Schedule Success Appointments With Yourself
When you have an important appointment you schedule it on your calendar (physical and/or digital) so that you don’t forget it or double-book something in the same time slot. You do this for important events like visits to the doctor’s office, travel plans, and business meetings. But, what could be more important that your own personal development and achievement — and I’ll bet you’re not putting anything on your calendar that resembles success appointments with yourself.
Success Appointments you should be scheduling with yourself…
Thinking time
You need to set aside time in your day to simply stare at a wall and percolate. Time to let your mind wander and find creative solutions to interesting problems.
Reading time
It doesn’t matter much what you read; fiction, biographies, newspapers, magazines, cereal boxes, etc. but it is important that you take time to read anything except the feeds on social media sites (you already spend too much time reading those!). You can’t come up with big ideas of your own if you’re not consuming ideas and concepts from other sources.
Writing time
Writing is a way to process thoughts and help them take shape. Writing is also a wonderful way to clear the mind by getting everything that’s in your flying around in your head down on paper so you don’t use up precious space trying to remember everything. You can write everything out in longhand in a notebook or type it all into electronic word documents — the important thing is that you get it down on paper (digital or otherwise).
Family time
Work can be overwhelming, but make sure you are blocking out quality time to spend with friends and family. Schedule time to simply enjoy each other’s company and recognize the awesome things they are doing in their lives. At the end of your life (or the end of someone’s life whom you loved) you’ll never regret the amount of time you committed to family.
Project/Hobby time
You spend a ton of time working on other people’s projects and working in other people’s businesses. Make sure you are schedule time to work on your own interesting projects and side hustles. You’d be surprised at just how many times something you learned while working on a hobby can be applied to solve a tough problem you encounter on a project at your day job.
Planning time
You have a thousand things swimming around in your head that you think you want to do. Invest some time in making choices to realize some of those dreams and create a strategic plan to achieve them. Schedule time to attend those night classes, block out an hour on the weekend to get more exercise, carve out a week to take that vacation you always wanted.
Schedule some of these suggested success appointments with yourself, or book time to do something entirely different that I didn’t think to list above. The really important thing is that you add time to your schedule to work on the really important things in your life.
