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Podcast Transcript
Two-minute Tips for Turbulent Times with David Allen
Areas of Focus, Responsibility and Interests
Revisit or create an overview of your Areas of Focus, Responsibility, and Interests. It’s a different horizon of your commitments. You’ve got actions you need to take, and you’ve got projects you need to finish. But the reason you have actions, and projects is because they respond to or they relate to areas of focus and interests.
For instance, you may have a project about your kids, well that’s because obviously kids and family will be an area of focus. You may have a project about your health, in which case heath and your physical energy is an area of interest or focus. So it’s a next level of abstraction, a useful place to visit, especially when things are changing a lot. Where you might need to revisit these different areas and say, how’s everything doing?
This is like being your own CEO, your own executive, essentially, for your life. Looking across all of your roles, and responsibilities, and accountabilities. If you haven’t done this lately, not a bad idea just to brainstorm it. You could just do a mind map. Spiritual Life – Relationships – Fun – My Health – Family
It’s a way to overview, essentially, sort of the whole context, so that there’s a part of you that feels like you’re more grounded in space and time, from the larger gestalt. Very helpful thing to do, we’ve done that over the years, for many thousands of people, who’ve gone through that exercise. And it’s extremely valuable. And it might surprise you, what you’ll come up with. If you really identify those things accurately and appropriately and say How am I doing about that?
Some of those may be on cruise control, hey that’s all fine. Oh, that reminds me, I need to, I better take a look at that, better look at it from that perspective. So getting grounded essentially from that little longer or larger horizon. Very valuable thing to do, especially when things are changing fast. So that some part of you doesn’t feel that you’re losing your footing, in terms of the whole game.