A note from our attorneys: reading this post can lead to profound and dramatic life changes, read this at your own risk!
At this time each year every blogger, writer, and person with an opinion trots out a piece on “How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions” and most of us dutifully right down a laundry list of “Things We Should Do But Haven’t Yet to Improve Our Lives.” My wife and I have our own variation on the New Year’s resolutions tradition, one inspired by our readings of Robert Kiyosaki, Stephen Covey, and by our own trials and errors in life, and we would like to share it with you. Warning, this goes a great deal deeper and is much more involved than the traditional process, and can sometimes lead to discomfort and anger. It can also change your life.
What’s really important
Instead of the laundry list approach to resolutions, I suggest that you spend some thinking of and writing down your core values in life. I like visualizing these through a mapping and in this way I can create hierarchies, I can overlap some areas and I can show inter-connectivity. It doesn’t have to be any too neat, as long as it is legible to you. Be comprehensive, putting in subsets and categorizing. For example, if family is important to you define what you mean by family and detail. One thread may lead you to Family> economic well-being> savings> cushion for emergencies> HSA plan.
If you are married or in another type of “until death do depart” relationship, I strongly encourage you to do share this, or at least a version of it, with your life-partner. This should lead to: first, reinforcing their place in your values, and second, encouraging them to carry out a similar self-assessment. There is, of course, the obvious caveat that if the milk-man is more important to you than your husband you can expect a little grumpiness on his part about that; but hey, honesty’s the best policy, right?
What you do when no-one is watching
The next step is a hard look at how you have spent your resources over the past year. For most of us our primary resources are our time and our money, although there could very be other resources such as personal connections, your health or important assets that play a role.
- Money – if you have been tracking your use of your cash through Quicken, Mint, or some other program now is the time to whip up those pie charts showing how the money’s been spent. If you haven’t been tracking it make some estimates.
- Time – There are no programs to track your use of time, but nothing reveals more about your values than how you have spent your most precious resource, the finite and rapidly depleting amount of time that you have as a living being. Money lost can be regained and assets can be rebuilt but you will never get the time you spend back. So examine closely what you do with that time and what that says about your values in life. Steve of “My Wife Quit Her Job” has exquisitely summed up time abuse here.
The primary question to ask yourself is, are the ways that you have been using your resources consistent with the values that you expressed in the first part of the exercise? Also, do they indicate additional values that should be added to the map from the first exercise? Finally, the hardest question to be honest with yourself about, are you using some of your resources in ways that are counterproductive or damaging to your core values?
Be honest until it hurts
If you’re like me and 99% of the other human beings on this planet you have noticed some inconsistencies between your values and your use of your resources. For some of us, myself included, you get a sickening, squeamish feeling in the pit of your stomach just thinking about some of the abuses of your resources. Good! If you don’t want to change your values, then start changing your use of resources!
The next step is the fun, creative part of the process, start brainstorming of ways to emphasize your values in your life and to improve your use of your resources. Take into account the ways that they will affect all your values and have fun inventing activities that have positive influences across multiple areas. Don’t forget to weigh in potential negative effects, we only have so many resources, but don’t spend too much time qualifying ideas at this point.
Get a clue, make a plan
Review your list of ideas and do some serious evaluating to get down to the best ideas that will have the biggest impact. Go back to step two, your review of your resource allocation, and figure out where you can trim some fat and make some resources available for new endeavors. This is the stage where your standard “How to
Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions” articles and posts kick in. Stephen Covey, blog-God Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and some of the bloggers from Web Workers Daily have particularly excellent ideas on the subject. You are getting to the clear, precise goals and forming a plan of action at this stage.
Review, refocus, and rejoin the battle
Set yourself some dates for for a periodic accounting of the progress that you have made to help keep the focus and reevaluate the effectiveness of your plan. Think of unintended consequences that have popped up that you hadn’t thought of before and do some soul-searching to determine if the original values that let to the plan are still in place.
Your two cents
We would love to know what has worked or not worked for you. Our own process changes yearly as we add new ideas and eliminate less effective ones, so your suggestions could lead to future improvements!
Tyler- You make so much sense about how irreplaceable time is. Do you have a method of keeping track of how you spend/waste your time?
Jane
You’re on to something and I have been putting some thought into that. In my job as an accountant I have to keep track of every minute and I have a sweet spreadsheet to do exactly that. Now I am thinking that I need to track the time that I spend on my blog and other pursuits and that I can adopt what I already use for that. I’ll put this down as a potential future post.