Till perfection

Sunday evening at my apartment. The air was thick after a sunny Juli day. I sat on my balcony totally engrossed by a book I was reading. At the time I’d forgot all about my plans of having a nice evening jog before watching the football World Cup final between Netherlands and Spain.

Suddenly I realized, that the time was 20:12 – 18 minutes to kickoff! Now, most sane people would probably have ditched or postponed the running plans, and instead getting ready for the match. After thinking about the problem for a few seconds, I found that I would not allow myself to do that. I planned a jog before watching the match, and that was what I was going to do.

This turned out to be one of my best runs in quite a while. I really wanted to get back in time for the kickoff, so I pressed myself harder than I’ve done for a long time. In just 20 minutes I managed to change clothes, lock up the apartment, and run 3,5 kms. At 20:32 (two minutes into the final) I was back at my couch planting my warm feet into an ice cold bowl of water, greeted by the world’s largest vuvuzela-orchestra as I turned on the TV to watch the match.

That day I coincidentally experienced first hand, how setting personal stakes pushes you to perform better. The reason I feel like mentioning this, is that to many people it sounds counter intuitive to intentionally setup personal risks. But the value of increasing your performance significantly, is most often worth putting on the extra risk.

I’m a big fan of notebooks, schedules, dictaphones and the like. Anything that can be used to record your thoughts as they fly by.

The less thoughts you force your brain to manage, the less brain processing power will be left for whatever tasks that may pop up during your day. Therefore, the more information you can offload to “external storage devices” (notebooks, schedules). See and use these devices as external extensions of your brain!

I love to read and learn. Feeling better than yesterday is an incredibly satisfying feeling for me. However, there are some periods where my reading gets into slow motion. Days can go by, and suddenly I realize I haven’t touched my current book for a week. Sound familiar? I’d like to share a simple yet powerful idea on how to avoid this from happening.

An old friend contacted me the other day and told he was about to implement a new business idea he had for a web app. He asked me whether he should implement the app using an older weaker programming language he knew well, or use a new cool interesting technology he did not knew well.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Holy hour and planning defragmentation. Taking time to plan your week is a great idea, but for this to work it is important to have clearly defined goals. Without a goal, how can you in which direction to go?

Most of us don’t like planning our daily lives too much. Maybe this is because planning itself does not yield any immediate gratification. Doing something that gives something back right now, often feels like a better use of our time.

What we really should understand, is the immense value of quality planning. If we understand and truly believe the value of a well planned day, week, etc., we will dedicate more time to planning. To achieve this belief we must continuously experience the positives of great planning. My way to do this, is to have a weekly holy hour.