put them in the chore or synergy category - washing the dishes might not seem important to anyone, but what happens if they don't get done? Again look at some of the ways to minimise this kind of work if it is falling into the No-Value category.
Buy a dishwasher, get help, see how fast you can do it.
The other type of no-value activity might be down-time activities - watching TV, surfing the internet, etc.
We all need some time like this, but are you spending too much time doing it? If so, make a pact with yourself to gradually reduce the amount of time you're spending doing these things over the next 30 days.
Then fill more of your time with hobbies and synergies.
Aim to spend 80% of your waking time here and you will feel much happier and more productive.
You are unlikely to be able to achieve this all at once.
Just making a plan to start reducing time spent on low importance tasks and increasing time on higher importance ones will make you feel happier and much more productive.
Aiming for synergies to be greater than hobbies will also make you feel more fulfilled.