All of us love to be organised and disciplined however, only some of us are really good at being organised. Be it our professional lives or our personal lives, we crave to have a plan for everything. We plan our lives, our years, our months, our days and even our hours and minutes. For all our goals, we have “TO DO” lists where we write down what we would want to accomplish at that particular moment which will help us achieve our objectives in short term and long term.
However while listing our To Do items, we forget an important factor which is, what are the things we won’t do at that particular moment.By neglecting this factor, we often end up doing everything except what that To Do list had and even if we are able to complete that task, we end up spending a lot more time and energy it should have taken.
As long as you have discipline, you can be a success. Discipline is what makes you do everything you need to do. Anthony Joshua
I personally struggle with keeping up with the plan I have for myself for that particular hour, let alone the plan I have for myself for the year. However, along with the other numerous things COVID has thought me is, the importance of having a “To Don’t” list too. It has helped me personally to remove all the unwanted and unproductive things I do while doing something productive. For instance, in the “to don’t” list I wrote, Do not use mobile phone, no music, no social media while writing an article. Which happened while writing this very article. By doing this, I told myself what are things I would not do while I write this article. Which helped me in focussing on my thoughts while I write, this automatically took care of an item I had on my “to do” list for the week (which is, post one article per week)
I’ve been applying this principle for some months now and it has allowed me to stay away from all the non-productive things I was getting used to. It has made me stay focused and concentrate on what I was working on and what I really loved doing. The more I started applying this in my everyday life, the more I felt I have lot more time than I thought and I felt my life is getting better. For instance, I made a note of what I won’t do after work hours (which used be, watching news endlessly, watching random movies or series which never really were of “my kind”) This automatically shifted my focus on spending quality time with my 2 year old daughter, reading books, listening to audio books or podcasts or even spiritual songs (Bhajan’s) which sprouts positive thoughts in my mind. Because now, I have all these hours for myself which I can invest on productive things where as, I used to think I never really have time for books or podcasts or even spending quality time with my daughter.
Focus so much on the productive things that you don’t find time for the unproductive one’s. Praveen (Me)
Let me break this down further, let’s say, you are driving on highway at 80 KM/Hr, am sure along with all the other important to do things, we also know what we must not be doing. Things like, don’t drink and drive, don’t look any where else except the lane ahead, don’t try to cross and overtake a vehicle especially if you don’t have the complete vision of what’s ahead and obviously don’t take your hands off of the steering wheel. Another example I can give is, If I have “Wake up at 5AM” in my To Do, It is important to have “Do not sleep later than 10PM” in my To Don’t.
Similarly, If you are a leader or an organisation, you have all the things you would like to be known for and what you must do to get there. Subconsciously, you also know what you would not do to get to your objective or the goal. Usually, these things are the one’s which might question your integrity, your ethics, the quality of the product or the service. As an organisation, you would never want to do something unethical to win that billion dollar contract, you would never want to be complacent with the quality of your product or the service to beat your competitors on the price.
To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him. Buddha
To summarise, “To Do” lists are important however, “To Don’t” lists are equally important. To Do lists tell you what needs to be done and To Don’t lists tell what you won’t do while working on your To Do’s. To Do’s are the goals and To Don’t’s are your plans to achieve those goals.
Note: By no means I am telling you that I am an expert at this and my life has changed completely after following the above principle. However I promise you this, my life has definitely become better and I am loving it 🙂
Be Great!
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