Discover what pulls you to do useless activities?

Please read the previous post before you read this one - Are you filling your treasure chest with plastic trinkets?---.

Your choice of whether you will do the plastic, zircon, emerald or diamond activities will depend on whether the actiivites are "urgent" or "not urgent".

"Urgent" plastic and zircon activities are distractions that will pull you to focus on them and do them.

"Urgent" emerald and diamond activities usually gets done.

It is the "not urgent" emerald and diamond activities that have a major chance to get neglected.

Keeping this model in our mind will help us to understand why we behave the way we do.

The questions to ask yourself are from two angles;

Is the urgency forcing you to choose the plastic and zircon activities?

Is the lack of urgency causing you to neglect the emerald and diamond activities?

These are very important questions for everyone of us to ponder over.

Do you make the "principle of subordination" work for you?

What is the principle of subordination?

Every activity happens at the expense of another. One activity, thus, subordinates another in a finite continuum of time.

Let's say you come back home from work every day at 8:00 PM and watch TV from 8:30 PM to 10:00 PM, every day. One day, you suddenly realize the dire need for exercising; so you come back home and go for a walk, along with your spouse, for an hour and get back home at 9:30 PM. You have, automatically, subordinated the activity of watching TV.

Your ability to continue exercising will depend on the tug of war between these two activities. Let's assume that you succeed in sticking to exercising, instead of watching TV, will that mean that you will reduce or totally stop watching TV. I don't think so.

Your TV watching may subordinate your activity of sleeping and may erode into your sleep time. Does that mean you will sleep less? May be or may not be, as you may sleep late and subordination is carried forward till it finds a nice, high priority area on to which it can settle down, finally.

The problem is, for most of us, this happens automatically and unconsciously. This is dangerous because you may subordinate important activities like sleep, family time, work ---

The more you are in control of the process of subordination, the more fulfilled your life will be.

How do you subordinate effectively? Well! that is for another post.

Meanwhile, you can begin to examine and identify important high priority activities that are getting subordinated by relatively low yielding activities.

Stay tuned in, for more, in the future posts.