There’s a book, a really good one out there called First Things First: To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy by Franklyn Covey. It is about how to prioritize your life to get the “first things” done that mean the most important to you and that build a healthy successful life. I really want to write a book entitled “You do what you gotta do.” The contents of my book would be short, the first paragraph would say “in life, you have a decision, to do the things that you want to do, to do the things you like to do, and to do the things you gotta do. If you do it correctly, the things that you want and like to do, are the things you gotta do. However, ignore them and they become the things that you hate to do!” The point is that, in life we have many choices in life to make, and what ever our choices are, we have to do the things that we have to do.
Sometimes we loose our focus on those things that we have to do, I know I have and recently have suffered from those effects. I let a lot of small, minor things get into the way, thus the things I had to do became the things I never did and really dreaded doing. A very good example is this very post. For about a month and a half, this post had laid waiting, wanting to be written, but I procrastinated let is drift – not for lack of inspiration or discussion, but something that I wanted, something that I liked to do became another distraction another block for a bunch of other things that I HAD to do. If I had spent the 20 or 30 minutes to write this post, I’m sure I would have felt the sort of burden to finish it that I feel now.
I have a lot of projects like this, each one has something that I have to do, or something I have to finish. Rather spending the small amount of time to finish each one I let them drag. I wish I had the answer in “How do I figure out What I Gotta Do”. Sometimes you know, but Franklyn Covey discusses a sort of organizing called Quadrant II organizing, and basing one’s life decisions on principle planning rather than urgency or task planning. That sounds more like the right route to me.