Friday Feature: How to be Successful

What is success? Financial freedom? A job you love? Travel? A happy life?

All of the above?

Since we all define success a little differently, we all discover it a little differently as well. In his article in Inc., Benjamin P. Hardy focuses on how we can unwittingly create our own obstacles, making the path to reaching our goals longer and more circuitous than it has to be.

Since my freshmen have just finished discussing Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, this piece was especially interesting to me, as so much of Covey is about setting priorities and building our personal and professional lives around them. I love teaching this each fall because it gives me an annual refresher and a check-up -- am I putting first things first? Beginning with the end in mind? I think this article might serve the same purpose: a check-in, of sorts, to remind me to consider the impact of small habits.

What is one step that you can take today toward your own success?

Friday Feature: Is Covey Still Relevant?

Every fall, I teach a first year seminar and every fall, we study Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. This fall, I realized with a jolt just how many years before my students were born this book was published. Does it hold up?

I think it does. In fact, I'd go one step further, asserting that, in a class where we focus on defining and achieving a personal definition of success, Covey is required reading. Or, as I approach it, required studying.

I'm not alone in my opinion. In her article, "Revisiting the Habits of Highly Effective People," Melody Wilding brings Covey's 1989 text into the 21st century, pointing out that in our highly distracting, fast-paced world, some of Covey's considerations are more important than ever. Personally, I think that in my Year of No, "Put First Things First" might just take on even more significance than before.

The funny thing is, I was a hard sell. My Covey training was mandatory and on my own time, which placed two strikes against it from the outset. But the trainings were better than I expected and the thing I came to like about Covey is that he's not trying to sell productivity at all costs. He was proponent of work-life blend before we were debating the terminology.

Next week, my students present Covey's habits. I can't wait to see how they bring them into the 21st century -- the only century they've ever known.

Sometimes, Drastic Measures are Called For

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Last spring, my e-mail decided to cooperate only sporadically. Its timing was, of course, marvelous. E-mails began disappearing into cyberspace and failing to arrive in my inbox right around the end of the semester, when I had the least amount of time available to remedy the situation. For a few weeks, I worried that friends thought I was ignoring and that business associates really hadn't gotten the things I'd sent to them.

Fortunately, the Apple Store was able to come to my rescue. Unfortunately, this came at a price, and that price was my e-mail stash. It was, shall we say, substantial.

The Apple technician was very kind and understanding -- although he was taken aback by my less-than-organized desktop and amused when I told him I write about organization. He allowed me a few minutes to process my impending loss (mostly because he didn't want to be blamed if I lost anything important, I suspect) and and then we hit the appropriate keys and sent several years' worth of back e-mails hurtling into oblivion.

It was a necessary step -- one that was unavoidable in order to achieve the larger (and more important) goal of a functioning e-mail account.

Three months later, I miss very few of those thousands of emails and am, in fact, relieved to be free of the dead weight of a backlog I could never seem to manage. I still have more e-mails in my inbox than I should, but I've also become more ruthless about what stays and what goes. More important, I've recognized that the time it takes to keep things under control is time well-spent. My goal, after all, is a functioning e-mail account.

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As I prepare to begin a new semester -- one which will include teaching freshmen about setting goals and developing good habits -- it occurs to me that my little lesson in technology applies to much more than e-mail accounts. It is, in fact, an illustration of Covey's second habit of highly effective people: begin with the end in mind.

If we don't know what we want, we can't begin to know how to get there. If we do know what we want, we can often cope with drastic measures, and we might even choose to take them.

What constitutes drastic measures will, of course, vary from person to person. In my case, it was letting go of correspondence, much of which was trash, but some of which might have been buried treasure. For a college freshman, drastic measures might mean staying home on a Friday night to study. To those outside of these situations, neither of these measures sounds particularly drastic, but drastic is in the eye of the beholder.

We all want things that are too expensive, whether that expense comes in the currency of cash, time, e-mail or something else entirely. Sometimes we're willing to pay the price, and sometimes we're not. It depends on how important the goal is.

What ends do you have in mind? What's keeping you from them?

Confessions of a Distracted Writer

It's been a reasonably productive vacation morning. Sleeping in, followed by a little laundry, a little emptying of the junk mail in the wildly overstuffed inbox, a bit of straightening here and there. A trip onto Facebook to see what I might be missing. A few additions to my to do list.

Anybody notice anything missing??

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As I sat in my writing perfect house this morning (now this afternoon), I failed to accomplish even the remotest bit of writing (unless you count Facebook posts, which I do not). Everyone is home and happily -- and quietly -- occupied. No one is bothering me. I have ideas, notes, plans, time...and yet instead of writing, I've tackled a few tasks that Covey would classify as important, but not urgent. The big rock, sitting in the center of my mind, is working on my novel, but instead, I am procrastinating.

The fact that I'm procrastinating comes as no surprise to me -- it's one of my greatest skills. But the thing that puzzles me is why this procrastination is hitting so hard now. I know I am nearing the end of my novel, so why am I not filling my lungs to capacity and sprinting the last leg?

Maybe it has something to do with Monday's post -- after four consecutive days of sprinting (after nearly that many months of sporadic sprints), I am out of shape. My mind is begging for a rest. If, however, that were the case, why would my mind suddenly click on in full clarity between, say one and two in the morning when I am trying to go to sleep?

Maybe it has something to do with the status post I typed earlier this week when it hit me that all the puzzle pieces of my novel that were presenting themselves as isolated scenes were actually the road to the end of the book, and all I had to do was put them together in the right sequence so the proper picture would form.

Yeah. That's all I have to do. Because, you know, that's not intimidating in the least. And that revelation is nothing, if not an invitation to launch new projects, blow the dust off existing ones, clear years worth of accumulated emails out of my inbox and straighten six-month old detritus in my basement.

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Excuse me. I hear the laundry calling.

Okay, I'm back. (Yes, I really did leave, for those of you who are wondering if I seriously abandoned
you mid-blog to toss laundry from the washer to the dryer).

And that is one of the double-edged swords of working at home. When things get tough, it's far too easy to abandon ship -- to get out of my chair and go do something else that is calling to me from a far corner of the house. When the writing is going reasonably well, moving from place to place can actually be therapeutic; those brief expeditions conjure up the next transition, or maybe even next few lines, especially when I'm momentarily stuck.

But when it's not going well, or when it hasn't even been started? Then all those expeditions add up to massive procrastination.

It doesn't matter how necessary, important, useful or essential the distractions are. They serve to pull my focus away from what I'm supposed to be working on.

Only they don't. The guilt (the really big rock) travels with me, growing larger with each echo of the equally big question: "Why am I not writing?"

Interestingly enough, confronting the procrastination and finding its source chips away at that big rock (yes, I am still a counselor at heart). And chipping away at the rock often leads to a solution.

Sometimes that solution is relocation (yes, that usually means Starbucks). Sometimes it means chipping off pieces of the rock and starting with equally small pieces of writing time because sometimes small pieces of writing times like blogs or emails prime the pump. And sometimes those same blogs and emails are just another excuse to procrastinate.

But usually, as in today, they are a warm-up. They remind me that I can still put words on a page, and that words on a page are much easier to fix than a looming blank page. And that even if I suspect that the words I put on the page yesterday were a waste of time and space (as I do), the only cure for that is....

...more words on the page.

Off I go.