Is it essential? No! Then why are you doing it?

Go, go, go
I am preparing for training. I am volunteering in my community. I am working with clients. I am going to dance class. I am cleaning the floor. I am ...doing, doing doing ... but at some point, I have no idea what I am doing, because I am just going too fast.

I found myself there this week and realized something was amiss. Yup, I was in Survival Mode once again!

Survival Mode
Do you find yourself in that mode? You are just simply doing what needs to be done without much thought. You are doing, that is, what ever shows up in font of you. Yet you really don't know if you should be doing it or not, because you don't have time to think about it. 

If you are like me at this point, you just trying to get the piles off of your desk, get your inbox cleared to a manageable level and make sure no one says you forgot about them.

It reminds me of this video from I Love Lucy!

We become exhausted on this race to do it all. 
I sure know that I was. In this way, we tend to believe that everything is important. I wasn't sure what I could drop. At some point I realized I had too much going on, but didn't know what to let go of. 

Greg McKoewn suggests another way. 
In his bookEssentialism; The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, McKowen suggests that rather than trying to do it all, we discern what is really important. It's been a good book for me to be reading this past few weeks.

Not everything is important despite what others would have you believe.

Tweet: Not everything is important despite what others would have you believe.

You might be doing it good, but are you doing it great?
When we do too much, we water everything down. Nothing is being done well. Everything is simply being done, and some of it not very good. As such, we are overwhelmed by the pressures around us. We feel out of control. 

Are these things all really important?
Instead, if we pause to discern what it truly important. We can discipline ourselves to focus on what truly is vital. 

• Do our children need to be in 4 activities or only one?
  
• Do we need to attend every meeting or only certain ones?
  
• Do we need to sit on every committee or the ones that we are passionate about?
  
• Do we need to control every decision or can we delegate certain responsibilities?
  
• Do we need to have our finger in everything or can we pull back and allow others to do some stuff?

The key is discipline
You need to become disciplined at slowing things down. It is vital that you take time to consider, ponder and discern was is really vital. In order to be doing a few things really well, rather than a bunch of things just ok, you need to take time.

Schedule time to look through your activities
Look back over your day timer for the last week. What could you have cut out?

Review your To Do List
Does everything really need to be done here? Could you delegate some? Eliminate others?

More importantly, take time to decide what is vital.

• If you were going on vacation, what would you finish up before you left?
  
• If you were passing the job over to someone else, what would you tell them is most important.
  
• If you were to die...what is the work that is inside you that you would want finished?

Be disciplined in your pursuit of your best work. Keep at it. Come back to it again and again.

What is really important?
The key to managing everything and enjoying life is figuring out what truly is important and working on that. We need to get disciplined


 about figuring out was is the vital pieces we need to hang on to,

Greg suggests that we move from the undisciplined pursuit of more to 
the disciplined pursuit of less.

Ask yourself this often
I am really doing the important work I should be doing - right now?