Enhance Your Personal Foundation

When we want to strengthen our personal foundation what we really are saying is that we deserve and want more for ourselves. Along with that comes admitting that we may have habits and a past that gets in our way of being able to accomplish what we want. I have found that before I could achieve some of the things I wanted for myself I had to build myself a stronger foundation. In order to make career changes I had to put time into learning new things. Additionally, I also have had to expand my comfort level and confront my habit of making excuses and procrastinating. I have found it really helpful to set up daily rituals that help me accomplish things more efficiently. I am always looking for hints and suggestions.

I love to cook and enjoy browsing through cookbooks. Recently I found an old cookbook and was disappointed that there were no recipes that appealed to me. Then on the second to last page under Notes I discovered a real gem: the 20 minute-a-day plan. This is how it works:

"Every day set aside 20 minutes and exactly 20 minutes; no more, no less. Do one task. Clean one drawer, wash one window, weed the garden, or polish the silver. Never deviate-take only 20 minutes and then stop until the next day. Tackle one job at a time."

I have been doing the 20 minutes a day daily for a while. I have taken care of tasks that I just did not get around to or did not want to do. Twenty minutes is doable. I have now set myself other time limits and find that I am more efficient as a result. I have set a half hour limit for writing an article and it has forced me to be faster in pulling my thoughts together. A friend of mine limits herself to twenty minutes a day to spend on twitter and Facebook.

I have been the most efficient when my time is well scheduled. I have been in job situations where I had to be very scheduled and it helped me accomplish a lot. Working for solo and having to structure my own time has shown me that I needed to strengthen that part of my foundation. I am doing that by setting time limits for specific tasks. For tasks that I designate as requiring an hour I stop after 50 minutes in order to refresh myself.

Each one of us has to decide what parts of us need to be strengthened and when we take the time to do so we discover new dimensions to ourselves.