It’s as important to plan for quality use of our leisure time as it is any other time. Here is a helpful exercise:

• List ten or more activities you enjoy or would like to try.
• By each one, note if it requires money, can be done alone or with others, is indoors or outdoors, active or passive.
• Rank them in order from most to least enjoyment. You may end up with some that are more interests rather than passions.

If you’re having trouble thinking of ideas, the best list of activities I’ve ever seen was in a book called “The Superwoman Syndrome” by Marjorie and Morton Shaevitz (no longer in print). Online, you could try DiscoverFun.

A comment from Ibrahim Husain led me to explore his site at http://www.zencollegelife.com.

There’s lots of productivity info here with a focus on college life. There was also a link to Steve Olson’s gathering of Free Personal Development Material, to be explored with all the extra time you will gain!

I was especially drawn to his review of The Greatest Management Principle in the World” by Michael LeBoeuf BECAUSE of the list of things that should be rewarded. I immediately thought of David Seah’s Printable CEO Series and how this could fit in to motivate ourselves. (or employees)

The next thing to consider is how to discover what is most rewarding for each individual, and find a way to work that into the system.

Productivity Flourishing offers three free planners with a view to using highly productive time blocks for tasks that require high levels of productive capacity.

I recently read the book “Happy For No Reason” by Marci Shimoff. The many charts about choosing expansion over contraction were terrific. I was inspired to put them on a photo cube template from HP to make a Happy For No Reason Photo Cube. The HP template is a little small for the photo cube I found, so I needed to cut them out to paste on the inner cube.

With the Photo Cube Companion, you can track time spent on four main areas of development: Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual.

This is a wonderful tool to clarify what you want to do with your life:

Pave Your Life Roadmap at Idea Sandbox

Don’t miss:

The radar diagram in pdf-a visual map of how you are doing at filling your life with value.

The Life Roadmap Plan in doc-a way to get specific in each life area about what will fill your life with value and how you will bring this into your life. I adjusted it a bit to fit my understanding. Under “enabling activities” I thought in terms of specific action steps that can be done right now: map.pdf

1. Use the radar diagram to identify values/themes. List life areas and ask “What will fill my life with value in this area?”

2. Use the life roadmap to plan steps for specific goals to increase value.

3. Choose three values/themes that you are most passionate about to focus on.

Personal Development System
Part Two: Relationship Tracker Cards relationshipset.pdf

This set includes four cards:

1. list your main primary and secondary relationships.

2. fill out a contact card for each of the relationships you listed.

3. conversation starter card.

4. an emotional account card to track loving actions.

Personal Development System
Part One: Relationships

Learn to speak in each of the five love languages with this lovelanguages.pdf. Master the language that speaks loudest to your significant other.

Are you where you want to be?

Today I ran across an article at Innovation Tools with this wonderful quote: “Your processes are perfectly designed to give you the results you are getting right now.” This certainly has the ring of truth, whether you are speaking in terms of business or life.

A strategy map has similarities to goal setting in considering metrics to measure success. The underlying principles are: “you cannot manage what you cannot measure” and “you cannot measure what you cannot describe.”

So how do we design the life we want right now?

An article by Steven J Bell called Design Thinking in American Libraries applies ideas from the book “The Art of Innovation” by Tom Kelley to the library world. They are equally useful in setting goals. The IDEO method is an approach to planning or problem solving with five steps: understand, observe, visualize, evaluate and refine, and implement.

Plan creatively to build a better experience.

Maintenance may not be generally considered sexy…but perhaps it should be. That which is not maintained disintegrates. This applies to everything…a house, a car, a business, a relationship. This is why we must make choices about what we will invest energy in, and the most efficient methods and the optimum frequency for doing so.

Stephen R Covey and Dr. Harley both talk about the importance of making positive deposits into emotional “bank accounts” and limiting withdrawals from them.

Have a system

I’ve been working on a series of cards that are designed to keep on track with personal development. I plan to publish several that make up a system to track actions in relationships in time for Valentine’s Day. They will include actions you can take to speak in each of the 5 love languages.

Reader’s Digest provides a tool to grade the presidential candidates, with nine traits of success.