Life Hacks by Charles Assisi: What is your plan for your one precious life?

“And here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

That’s from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and the real import of it started to hit home for me only recently. The trigger was when my running coach insisted I spend some time reflecting on what matters most in the longer run, and answer whether I’m engaging with that.

To get me started, he suggested I review my calendar over the last month and place all I did into a grid of four square boxes called the Eisenhower Matrix.

“Place all the times you found yourself handling a crisis, immediate deadlines or dealing with an emergency in the first box,” he said. What is urgent and important had to go here. Pretty much everything fitted here, it would seem.

“I get the feeling you’re trapped in busy-ness,” my coach muttered. I didn’t get what he meant by that until a little later.

“The important-but-not-urgent tasks are to be placed in the next box,” he said. In attempting to do this, I thought I could see a pattern emerge. How often I had cancelled my morning runs? Why so many unread books? Whatever stopped me from showing up at events I had signed up for? Why no quality time with family? He suggested we dwell on this a bit.

“Do you know who the most successful people are?” he asked

“No!”

“Those who sell life insurance. Nobody wants to be told they’ll die someday. But insurance salespeople are serene creatures. Being rejected is part of their life. They know if they follow a routine, the payoffs in the longer run are very high for them.”

I hadn’t thought about it like this. I guess that lack of routine, or respect of routine, also explains why so few of those who aspire to write a book, make a film, run a marathon and do other such important tasks ever actually manage to get moving on them.

We moved on to quadrant three. What about all the time spent doing things that were not important, but urgent?

This took some doing because most of it was not logged on the calendar. By way of example, paying a bill or finishing paperwork emerged out of nowhere; fixing something at home that had broken; making time for a relative or friend who needed attention right away.

Is it possible to plan for all of it? Things happen. My coach pointed out, however, that most of what I had described could have been avoided with some planning. And, he asked, why didn’t I leave room for slack? Indeed! Why didn’t I?

I was now asked to audit time spent on matters not important and not urgent. It didn’t take much to figure out that I was spending hours stuck in arguments with fringe elements on social media platforms. Whatever for, I began to ask myself? Was it at all worth my time?

While there’s a voice in my head that has always argued for toxicity to be dealt with, Greg McKeown, a British writer and leadership guru, makes a compelling case for why we need to give up on certain things. To do that most effectively, he advises, instead of asking, “What do I have to give up?” ask “What do I want to go big on?”

Or, as the poet Mary Oliver put it: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I like the idea of spending some time trying to answer that.

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