Pyramid of Focus ... EVERYTHING supports your WHY

[MarkBruns]

First things first. First of all, you must...

KNOW YOUR WHY.

The whole architecture of your time management discipline will be and should be entirely different. You are in the driver's seat; it's up to you to design and customize an approach that works for you and where you are now in your life ... of course, you might use useful tools, automation, apps ... but it's all about efficiently, expediently driving toward your WHY. The most important thing starts with having some clue about what your WHY is, but it really boils down to the seconds in your day, focused on the planned task at hand, to help you better KNOW YOUR WHY ... as you actually do your tasks, you will see what you need to correct, re-shape and better time sculpt ... remember time sculpting is what you take away, primarily about removing the bad habits of being yourself ... but you really cannot KNOW YOUR WHY without planning, executing, doing your planned tasks so that you can coach yourself in your time sculpting ... it will become obvious to you as you improve your time mgmt discipline.

It's your archictecture, because it has to fit your life

How you structure your time management discipline is your business ... but you WILL want to CHEAT, to steal ideas for what works, to buy coaching/training that can help your with your WHY ... YOUR why is the bigger picture; it's not going to be in all of the little details ... for the little details you want to look around and use/borrow the best ideas ... one of the most important skills in KNOWING YOUR WHY is understanding WHAT IS NOT your WHY, but might be somebody else's WHY.

Of course, you will need to OWN the overall approach ... you OWN the mission ... but just as you should steal ideas and not make everything from scratch -- you should also part with some of your money to avail yourself of high quality, professional services ... when you pay, even a small annual subscription fee, you should not tolerate second rate services. Particularly, because this realm is so intensely competitive NOW and the competitive landscape changes. The best service from 5 years ago would not compete in the current market; the best from 10 years ago might not even be in the game any more. The competitive landscape means that there are especially great, but inexpensive ways in the VIRTUAL realm, eg apps, FiveRR microworkers, to USE high quality professionals to improve your execution, to stop messing around and just get down to business and get stuff done ... and the prices in the VIRTUAL REALM are less than what you would pay for the fuel to commute to a professional service in the physical realm for a month.

Inexpensive VIRTUAL professional services and AI automation will speed little tasks up dramatically, so that your time can be put to a higher and better use ... stop driving -- start using virtual services to optimize your time use.

An example of how this works in practice might help ... you might want use 30 min time blocks made up of 25 min pomodoros with 4 minute high intensity interval training exercise snacks or Tabatas. Working 10 or 15 4 min HIIT Tabatas into every day's time blocking sounds too good to be true in theory because being more fit will dramatically amp up your productivity and improve your mental outlook ... but you might notice that in your practice or the execution of trying to accomplish the 15 Tabata day, that you tend to waste time thinking about what should be or you might overthink the balance part of daily exercise routine. Well, somebody has already solved this problem AND automation quickly solves it for you. You really need a personal trainer. Actually, an AI task master would be good enough and an app would taking the hesitation out of it -- you just need to exercise, you do not have to become personal trainer OR train like a serious competitive athlete ... you're just an ORDINARY person who needs to be more fit ... you just need GET GOING.

Of course, if you think about it a bit; you will realize that there are all kinds of inexpensive ways to get fantastic personalized plans for you per a fitness regimen fitting your goals for the whole year ... it's a competitive industry with almost too many choices ... the best approach is just to look into it, do some homework and then pick one and GET GOING ... the plan can be automated with guides, but it's still YOU that will have to do the exercises ... the important thing is GET GOING. Thus, an easy, inexpensive antidote for that might be an app such FitCoach app or you might try other apps over the course of time, as you become more experienced, to get a professional, but personalized daily workout plan for ordinary people ... if you are training seriously and have aspirations of competing, you probably want to hire a coach or trainer ... but, for an ORDINARY person, with the simple app, you don't get distracted or waste time coming up with something that professional can do better -- instead, with when it's time for a 4 min Tabata, you don't think, you just start right in with the next exercise without thinking about it.

You will need to have a way that helps you to mind your business in some sort of consistent and prioritized fashion that makes sense for YOU. It's all about YOU ... your WHY ... you might have a laudable "I am Second" goal to try to be available to help others, but you have to remember that you do have to take of YOU and particularly your FAITH to even be able to serve others.

At the pinnacle ... your main FOCUS is your faith, your soul, your prayer-life and the spiritual approach you use to lead meditatively disciplined life ... if you want to cut down the trees, then ... FIRST, you must sharpen the axe, you must make your faith REAL by optimizing each second your time ...

Your use of time is what supports by five other areas of your life.

Your "I am Second" GOAL means that, God willing, if you are able, you will place yourself SECOND to these other five areas ... but your time mgmt has to come first ... and you should not tolerate needy people who refuse to grow continually being in your life. Providing tough love means that you will need to stay away from non-contributors and let them find their path back into your circle. You can offer to be a public example, but the entire WORLD is not your circle.

All lives are very different and unique or basically uncomparable ... moreover, we grow/change throughout life ... so how you view the world should be completely different at 20 than it was at 15 and then as you meet people, do things, get involved in different communities and networks, your life will change every five years as a result of those new involvements ... you will find that you may outgrow relationships, just as others outgrow their relationships with you.

The 20-5-1 pyramid of focus can vary SIGNIFICANTLY ... a pyramid might seen totally nonsensical to you, untterly unrecognizable at all ... it might be simpler to just think in terms of ONE priority with five supporting areas to give one balance.

So ... although we are different and change ... your personal life structure might look APPROXIMATELY something like this ...

A) your relationship with your significant other and your immediate family circle ... if you are are monk, you relationship is with your Creator
... you have a 10,000 year perspective and your focus is on more permanent, more general solutions

B) your home/vehicles/properties/investment accounts/hard assets/etc and all of the material things you need for financially sustaining and tooling up your life ...

C) your exercise/health/fitness/creative pursuits and everything you need for an active, engaged, creative life ... this is maybe most important ... because of how fitness drives time mgmt

D) your scientific or professional duties along with your educational development to sustain and grow your influence; this includes work/civic/political/church responsibilities ...

E) your networks of close friends / old neighbors / business partners /professional associates and also your extended family and immediate family of close friends ... this is what social media, txting, email, phone calls are for ... you CANNOT afford to go to funerals

Obviously, that structure will not be ideal for all ... maybe it's not even ideal for anyone ... it's just there to represent our notion of structure.

Realize, particularly that the priority is
not necessarily, going to exactly match anyone's structure of priority ... but you probably want to spend more time and energy on your immediate family than you do with your professional associates, so the five main areas that support your life are not necessarily equivalent ... but there should be some balance.

What we kind of do know with absolute certainty is if you don't place a priority on your faith -- you should be assured that the things that matter to you most are constantly in a state of being susceptible to being lost.

Obviously, we might hope otherwise, but we can pretty much guarantee that an individual WILL lose ALL of the five supporting areas ... the more SEVERE form of "death and taxes" is sort of the only gaurantee that comes with Life. You cannot expect to escape that level of loss. Will your faith sustain you in that time.?

and the 20-5-1 pyramid might not work at all for you.

The POINT ... having a POINT to focus on PRACTICALLY in your planning ... KNOWING YOUR WHY cannot happen nebulously ... you learn to more exactly, more precisely know your WHY through practice, planning and where you invest your TIME.

You need to continually work at better knowing your WHY ... it's all about having a relationship with your SOUL ... when you do not have a relationship with your SOUL, Jesus Christ and your Creator, you probably don't really have a clue about what your WHY is, ie it's not YOUR unique why -- you're just going through the motions of imitating somebody like a celebrity and that somebody changes like some fad in clothing, hair or car styles OR WORSE, you want to imitate some celebrity, car or hairstyle from your youth.

You need YOUR OWN why ....to drive YOUR OWN prioritzation structure that makes sense for your time management discipline which drives how the 86400 seconds are used in your daily practice.

Your structure should have some coherent means of dynamically rebalancing itself ... and structure might be far too rigid of a word ... it needs to be flexible so that you can create with your time ... it might stretch, bend, twist ... but the general structure should be something helps remind you or guide you back to what the goals and priorities are ... because we all have moments, hours, days, weeks where we sort of lose touch what the objective of our mission is.

The REASON why I think in terms of a pyramid ... is that I am just not very smart ... but I can think in terms of a 25-5-1 structure and I can use that structure to keep my thinking somewhat prioritized and aligned ... 25-5-1 is sufficiently messy that I can still be creative in time sculpting my life.