Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Plan! Plan! Plan! Visualize!

Friends and colleagues often wonder how I can even keep up with myself. From their perspective, I do tons of stuff, travel to a thousand places and still be sane. However I do not feel that I have done tons of stuff nor traveled to a thousand places. OK, taken that I act like the normal person next to you on the train I am still not superman.

The trick to juggling family, work and fun is as simple as planning. We use our day timers, Franklin Covey systems and even DIY planners, but one trick in planning is visualization.

When you plan and visualize your environment where you would be performing, the things that you will do, the stuff that you will use, once you actually get to that point of execution it becomes natural and effort-less.

For example, when I learned that I would need to find a new apartment, I would plan on my mind the things that needs to be done, stuff that needed to be taken cared of, down to the boxes that I would be using. Two nights ago, I went to Staples and bought home boxes. In one night, I
was able to contain all the binders, papers and reference materials in my room. Ready to be carried out to my next apartment, in like two months.

There have been studies that show how visualization creates a great impact on almost everybody. The team that practiced every night, the team that visualized their game plan and the team that did nothing. The team that visualized might not have the same outcome than those that practiced but it sure is better than doing nothing.

My only problem with planning / visualization, my mind sometimes becomes to active that I have a hard time turning it off. Anyhows, I'll try to tackle that on my next article.

Happy visualizing!

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