Now or Never, Part II: Today and Tomorrow

In Now or Never, Part I: Today or Tomorrow, we explored 2 tough choices: 

• Do you choose to live for today, or to build for tomorrow?
• Do you choose to focus on your detailed, daily problems, or do you focus on finding the root cause of your problems?

It’s dangerous to spend all your time thinking about the future.  You get lost in a dream world, with your thoughts spinning around and around, while the imperfect present crashes and burns.

It’s just as dangerous to spend all your energy reacting to whatever happens to you today.  When I just react to today’s challenges, I’m not that much different than an animal,  unable to make any real choices about what my future should be.

When you’re stuck with a choice where both sides have issues, don’t choose one.
Choose both.

Yes.  Choose today and tomorrow.  Choose the detailed and the general. Find a way to make them work together, even though it seems like you have to choose one or the other.

Today and Tomorrow
So how do we make them work together? 

Take some time.  Think about what’s important to you within your family and relationships, your job or business, your health, your spiritual life, and other interests. Think generally about what’s important to you, and then list some details that flesh out your general ideas. You should focus, not only on what you have, are doing, or who you are now – but also on what you want to have, what you want to do, and who you want to become.

Also identify the problems and challenges that you regularly face, or imagine that you’ll face as you go about your everyday life, and pursue your goals.  Include the situations where you often procrastinate, or feel conflicted about doing. Try to complete your initial goal discovery and planning, over the course of a week.  Spend 30 minutes to an hour each day during this week working on it.  While you’re doing your initial planning, you don’t do anything differently than you’re already doing.

Then it’s time to do some planning.

1. Look at what’s truly important to you, that you already have, and that you want to achieve. Determine what you have to do to keep the one, and achieve the other.  These are your goals.
2. Come up with a series of steps that lead to each new achievement. List whatever steps you can, even if some of them are fuzzy, and you don’t have a clue how you’ll accomplish them. Often knowing the details of what’s important to you will help you define steps to achieving your goals.
3. Identify the steps that you’ll take to overcome key obstacles and challenges, and maintain the important things that you already have. Maybe you need to take small steps now to acquire the knowledge, or build the skills you’ll need to face the challenges.
4. Focus on defining the beginning steps of each goal. Be sure to make the steps small enough that they seem doable, at least the first one or two.
5. With the detailed picture you have of what’s important, what gets in the way, and when you get stuck, look for underlying patterns of weak areas and unresolved conflicts.  When you find a weakness, you can plan to overcome it yourself, or plan to work with others who have those strengths that you need.  Where you have unresolved conflicts, you can plan to overcome those conflicts and get unstuck.
6. Look among your list of important actions for ones that are important and urgent.  These are actions that have to be done right away, possibly today.
7. Are there other tasks that are not on your list, that you still have to do.  If they are really important, add them to your list of important tasks.  If they don’t relate to what’s important to you,  try to identify which of these seem urgent. Think especially about urgent, unimportant tasks that you have do regularly, even daily. Many of these regular activities may seem urgent.
8. Review the urgent, unimportant tasks carefully.  Be honest. We often pretend that tasks are urgent, when the truth is we feel like doing them because they’re easy, unchallenging, and pleasant.  Most of these don’t need to be done at all. 
9. Often we fill up our time with simple, familiar tasks that aren’t important to us and have no urgency.  There are a variety of reasons we do this. Maybe it’s because we haven’t thought about what’s really important to us. Maybe it’s because we’ve encountered some external resistance when pursuing our goals. Maybe it’s because we haven’t thought about what the next step is to get what’s important. Often it’s because we’re afraid or otherwise troubled by an action that we need to do. We’re stuck between wanting to do the action, and not wanting to do it.  If you’re stuck in this way, find ways to explore and work through your resistance. (See my 3 part series on Getting Unstuck). 

What have you accomplished with this planning? 

• You’ve thought about what’s important to you in several key areas of your life.
• You’ve identified the daily and regular steps you need to take to get and keep what’s important to you.
• You’ve learned to focus on actions that are important, question actions that are unimportant but urgent, and abandon actions that are not urgent and not important.
• You’ve found patterns in the details of the challenges that face you and in the details of the ways that you get stuck, and you’ve started to plan to overcome them.
• You’ve brought your daily actions and choices in sync with your long-term choices, driven by what’s truly important to you.

You’ve begun to turn today into tomorrow.  Congratulations.