2025 September 30 How to decide

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Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me to talk about some more fundamentals in reimagining your future. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, and send me a message.

Tonight we'll be talking again about two more fundamentals that really help us live a life that we truly enjoy and find fulfilling. So far, we've talked about things we can do to change and improve how we interact with life, and especially how we avoid negative self-talk. We talked about that a couple weeks ago. Then we talked about being patient yet persistent when we're learning new things, and also starting with good fundamentals, which is what we're going through now. So tonight we're going to focus on one really important topic and another simple and fun step to help you keep moving ahead.

So the fun one first: if something's on your dream list, something you really want to do, then promise yourself that every day, or however often you can do it regularly—and that's an important point—you'll do at least one thing, no matter how small, to move you closer towards your goals. It doesn't have to be huge, and in most cases it really should not be huge because we're really trying to find that next little step that you need to take to move you along your path towards your vision and your dream life.

Developing the habit of making regular progress, no matter how small, will usually keep you going through difficult times better than having the occasional huge spurt of binge working for hours towards a goal. People use practicing a musical instrument as an example. I've seen many people talk about how it's more important to practice guitar—I play guitar right now, I own a guitar—but when I'm practicing, if I practice guitar 15 to 20 minutes a day, hopefully a half hour a day, but even 15 to 20 minutes a day, that's a lot more useful in developing muscle memory and developing a habit than sitting down one day a week and trying to play for an hour or an hour and a half. For one thing, that's such a long time that by the end, you're usually not very effective. But the other thing is, if after dinner you sit down and play even for 10 or 15 minutes, it's a regular thing. It becomes part of your schedule. And if you miss it, something doesn't seem right about the day and you realize, oh yeah, I didn't do that.

Same thing with working towards your goals. Do a little tiny work each day. You'll find that it works into your schedule and just becomes a regular thing to do, just a small task. But make sure you always have another little step in the queue in mind for the next day, so each day you can reward yourself with a little bit of a win to celebrate.

We'll have a whole course on ways to make up a reminder list or a life planning list that doesn't seem overwhelming and comes with built-in motivations. We'll talk more about that. But the second item, which is what I really want to focus on today, is to help you clear away all the distractions and truly keep the important things in your life front and center.

I totally understand that life is full of distractions. In reality, many of them may be important in one way or another. The first step is to divide things that you have to do into categories. This is also called an Eisenhower Matrix or decision matrix. It was named after General Dwight Eisenhower, who came up with the idea. It's a very simple little idea. Simply conceptually divide a square into four pieces. Label one column, usually the left column, "urgent," and the other column "not urgent." Then label one row, usually the top row, "important," and the other row "not important."

You have four quadrants. We have urgent and not urgent, important and not important. Quadrant one contains things that are emergencies, things that you have to do. Quadrant two is something that you can put off and defer. You have to do it, but it doesn't have to be done right away. Then you have things that you can delegate because they're not important, but you do have to get them done at some point. And then the not urgent and not important ones—why are we even doing those?

So the concept is: focus immediately on the important and urgent. Schedule the things that are important and not urgent. Right off the bat, you've taken all the important things that you have to do and you realize, wow, I have 10 things I have to do, and you realize actually I only have two things I have to do today and 10 things this week. We'll set those over into the schedule side so we know we have to attend to them, but not right yet. Then we get to the not important. If it's urgent, you can hand it off to someone else, you can delegate it. Or if you're working alone, you can do it after all the other scheduled tasks because it's not really that important, but it's something that you should do. Mowing the lawn, something like that. If you don't do it today and you do it tomorrow, that's fine. Nothing really is going to change much in life. And then finally, there's the not important and not urgent. These are the things that you have to ask yourself: why are they in my life if they're truly not important and truly not urgent? If it's super fun, then that kind of moves it over into the important category, because fun is important. So if it's just something you're doing because you think you have to do it, then you probably want to reevaluate whether it should even be taking time in your life.

Like I said, this first step is just determining what even merits getting any focus. Then there's a related step of doing a similar analysis to see if it's necessary and consistent with your vision and your passion. That kind of drives importance, but it's a little different. There's important because life says certain things are important—you have to pay your taxes. Very important thing. If you don't, you get in trouble. Is it consistent with your passion and your vision? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but you still have to deal with it. Then there are these other things that, whether they're important or not, depend on you as a person. If you're not a painter and somebody says, hey, let's go do a painting, it's really not important to you at all. But if you're a real painter, somebody who loves to paint and it brings you joy, brings you calmness, it's really important to you. So that's where you have to go through the same thing—is it consistent or not consistent with your vision and your passion, your life passion?

There's another way too that comes out of taking things that may seem like they're pointless, but actually have personal meaning behind them. Think of something like doing laundry. What's the point? You just have to do laundry again in a few days. But perhaps the meaning behind it is that you want to make yourself or your family or whoever feel comfortable and clean when they go out or when they put new clothes on. When you look at the laundry basket now, you can see it as an opportunity to do something meaningful for your family or yourself, and it's not just some burdensome task that wears you down. The laundry itself may not be important, but what it brings you is important. So another important way to look at things.

So now we kind of know how to focus on something, but which thing do we focus on? There are multiple answers to this question depending on the person, but some that come to mind for me are: focus on living towards your life vision. Super important for me, and I think for most of us. Or another way to look at it is focus on what you want, and hopefully what you want is consistent with your life vision. So if the next thing you want is to learn Spanish so you can travel in South America and have a close relationship with the people there because one of your life visions is to travel more and you want to go to Spanish-speaking countries, now the future you want is predicated upon this next step. And you can break down that step into little smaller steps. Like we said before, when you're planning your day, doing one thing a day, you can say, okay, each day I'm going to learn one new adjective and one new verb in Spanish, and that's it. When you focus on the little steps and you focus on the future you want, then things make sense and it's self-motivating.

Another way to look at it is you can focus on what you can influence or control. There's a whole saying about if you can't influence or can't control it, well then don't even have it be part of your focus. I don't entirely agree with that. I mean, that works for a lot of people and I'm not saying it's a wrong approach, but kind of another corollary is you can focus on putting yourself in a position where you can influence or control what matters to you. So the two kind of go—it's kind of two views on the same situation. If for some reason you think you can't get yourself in a position where you can influence or control what matters to you, then if you come to that conclusion, it's kind of like, then I just can't worry about it. Or maybe something drives you to just say, maybe I can get myself in a position where I can influence it or can control it. Like I said, lots of ways to look at how you set your priorities, but the really important point is it's you setting priorities for you. They're really all saying the same thing in different ways.

The key point is be mindful about choosing what to focus on rather than being distracted and focusing on things that don't really matter to you. Like some examples here: your car needs gas. If you don't get it tonight, then it becomes an emergency tomorrow morning. That has to become the priority of your activities, right? This is letting distractions and things determine what you're focusing on. You have the opportunity to look at that and say, oh, it's not really that important to me, but it is urgent and I don't have anybody else who will get gas in the car for me, and I'm driving past the gas station. I should just do it. And now you make your tomorrow much calmer. If you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation with some activity that doesn't really matter to you—you find yourself in some club and the club really doesn't interest you, but you just haven't gotten around to leaving, some situation comes up, there's a fight between people or whatever, and you just don't want to be involved in it—you have the choice to focus on either working through that situation if it does have some importance to you, or just leaving that group. You're deciding what to do. It's not just that everything that comes up and calls for your attention automatically gets your attention. One more: you know you need to mow the grass, but you have to be up really early tomorrow morning to travel, maybe on your vacation in South America we just talked about. Perhaps you have the option of just having your neighbor's child come over and mow the grass while you're away on vacation rather than trying to fit it in before you travel. You have the option on a lot of these things to take some decisions upfront to help make things better. You are in control. You can make your own life better.

Although we picked some very simple examples, I hope you're starting to see how this gives you control over not only how you act, but how much priority you give to each activity and also how you respond to it. I happen to be in kind of an uncomfortable situation right now, something that has nothing to do with anything, and it was really distracting me, really interfering with my regular schedule and just taking all my time and thinking, oh, what am I going to do about this? And after a couple hours of this, I thought, what am I doing? And I stepped back and went back to the basics and asked myself: is this important to me? Is it urgent? And is it aligned with my life vision? Three questions, super simple. Took me about three minutes to do it. And with just those three questions, I was able to answer that yes, there was some importance to it, it's not especially urgent, but most importantly to my feelings at least, it was totally unaligned with my life vision. That enabled me to realize it's actually someone else's issue, that it could be solved over a period of time, and that the answer is pretty clear cut and not something that should be consuming a significant amount of my time. In a matter of a couple hours, it went from being essentially all-consuming to just one of those important but not urgent tasks that could be scheduled and could be safely put right out of my head immediately. And indeed, for most of the day, I've barely thought about it.

This sounds really simple, and this technique sounds really simple, but they're very powerful and they're freedom-giving techniques, especially in those cases where someone else is imposing their issues onto you. So while they might seem a little boring at first, if you spend a few minutes thinking through some of your pressing issues, you might just find out that in reality they aren't pressing issues whatsoever and it may not be an issue you have to deal with. Maybe it's someone else's issue. And that's another whole story.

These things happen in life, whether it's something more serious, like a minor car accident, or not-so-minor car accident or whatever. But in the case of a minor car accident, yes, you think, oh my God, he ran right through the stop sign, he hit me. And that's what you can think about it. Or you can be kind of like, okay, it happened, but now what? There's a path I can do. I've already called the insurance company. They said go rent a car tomorrow. So I'll call work and say I'll be late and I'll rent a car tomorrow. And the guy ran a stop sign, but he was really extremely upset and must have apologized 10,000 times. And he just made a mistake. And we all make mistakes. And in reality it was an old car, even though I like it a lot. Okay, your mind has now containerized this thing and said, so tomorrow I can do this, so I scheduled it. The other things will happen. Either I or someone else can do it. Take the car to the garage to get the body work fixed and it suddenly becomes a non-issue. Still a task to be done, but it's not this all-consuming thing in your life. Super important. Super powerful. Super easy to do.

So that's it for the evening. I hope you enjoyed that. Hope it helps you out a lot. Your homework tonight, no surprise, is to think about some of the tasks you have right now, especially those you may not feel like doing. Write them down and try to categorize them into one of those four categories defined by the Eisenhower decision matrix and write the category next to each one. Remember, it was something you have to do, something you can schedule, something you can delegate, something you just eliminate. So write that down. Extra points, of course, if you can then go further and decide if each one is aligned with your life vision. And if not, is it secretly aligned by virtue of helping someone else or accomplishing something that is aligned with your vision?

Good luck with that. It's one of my fun things to do. When you get one of these small tips like this, it seems really simple, but like I said the other day, first I forgot about it and then I thought about it. Three minutes changed things from then forward. So try it out the next time something happens that you're not expecting, or you just feel overwhelmed with all the things you have to do. And you might find suddenly you have calmness in your life where before there was just nothing but concern about everything you had to do.

As always, remember, many places have wars going on in the world. Things are just a mess right now in a lot of ways. But there's UKR7.com, which we talk about all the time. Those are links to ways to help the people of Ukraine. And to me it's really important and I hope it's important to you at some level as well. And then the other one is World Central Kitchen at WCK.org. They help people after disasters, typically natural or other disasters, and help get food and basic services back to people. Both these organizations are great and they work throughout the world. But there's also organizations probably in your state, your region, your neighborhood, your country, depending where you're looking from, and they can always use your help as well. And if you don't want to work on the national or international stage, there are probably local places that can use your time. And if you're just not in a position where you can donate time or money to one of these groups, remember even something as simple as a smile can just change someone else's day for the better, maybe even their life in ways you possibly can't even imagine.

So if you're able, please check it out. But remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself always is to care for others. Look outside yourself, see the world in a different way. I know sometimes it might sound silly, some of the things I say to do, but it's always refreshing just to see somebody smile. And today I actually went and had to pay one of the two property taxes we pay each year in the state, and places like that, I always go out of my way to be especially nice to the people behind the counter because probably 90% of the people that come in are grumpy because they have to pay their taxes. Those people aren't charging you the taxes, so why are you being snooty to them? So you have opportunities every single day to bring a little brightness into somebody's life. I suggest you try it all the time.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along. Please subscribe. Hit that like button. If not, drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that is the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com.