Over the past months, I’ve been reading a great number of motivational and inspiring books on personal growth. I’ve also been listening to podcasts and watching videos on YouTube. This interest has sprung from a combination of factors as I’ve recently reached a few significant milestones in my life; I retired and turned sixty, and I have five grandchildren between the ages of three months and nine years. I am concerned with aging, health, and emotional wellbeing, as well as my children’s and grandchildren’s future challenges. I have more time to reflect and more things to reflect on, so I’ve found these books, podcasts and videos very helpful, especially in these uncertain and volatile times in which we can take nothing for granted. I’ll be sharing my thoughts with you on Mondays.
This Monday I’m featuring Design Your Day, written by Claire Diaz Ortiz, a book which has the advantage of presenting a synthesis and discussion of many other books on time management as well as her own contribution to the discussion, the DO LESS method. She proposes strategies to achieve goals in less time by enhanced time management skills, leading to maximum efficiency.
In this enlightening book, she uses acronyms to put forward her suggestions for best time management skills.
Listen to her talk about her proposals in this podcast.
The first acronym is DO LESS:
Decide what you want or need to do for a time frame.
Organise what you will do.
Limit to the essential. Make sure it’s all necessary.
Edit your time. Define your limits and stick to them.
Streamline or reduce your work time based on the 4 hour week principles.
Stop. Take time to pause, relax, detox and unwind.
She proposes a morning routine, because she firmly believes that doing as much as possible as early as possible can make your day more successful, and the acronym is PRESENT:
Pray or meditate to connect with your inner self.
Read something inspirational.
Express yourself by means of journaling.
Schedule your day by careful planning.
Exercise to energise your body and feel better.
Nourish by doing something for yourself, such as a treat or a hobby.
Tracking which she refers to as checking your routine.
She proposes using SMART goal setting to break down your strategies to achieving objectives, and focussing on the following life categories: God, Family, Health, Personal, Work and Money.
She discusses Pareto’s 80/20 rule and the 4-Hour Week as well as Parkinson’s Law which states that work expands to fill the available time for completion. So the longer you plan to do something the longer it will take.
This books’ advantage is that it is unpretentious, short, practical and clear. It includes ideas put forward in many other personal growth books which she discusses.
The main new idea she proposes is to aim to do less by planning more efficiently and delegating where necessary.
Here’s the link if you’d like to read my other posts on #PersonalGrowth
Rereading Jane Eyre 
That’s all really good advice and I shall try to adopt some of it,especially the doing more in the morning. Interesting post. Thank you for sharing.
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Retirement sure is an adjustment. It wasn’t for me, as I’m a novelist. But when my husband retired a year ago, I wasn’t sure I would continue writing books. I had to see how things went. I could have never imagined Covid, for one thing. But his retirement is working out better than I thought and I’m still writing novels 🙂
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