Personal Insights Blog #2 – Having Time to Do it All – How to be productive

By dougnau on Aug 11, 2009 in Miscellaneous, Tools

Where’s Doug Nau Been?

You may have noticed that I’ve taken one of my longest blog sabbaticals over the past few weeks. This isn’t for a lack of motivation, or a relative drying up of new content to create – its been quite the opposite. The reality is that I’ve been thinking more than ever about ‘The Personal Growth Network’, how to truly turn this into a network and community of subscribers, and how to continue to add value to you. This being said, its been my lack of writing over the past few weeks that has me contemplating and acting upon these other ideas. For those of you who’ve wondered what I’ve been doing, here’s a short snippet:

Vacation up to the coast with my wife and kids. We spent a week out at The Sea Ranch in Northern California. We had no internet access which I had mixed feelings with at first, but in fact that turned into a real positive as it allowed us to ‘unplug’ for a week. (By the way this is about my 8th visit out there, a great place to go for cool weather in the summer and walks by the ocean)
Completing a Stress Managment Certification. I am in my 8th and final course to become a certified stress management consultant through AIHCP. This has taken me about a year and I’ve been chipping away at this goal steadily throughout. As I am getting closer to completion I a committing more time to this, so there’s been plenty of reading/studying in the evenings.
Home Projects. The Sacramento Valley is one of the most productive agricultural locations in the world and we’ve got a beautifully landscaped lot which has been ‘maintained’ as best as possible over the past 2 years as our efforts have changed to raising babies. This summer I refocused on grooming our yard which had become quite overgrown – that’s been a heck of a project and I am pleased to say that I’ve remained extremely productive in spending time with the kids & working outdoors at the same time (they love to be outside & it hasn’t been too hot this year).
Guests, Parties, Commitments – The summer is always busy and this year is no different. The influx of guests and social endeavors has come with the season.
Building a wellness coaching program. Sutter Health Partners continues to be a vibrant and interesting group to work with. I’ve been putting in more hours than typical as I become more involved with the implementation of next year’s program. This has been the most significant priority shift which has kept me from blogging over the past 3-4 weeks.
Revisiting Goals. One of the major life goals that my wife and I have is to own a vacation home on the water (lake/ocean). I suppose a lot of people have this goal & for us its been a vision years down the road. At this point we decided to begin acting on that vision. Maybe we can make it happen, maybe not, there are plenty of variables but I do no that if the intention is set without action, nothing will come out of it. The market and interest rates are right at this time. So a goal in our long term vision may be pushed forward if our research proves positive.

Key Learnings

Following my heart, I’ve used this ‘busier than usual’ time to assess my priorities. I’ve written on developing and using your intuition in the past and its sending me strong messages.

I am committed to offering value through The Personal Growth Network. I fully expect this website to continue growing and to become a vibrant community of personal growth enthusiasts and wellness professionals. I am committed to making this a priority as I know how it feels when it is not (gotta listen to that intuition).
My coaching work is evolving. I love providing this free service for all to benefit. I love meeting with clients. I love having as large an impact as possible. My focus with coaching is changing. My measure of success is in reaching the broadest audience possible to help create positive lifestyle change. Growing programs, not only growing individuals is an exciting and fresh new angle I’ll be focusing my attention on.
Life balance is not a 24/7 thing. What I mean by this is that you are never fully balanced in the six areas of wellness at one point in time. The six components again are – health, career, relationships, personal growth and development, finance, and enjoyment. If all was perfectly balance life would be boring. I listened to James Ray speak about finding ‘harmony’ rather than balance and I like this analogy. At times career will be the focus of attention, at others enjoyment, personal development etc. I have not been able to do it all these past 3 weeks, and the area which has dropped off the radar is writing for this website, and I am OK with that as I am clear on my goals and a path forward.

Path Forward

For those of you that are interested in knowing what is coming next (perhaps you are thinking of strategies to improve your own website), here’s my plan moving forward:

Work with SEO company on placing in the top 10 in Google as Life Coaching – this is in place and I figured I’d learn from the true experts for a trial period
Develop the brand for The Personal Growth Network. Right now this site is a collection of articles I’ve written on topics of health, wellness, life coaching, and life balance. Its really branded a ‘me’. Over the next couple months I’ll be rebranding The Personal Growth Network to be its own entity, and to brand www.coachforwellness.com as my personal site, and in the process I’ll evaluate my linked in, facebook, myspace, and twitter strategies.
Turn The Personal Growth Network into a community site for wellness professionals to communicate and collaborate, to share articles and build their online resume. This will be a major shift to the direction of this offering.
Gain media attention. Upon the completion of this work, my focus will be on news print, internet, radio and television promotion of this work.

The time without writing has given me an opportunity to re-evaluate the strategy of this site and what would need to be done to maintain long term viability. I believe this strategy offers the most value to my reader base.

Being Productive - Calendaring

I’ve always been productive but I’ve been ‘uber’ productive over the past 4 months. Its been exciting for me as I’ve had unparalleled energy and while my articles have slipped as of late, I do feel like I’ve been able to do everything I’ve prioritized. This has been my secret (and its quite simple). Microsoft has a new product called ‘Windows Live Mail’. I’ve been using it for over a year as it was released in beta then. I’ve always been a fan of calendaring and this tool allows you to calendar online or offline and sync when you are connected again to the internet.

What have I been doing differently? Well I’ve read a lot of calendaring strategies and this is the one that works for me. Each Sunday night I’ve been reviewing my priority list and what I’d like to accomplish for the upcoming week. In such a case, maybe I’ve got 1-2 main projects that I’d like to complete that take some significant effort. That Sunday, I’ll break it down into all the bite sized tasks that need to be accomplished to make that happen. And like you I’ve got a day job, dinner, kids, etc to consider, so bite sized chunks could be 10-45 minutes any given night. I’ll take these chunks, spread them out over the week and review each night for those I’d like to complete that evening. Each night I generally love to see that I accomplish 2-3 tasks in the calendar. After I complete them, I shrink their size to be a 1/2 hour slot starting at 5pm to know I’ve gotten them done. Its awesome for me to look back on a week (like last week), and see all that’s been completed. Its a data source from which I can draw on and learn from in the future as well.

You could use any calendaring tool – I really like this one (and its free), below is an example of what last week looked like for me. By the way, you’l notice that there is ‘zero’ TV in the schedule. Its been months and months since I’ve plugged into TV – if you watch a lot of TV – compare that as a life goal to the others you’ve got.

I know this strategy works if you commit to it. Each of my weeks for the past 4 months looks similar to the above and I am excited to see how things shift as the weather changes, the kids go to bed earlier, the yard work settles down, and I can commit to spending those tasks on the path forward described above. Please comment on how this strategy works for you.

Be Well