Today I am going to start discussing mindset. This will be the first of a series of items about this topic. It is a big subject and it requires quite a depth of understanding to make a real difference. Fundamentally we all need to be stretched. We all need a little bit of distress in order to improve. There is a real distinction between DISTRESS and EUSTRESS.
Eustress is positive stress, distress is when we just can’t cope with the volume of things being thrown at us, and it starts to have a negative effect on mind and body. If our lives were ideal, we would be in a state of Eustress all the time but that is just not pragmatic. Too often our lives can be complex, at times very challenging, and we seem to have an inordinate number of things to do. I certainly think that organisation of tasks is a very important aspect of having a good mind set. Being clear about your daily priorities is key.
In terms of organising tasks, I would strongly recommend Stephen Covey’s ‘Four Quadrants of Time Management’. That’s the urgent and important, non-urgent important, the urgent non-important and the non-important non-urgent. He divides these up into four quadrants.
These are the things that take us into firefighting which we must do immediately in order to solve a problem.
This is the key quadrant. These are the tasks that don’t grasp our attention and they are the ones we know are essential to improve our situation, our work, our lives. Not dealing with this quadrant can really have a downside effect on mind set, the reason being that this is the preventative stuff in our lives that makes a huge difference that is very easy to avoid because it is not immediate and it is not crying for our attention.
This stuff is often other people’s priorities, such as emails that we don’t need to respond to, people giving us immediate tasks that are unimportant to our priorities.
This is the stuff used to waste time to make ourselves feel better. It’s the TV we don’t really need to watch, the book we don’t really need to read and the shopping we don’t really need to do. We’ve all been there, and we’ve all done it and it’s just a way of avoiding the task we know we really need to do.
The reason why I have majored on organisation in this item is that without organisation not much else will follow. If you can really focus on the Quadrant 2 this will massively improve your Eustress.