It's a mission statement!

Today I read an article on effective time management that was written before email was invented. Well, not really, but written before email was widely used. Published date on this article is February 1997. Yikes! I like the part that says, "Don't interrupt your work when the mail comes." Yeah, as if that's anyone's problem. If written today, I bet it would say something along the lines of, "Don't interrupt your work when you hear all the little beeps flowing from your Outlook, or feel the vibrations of your Blackberry, or hear the endless ringing of your telephone, or see out of the corner of your eye one of your staff standing at the door waiting to ask another question..."

One part of the article hit home, though. The part on balancing the different sectors of one's life. The basic idea of this section is that not only does one have to practice effective time management in one's professional life, but also should practice effective time management in one's personal life. What are my personal goals, and what is my personal mission statement? Am I spending my time in a way that reflects this mission statement? Sure, watching TV and taking Facebook quizzes are good ways to get my mind off of work, because these are activities that don't require any thinking at all. None. But do these activities help me reach my personal goals of being more physically fit, doing more craft projects, or reading more books? Or what about volunteering? Old people aren't getting any younger, and they're not going to wait for me to watch House Hunters four times a night. Many of the things that I like to do and that I believe are things that define me are passing me by. I need to get some motivation, and this personal mission statement idea is an interesting one.

What would mine be? I thought about that a lot this past weekend, while this post was sitting in draft form. And I think it would be something simple. Something like, "Wake up each morning looking forward to the way I'm going to spend my day and go to bed each night feeling good about what I accomplished." Is that a mission statement, though, or more like a set of goals? Who knows. The point is that I read this old article from Harvard Business Review and thought that most of it was useless, but there was this little gem that I pulled out of it. Much of life is like that - a lot of useless stuff but a few gems once in a while. It's those gems that keep us going.