Life Management Lessons Relearned This Week

Some people seem to learn something so well that it sticks with them all of their life. With me, there are things I have to relearn from time to time. This week has been a time of relearning for me. Below are some of the life lessons I relearned this week. Maybe this list will be useful to you.

Do you find yourself relearning some of life lessons? If so, share with us in the comments.

Here is my relearn-list for the week:

• I need a daily ToDo list. Over the past couple of weeks, I had gotten away from using a daily ToDo list and was just using a running list. Not only did this mix my higher priority items in with my lower priority ones, I was also adding ideas to the list. They were not even actions, just ideas. This led me to be less productive, less focused, and it contributed to a general feeling of angst. So, I caught my error and fixed it. Hopefully I won’t drift from consistently using a daily list again.
• It pays to give yourself a break. For the past few weeks, I have been keeping myself busy almost all of my waking hours. A lot of it was related to blogging. Looking back on it, a lot of it was unproductive, or unfruitful. Regardless, after awhile the pace really took a toll on me, and a feeling began to well up inside of me that I was not doing anything worthwhile in life. Basically, I needed a break. I needed to step back and get perspective. So, I slowed down on blogging from 2 or 3 posts per day to a pace that let me have time to just think and relax. It has helped immensely. A lot of us are just not good at giving ourselves a break and feel like we have to be doing something all of the time. We owe it to ourselves to step back away from it all from time to time.
• You can overload yourself, really easily. This sorta relates to the previous items, but is a bit different. I had been piling stuff on myself without asking if I could legitimately handle the increased load. Jimmy Guterman of O’Reilly Radar talked about this recently. When I read his article, I said to myself “him too, huh?” It dawned on me that I had been piling stuff on and that perhaps a lot of it was not even worth doing. I am now working on trimming my list down to what is worth doing.
• I can’t be someone else: I can only be me. I can’t be Robert Scoble. After reading his and Shel Israel’s book Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, I was so excited about blogging that I tried to mimic Scoble’s numerous posts-per-day approach to blogging. I could not keep the pace and do everything else that I felt I should do. It is great to try to emulate certain characteristics of other people: we can become better by doing so. But, if we depart too much from being ourselves, we lose our genuineness.

I look forward to hearing your comments and thoughts.