I say one of my favorite sayings all the time, and it always goes something like this:
“We all have a hundred things on our plate, but are you working on the right things today?”
Easy enough to say, but harder still to deliver on. Why? Because we are creatures of habit. We show up (physically) on Monday morning. We check email and voice mail and then “ping pong syndrome” begins.
What is “ping pong syndrome”?
Reacting. Bouncing back and forth between all the things competing for your attention all day long. Reacting to emails and voice mails, trying to deliver for our leaders, reacting to our Clients’ needs, and dealing with our teams’ issues. We react to the voices in our heads, feedback from family and friends, and what the media and society tell us we should be doing. We spend so much time reacting all week, that before we know it, its Friday.
Did you know?
A University of California – Irvine study showed that information workers are interrupted on average every 3 minutes. In addition, a study at Intel showed people spending 20 hours per week processing email. (source: IEEE Spectrum)
The challenges to maintaining strong mental focus have never been greater. To help, here are two insanely practical tools that can help you BE CERTAIN you are working on the right things, and avoiding ping pong syndrome:
Goal Setting Worksheet
This Goal Setting Worksheet will help you organize your goals, to dos, and/or projects to help you make the biggest impact in your life or career.
Updating this each week will only take about 10 minutes if you have your personal development plan and to do list organized.
Download the Goal Setting Worksheet Template (Excel version). PDF version.
Here’s what you do:
- Place all of your goals, tasks, or projects in the quadrants.
- Quickly, you’ll find the things that have low effort/ high impact. Work on those first.
- Move to those things in the high effort/high impact quadrant!
Weekly Planner Template
This Weekly Planner Template (inspired from the teachings of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
Creating one each week should not take you longer than 10 minutes.
Download the Weekly Planner Template(Excel version). PDF version.
Here’s how to use it:
- Simply write in all of the roles you have. As you’ll see in my example, I put in things like Husband, Father, Team Leader, etc.
- Then, ask yourself “What is the most important thing I can do in this role this week?”
- Pull the best high impact/low effort and high impact/high effort goals, tasks, or projects that you will accomplish THIS WEEK from the Goal Setting Worksheet, or any other to-do list you maintain.
- Fill in the “Sharpening the Saw” section – which contains the 4 areas of your personal development each week. Sharpening the Saw refers to Habit 7 in the The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Hopefully these two tools will help you focus your biggest decision – where to spend your time – much more effectively. Will you be able to consistently do this type of goal setting each week? Not always. But, doing this more often than not, and getting in the habit of doing so is time extremely well spent.
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Hey Regis,
Thanks for the worksheets. Just a note, the Goal setting one has High and Low Impact twice.
-Kat
Hi Kat – thanks for the head’s up on that! The worksheet has been corrected and is ready for download.
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Simple and effective work sheets.Thank you
You may want to check out http://www.GoalsOnTrack.com, a very nicely built web app designed for tracking goals and todo lists, and supports time tracking too. It’s clear, focused, easy to navigate, worth a try.
Thanks for the worksheet, you have already helped me to obtain my goals of not having a worksheet. Check!
Thanks for the worksheet.
That’s quite a different approach than I took with mine at http://the-life-plan.com but it sure helps with the ever present challenge of prioritization.
All the best in 2011!
Thanks Daren! I checked out your worksheet, and I like the thorough list of questions about each goal you want to set. I’d also recommend checking out my personal development plan template, which would be a great place to collect all of those goals after going deep to analyze them (using the templates on our websites).
Hi Regis!
Long time, no talk — so to speak.
I stumbled upon your blog here by way of one of your FB posts with a link to this article. I want to take a moment to say: WOW, this is valuable information. I hear and think about productivity tips all the time, but rarely do I find advice that also includes actual, real-world tools that are ready for use immediately. I have printed these spreadsheets and plan to put them into use today.
So, thanks for those. And, it’s nice to see you again. I hope we bump into each other again soon!
Take care,
Lauren
Hi Lauren – so great to hear from you! I agree it’s hard to find real-world tools that are ready to use. If you come across other valuable stuff, please let me know. We have a community of folks here who all care about these topics and are always looking for new ideas. Take care and talk soon!
Hi Regis,
You have some great content and some wonderful plans to lay it out for people. I was looking for a worksheet like this and I went ahead and shares some of your content on my blog with several links back to you… I hope that is okay. All the best!
Jason,
All I can hope for is to provide valuable stuff that people like you will want to share with your readers. I really appreciate you doing that.
Thanks!
I think it is great idea to apply business minded ideas to your personal life. It would have never clicked into my mind to do so. I would say “you live and you learn”
I like that term “ping pong syndrome’, I didn’t know that I have it.
Glad you like it. Once we can see we are doing it, we can make changes! I find that labeling things like “ping pong syndrome” helps me identify when I’m doing things like that.
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Thanks so much for the template! I loved the old Covey Planners, and it looks your template is based on those. Nice work. Now to integrate this into a widget for Google Calendar!
Hi Esmeralda – glad you like them! Keep me posted if you create that Gcal widget. Would love to check it out and share it here on Dot Connector!
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Thanks. I needed an effective template and got it here. Thanks for the doc. Appreciate sharing thoughts.
Cheers!