Pages

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.

No comments: