Day Twenty-Three of The Thirty Day Proactive Test

Day 23

12:00 PM

Okay. I drank too much the night before last, because I am a pleasure-centered person. So, I did no writing yesterday. I was just too sluggish and hungover. That was not very proactive behavior, I admit, but today is a new day. So I am going to do some more reading of Covey's 7 Habits. Also, to begin work on my personal mission statement, I am supposed to be keeping an eye out for quotes and taking notes as reference material to be used in the creation of my personal mission statement.

Also, Covey recommends in another exercise at the end of Chapter 2, that I share principals of Habit 2 (begin with the end in mind) with family or work group and suggest that together we begin the process of developing a family or group mission statement. So if any of you readers have suggestions in what direction you want this blog to go, or some good inspirational quotes or whatever, please feel free to put your ideas in the comments section below.

So writing this personal mission statement will be quite an endeavor. So in the spirit of Habit 3 (put first things first), I will start taking notes and collecting quotes as reference material for my personal mission statement. Also, ideally, I would like to create a mission statement for this blog, so if you, the reader, have any ideas, please leave a comment. Let us create this blog's mission statement together.

I will be putting all these quotes and notes in my blog as I collect them for both my personal mission statement and the mission statement for this blog.

Well, here is a quote: that I found right at the beginning of Chapter 3: 

     Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.                                                                                                                                                         

                                                                                                                                                     Goethe


This brings us to why I did that exercise on this blog a couple of days ago (scroll down) because the ideal is to be principle-centered, instead of self-centered, money-centered, pleasure-centered, etc. This mission statement should come from a place of being principle-centered.

You cannot become principle-centered without a vision of and a focus on the unique contribution that is yours to make. That whole exercise the other day was to explore and be aware of the paradigms I am living under so that I can shift my paradigm into something more principle-centered.

So this Habit 3, "put first things first" is all about personal management, time management, scheduling, prioritization, to-do lists, daily and weekly planning, etc.

For the purposes of time management, he creates a little time management matrix.

The Time Management Matrix

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Quadrant I Activities: Crises Pressing problems Deadline-driven projects	Quadrant II Activities: Prevention, production capability activities* Relationship building Recognizing new opportunities Planning, recreation
Npot important	Quadrant III Activities: Interruptions, some calls Some mail, some reports Some meetings Proximate, pressing matters Popular activities	Quadrant IV Activities: Trivia Busy work Some mail Some phone calls Time wasters Pleasant activities

*Production is our ability to produce something (or in other words, our ability to do productive work), while production capability is our ability to maintain the level of production (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People pg. 151).

To be continued...

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