It's Time To Take Accountability

We are halfway through the year! Can you believe it?

At the beginning of each month, I like to reassess my yearly and monthly goals.

While getting real about my progress or lack thereof of certain goals, I came across this podcast with Rich Roll and Neil Pasricha, the author of several popular books such as The Happiness Equation, The Book of Awesome, and most recently Our Book of Awesome: A Celebration of the Small Joys That Bring Us Together.

In that podcast he shared his 4 quadrant system for optimizing, organizing, and getting your ish together.

I really enjoy how it tidied up multiple ideas I’ve been learning about over the past year, so I wanted to share it with you all!

High Time Investment-Low Importance

This includes things like laundry, cleaning out your email inbox, and getting rid of the very expired food in your fridge.

~Just give up on that 2-week-old box of spinach, you’re not going to eat it~.

These things do need to get done or it will cause overwhelm later on.

However, as we typically have more urgent and important things to handle, these lower levels of importance and high-time investment tasks get put on the back burner.

Because of this, Pasricha suggests that we assign specific, and consistent times per day/week/month depending on the task.

And these are set in stone.

If you need to check your emails or respond to clients, chose two one-hour blocks per working day.

This way you are not task switching, one of the biggest threats to focus and productivity we can encounter during our work days.

Research even shows that on average it can take us 20 minutes just to regain focus when switching between tasks ie. checking social media on your phone, getting up to grab a snack out of boredom, checking your email, etc.

Alarmingly, in a study done by UC Irvine’s School of Information and Computer Science, they reported that the average person is interrupted every 11 min and 4 seconds during their work day.

It’s no wonder so many of us feel like we’re always working but never getting anything done!

Low Time Investment-High Importance

These are tasks that can make an impact on your quality of life or the quality of life of those around you such as:

• Greeting your spouse when they get home and spending 10-15 minutes asking them about their day.

• Looking up from your phone when the children in your life want to show you the cartwheel they’ve been working on… non-stop, loudly, and chaotically for the past 5 hours. ~gotta love them~

• Greeting customers when they come into the store and making them feel welcomed with a smile.

These are things you automate.

You just do them.

They take 5-15 minutes and make a big difference.

Low Time Investment-Low Importance

This includes things like grocery shopping, picking up quick things from the store, etc.

For these things you just automate them!

Thank God for Amazon and Instacart right?

This isn’t to say groceries and miscellaneous items like light bulbs, screws, etc aren’t important, they very much are.

But it isn’t important for you to be the person who retrieves them.

Personally, this was one of the hardest things for me to let go of.

I had to let go of my slight control freak tendencies and realize that between San Diego traffic and long lines, I was wasting anywhere from 2-3 hours a week on grocery shopping alone.

That’s not much when you look at how many hours are in a week, but still, it adds up!

Now I very gladly pay the fee for Instacart +, and have my groceries delivered weekly.

Do the shoppers occasionally pick veggies with mold on them? Yup.

Is it worth the extra 3 hours a week to spend with my loved ones or on work? Absolutely

High Importance- High Time Investment Tasks

The beautiful thing about this system is that by regulating, automating, and effectuating the other three categories of tasks, it reduces decision fatigue!

This gives your brain the space and energy to ponder over (debate) the more important things in your life like relocating, delving more into spirituality and self-development, choosing a new job, building relationships with current and potential loved ones, and the list goes on.

So frequently we’re spending too much time on routine and mundane tasks that when it comes time for our personal goals, and pouring into our loved ones, we don’t have any energy left.

Now it’s Time to Take Accountability

Prior to my 30-day social media detox, I had to take a hard look at my screen time and then at myself.

I plan on going more into this in next week’s newsletter but I was spending about 20 hours a week on social media alone.

SIS, that’s a whole part-time job.

Given, I was spending some of that time building my brand BUT I had to take accountability for the fact that a good portion of that time was spent scrolling on my FYP.

I looked at my output vs input on social media and there was no way I was producing 20 hours a week worth of content.

And that was a tough pill to swallow.

With that extra 20 hours a week ~ amounting to 80 hours that month ~ I learned how to start a newsletter, and then committed to starting it which I have done every week, Alhamdulillah.

I got rid of over 300 past posts on my Instagram, rebranded the whole thing, and did some serious work on my website. ~milly rocks~

This is not me telling you to get off of social media but rather to gently motivate you to look at how you’re spending your time.

Are you participating in productive procrastination and doing low-important-low time-investment tasks that you could be automating?

Are you making excuses for lack of productivity when you’re yo-yo-ing from work to email and back again for hours every day…and then using your lunch to catch up on work?~ If you’re a current or recovering workaholic I’m side-eyeing you…don’t worry I’m directing that same energy at me too ~.

I want all of us to be the very best versions of ourselves possible.

I want all of us to have time in our schedules to move our bodies, cook nutritious foods, spend time with our loved ones, and do the hobbies that bring us joy.

But that requires reflection, planning, and consistent implementation.

I hope you all are having an amazing year.

I hope your peaks are much larger than your valleys, and I hope you all accomplish the things you set out to accomplish this year.

As always wishing you all abundant light and radiant health,

Aqilah

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