Problems eat up our bandwidth.
They come and go in a loop inside our heads between appointments, during our commute, when we wake up in the morning…
What a waste of thinking time.
It’s important to reflect on our problems but we have to do it intentionally. The rest is pollution that affects our emotional state and decreases our capacity to decide on all the others subjects.
Photo by Nik Shuliahin 💛💙 on Unsplash
The 12/48 method. 2 steps to managing your daily life problems
1- Block a time slot in your agenda to think about the problem.
Let’s say 60 minutes. Or whatever time you think you need. If you cut yourself off from all distractions, you can get a lot of work done in a short time. The key is to cut out all possible distractions during this thinking time. This is your quality time “Important and Not Urgent”
2- Divide your time with the 20/80 rule.
- 12 min to understand my problem, and remind myself of the consequences if I don’t deal with it.
- 48 min to evaluate my options, select the most interesting ones, launch the first action and plan the others.
It sounds obvious. But observe your habits and those of the people around you. You’ll be surprised how often the equation is reversed.
Improving the quality of your thinking accelerates your growth.
What problem is passively bothering you that you could try this approach on?
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