March- Stop Wasting Water

This month we have focused on decisions and priorities. I’ve used the analogies of spinning plates, juggling glass and rubber balls, and the carnival horse race to discuss ways to determine and then rack and stack our priorities.

Then I introduced the concept of Lines of Effort that I use to track my priorities.

We’ll be digging further into the Lines of Effort next month, but for today, I’d like to stick with the horse race analogy.

One tendency I noticed when watching people play the game is that almost everyone wants to watch their horse. The problem with this is that regardless of how stable you believe your shooting position to be, as soon as you take your eyes off the target, the stream of water moves.

By the time you find your horse, you realize that it isn’t moving, or it isn’t moving very quickly, so you return your attention to the target and steady your aim at the bullseye, but the urge to check on your progress becomes too great.

Once again the attention is diverted to the results rather than staying focused on the actions that bring results.

There is a lesson in there somewhere.

The second, and for our purposes more important lesson, is that in our lives as I mentioned in the post, we are playing the game alone. We are responsible for moving all of the horses forward and we decide the priority of each particular horse at each particular moment.

Often, we want to move two or more horses at the same time.

We call this multi-tasking.

You have probably heard people say there is no such thing as multi-tasking, but that’s not true.

I’ll tell you why, and this distinction will change how you prioritize your life.