A Better Life, Every Day

A Day at the Spray Park

Two of my Better Life commandments are "spend more time with my family and friends" and "smell the roses, hear the music".  Today was a great example of both:

My soon-to-be-step-daughters were excited about meeting a friend of theirs from school at a local park today.  Although I have been barely able to keep up with all I have going on professionally and personally, I took them to the park, and I am so glad that I did.  I had a blast!  We were shooting each other with water canons, running through sprinklers that were overhead, and running over sprinklers that shot up from the ground.  The girls and their friend had buckets that they would fill up and spill over my head when I bent down to the hear the secrets they said they needed to tell me.  The smiles on these 6-year old girls' faces were priceless.

Overall, we spent about three hours at the park, and they were the three best hours of my week.  I did not anticipate being there that long, nor did I expect to be soaked, but I wouldn't trade the time I had with the girls today for anything.

A Better Life Quotation

"If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess, they would stop worrying."

~Dale Carnegie

A Better Life Quotation

"What you get by reaching your destination is not nearly as important as what you will become by reaching your destination."

~Zig Ziglar

So get started on your Destination today!

12 Better Life Commandments - Do You Have Yours?

One of my favorite blogs to read is Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project.  As part of her Happiness Project, Gretchen developed twelve happiness commandments (you can read hers just under her picture on her blog), and I thought that this was a great idea, so I came up with my own "Better Life Commandments":

1. Live my own life
2. Believe
3. Accept my imperfections
4. Spend more time with family and friends
5. Be healthy
6. Do the right thing
7. Continuously learn
8. Embrace healthy confrontation
9. Be a role model for the girls
10. Live within my means
11. Smell the roses, hear the music
12. Do it now!

While the list may change as the days pass, I think this is a great starting point.  I know that my life will be better every day if I follow these twelve commandments.  In a future post, I will explain what these commandments mean to me and why I chose them.

I recommend developing your own happiness or better life commandments.  What commandments do you follow?

A Better Life Quotation

"People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine."

~Brian Tracy

Track Your Progress to a Better Life

You have taken the time to figure out where you want to go with your life, the steps needed to get there, and when you want to to reach each step.  You have also defined the Next Actions you need to take in order to get there, but how do you know where you stand at a particular time in your journey?  By tracking your progress!

There are many different ways to do this.  To name a few:

• Journal
• Spreadsheet
• Bank account
• Programs installed on your computer
• Web applications

Choose the one that works best for you and your destination.

Tracking your progress is an important part of your journey because it will show you where you are at any given time.  It will let you know whether you are going to hit your target date for each milestone, and whether your are ahead of or behind schedule.  This will give you the opportunity to change things if you find that you have fallen behind schedule.  I like to track my progress every week during my Weekly Review.

A couple of examples from my journey:

Productivity
Destination: I am a GTD Master (Black Belt)
Milestones: Hit the relevant points on the GTD Mastery 100
Next Action: Review the GTD Mastery 100 list to determine which points are relevant to my life, and to determine which ones I have already achieved. Complete!
Next Next Action: Prioritize the Mastery skills that I want/need to implement.  Kris from Fresh Focus...on Productivity! recently started a series on the Mastery skills that I will be commenting on as well.
Progress Tracking: I printed out the list, checked off what I am already doing and crossed out what isn't relevant to me.  As I complete each step, I simply check it off the list.

Health & Fitness
Destination: I weigh 180 lbs.
Milestones: I weigh 265 lbs. by August 1, 2008
Next Action: Schedule workouts on my Calendar for every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.  Complete!
Next Next Action:  Get to the gym!
Progress Tracking:  I use a program called VidaOne Health & Fitness.  I have been using it for a few years now, and I like the fact that I was able to install the program on my Treo with the Palm OS.  The program allows me to track my weight, my workouts, and my diet.  Since it is on my Treo, I can enter information just about anywhere, and then I get home it's a simple sync to get all of my data on my PC.

It doesn't matter what you choose to track your progress, just choose something!  Knowing where you are in your journey will help you stay on course.  If you can see at a given time that you are on schedule or ahead of schedule, it will be motivation to continue doing what you are doing.  However, if you are behind schedule or off course, regularly tracking your progress will help identify this so you can get on schedule or course.

Past posts in the A Better Life Series

1. What is Your Starting Point
2. What's Your Destination
3. Plot your Course to a Better Life
4. What Are Your Next Actions to a Better Life?

A Better Life Quotation

"First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination."

~ Napoleon Hill