Free Beer Tomorrow

A new year has begun, and some people overlooked the past and made plans for the future. Past matters you cannot make unhappened. However, you can derive experiences from beneficial as well as faulty things out of your business life of the past year. I don’t want to talk about planning the future and what you may do better this year. I want to point to the fact, that you may enrich your present being by becoming aware of your experiences.

How to do this? Maybe I can be an example. The last year has been terrible, stumbling from one business difficulty and challenge into the next I had to cope with. Although my own way to manage and organize my tasks has been the essential aid to “survive” job related, many important seeming things remained undone.

1) Within the next days I decided to review my task book. (where I have my collected activities of the past year) I look, WHAT I had done, How I did it, Why I did it. And which (mostly not supporting) patterns had developed, without seeing it from close distance. The best personal strategies and ways to work once established may wear out if not frequently taken care of. And I spent no time to do this sufficiently enough. (I refuse to say I had no time.) An important question will be, what did I do, that I could have delegated? What did I adopt as my duties and responsibility but haven´t been mine?

2) As my favorite working tool I use a mind map to organize my findings and to give it a structure, so I can derive important decisions, and make visible new habits I should adopt, better strategies I will use and remarkable hindering activities I must leave.

It is time to say good by to bad habits, to as useless detected procedures, … all things that do not support my work and do not lead to valuable results.

It is just making an inventory of personal activities and current habits and concentrating on those that promise the best results according to the Parteo principle (80:20 rule).

3) This means, I take only a handful of things I will change, and will leave. Otherwise my list of the new will be too long and no improvement at all will happen. The exaggerated claims are the death of every change.

If you do the same, the key point now is to become aware and feel the findings you see through this inventory instead of saying or promising yourself “I will do this tomorrow,” or “this year I will act so and so”. Just be conscious now, let sink in the result of the end of year insight as described above. Deeply meditate on your findings.

Maybe you only swallowed the single characters of the last sentences. However, I must repeat that: Analyse, and let sink in the result consciously, feel it, fill your room under your skin, your whole body with the results. Try to be fully aware of what you have detected now.

This is the best time management practice you can do NOW for any change you think of.

Otherwise you step into an endless circle like the guest in a pub, reading on a board: “free beer tomorrow”

I wish you a prosperous new year.