Are you where you want to be in life, or does it feel like time is slipping away? You're not alone. In today's post-pandemic world, the boundaries between work and personal life continue to blur. Bringing intentional focus to your daily activities can help you live more purposefully and work more efficiently—ultimately helping you achieve your goals. In this guide, I'll share five practical tips for living with greater intention and working smarter.
Technology offers many ways to live more intentionally and work smarter. Start by setting up a simple system that helps you set goals, establish habits, capture information on the fly, schedule deliverables, and perform regular self-check-ins. Beyond technology, incorporate visuals into your workflow. Visuals create connections that text alone cannot, helping you unleash ideas and align with others more effectively than written or verbal communication.
It's pointless to be busy and accomplish many tasks if they don't move you closer to your goals. To ensure meaningful progress, only take on projects and tasks directly related to your objectives. Additionally, identify and track specific habits that will help you reach these goals.
This is the information age, which means we come across content all the time. Capturing relevant information when you encounter it, ahead of doing the task, can help you get 25% – 50% of the way there so that tackling the task can go much faster when that time comes. This is called incremental work and is also helpful for those of us who don't have long periods of time available at once.
Identify which deliverables (projects, tasks, etc.) will help you accomplish your goals and set specific dates for completion. Then, refocus your intentions daily based on these deliverables. Without establishing clear focus, it's easy to get caught up in busy work that doesn't move you toward your goals. This daily intention-setting is a cornerstone practice of living intentionally. Set visible reminders to ensure you both refocus daily and complete your deliverables on time.
Once you've set your goals and you start moving through your tasks, it's super important that you establish some periodic and regular check-ins. Setting goals only helps if you're checking in on those goals. Otherwise, you may be performing tasks that aren't helping you progress towards those goals. To ensure you are checking in often, set up specific intervals and routines during which these occurs (for example, compare your goals to your tasks at the end of each month).
There you have it! Take a look at how you are doing things today. Are you doing any of these 5 things? If not, it's time to revisit things. But how do you apply these? The first step is to leverage technology, I’m a big fan of using the app Notion. Not sure how to get started? Check out my FREE guide and learn Notion in 5 quick steps.
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