Last year, my son and I were on the ski slopes. I never really got past the beginner stage, having to relearn skiing every year. My son is natural talent. He zips down the slopes with ease, but at the time he had just switched from skis to snowboards. We talked about the challenges of the switch; one is how to turn. On a snowboard (IIRC) you turn by shifting your weight from one edge of the board to the other and leaning into the turn. Even though this shifting feels wrong to you as a skier, you still have to do it, otherwise you won't make the curve, and you will probably land on your nose! Or as Maximilian said, "You have to commit to the curve!"
When I started doing "Personal Agility", the biggest change was focusing on things that mattered. And it worked, gloriously... At the end of last year, I thought, wow what a great year! At work, I have been able to create and introduce new products. In my family, we many accomplished important things. We'd never had a year like that! So let's celebrate, right? And my book...?
What I have not been able to do is get the book written. Even though I am reminding me to be nice to myself, it is still frustrating not to have made much progress. In fact, it is really frustrating!
Today I found myself staring at my Priorities Map, with so much to do and no idea what to do next – What now? My Priorities Map was overflowing, I was even adding columns to manage all the stuff I could do while trying to maintain some overview. But I had now idea what to do. I want to make progress
I decided to take a look at my breadcrumb trail to look at what I had been prioritizing. This is my what really matters column look like:
Theoretical Priorities
When I look at my Breadcrumb Trail, I see a different pattern:
Priorities as reflected by what I got done.
So clearly, I am spending most of my time on “Running my Business” and Personal Agility is a distant third.
“You have to commit to the curve.”
Clearly I have not committed to the curve.
What now?
I reset my Priorities Map. I moved everything that is not done into the Forces Map. This has one column each for topic that really matters, plus a few other themes that matter, though they are less important things, like planned improvements to my course books, that need visibility.
Now I sorted each column by importance… basically the order I want to do them in. Then I moved a few cards (10 actually) back on to the Priorities map. Commit to the curve? Damn right. The first items I pulled were from the Personal Agility column! Then a few for business, then one or two for the family.
Which one to do first? The first priority is Personal Agility, so a Personal Agility item is at the top of the list. (That's actually a slightly harder question than it looks, but more on that in my next post.) And you'll be hearing about the results of my first item shortly!
P.S We have an issue that attachments and embedded videos may not show correctly on the emailed version of this post. We are working on that. Here is the link to my taxi interview in my last post (
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Edit: I had the before and after "what really matters" column switched. -- fixed
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