There's a difference between important and urgent...

For those of you who have read "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", you will know exactly where I'm coming from here. In this book the author examines how effective people get ahead in life by focusing their attention towards important non-urgent tasks. Basically all the things we do fall into 4 categories:

1. Non-important and non-urgent
2. Important but non-urgent
3. Non-important but urgent
4. Important and urgent

Categories 1 and 3 are time wasters and barriers to effectiveness. These are things such as tagging pictures in facebook or answering a silly text message from a drunk friend. Category 4 is where most of us get hung up. These are the things that are important day to day tasks such as answering a ringing telephone or getting an oil change in your car. While these types of tasks need to get done, they do very little to actually get us ahead.

The most effective people tend to focus heavily on category 2. These are the things that are important in getting ahead, but are often put aside when category 4 calls. The reason why I am writing about this in my blog is that for most of you, your health and fitness is a category 2 item. If left un-attended for too long, it will gradually present itself in category 4 and will prevent you from living a fullfilling and effective life. There are many serious health risks that accompany a poor diet and sedentary lifestyle. Most of these risks don't present themselves immediately. Imagine achieving success in almost all other areas in your life only to find that you have developed type II diabetees, hypertension, sleep apnea or even heart disease due to a simple lack of physical activity.

The good thing for you is that it doesn't take much to prevent a lot of these diseases and it takes almost nothing to get started. Here are a few tips to help you become a category 2 person:

• Be aware: Educate yourself and know your family history. If good gentics are not in your corner of the ring, then it is even more important that you take extra good care of yourself and start soon! Get a regular physical exam and take action if you notice negative changes.
  
• Seek professional help: The biggest mistake many people make when trying to get healthy is they attempt to figure it all out on their own. Every successful athlete has coaches, and so should you! There is a lot of great information out there. You may just need to have someone explain it to you in a way that you will understand.
• Make room for category 2: This means eliminating as much clutter in your life as possible. If you're a grown adult and you can't last 24 hours without checking your facebook (even your email), then you have a problem! Try to consolidate as much category 1, 3 and 4 items into designated times. Imagine if you only answered your phone, email and texts from 10am-11am every day.... You may actually find enough time to get to the gym!
• Evaluate yourself: Take note of everything you accomplish in a day... This is different than everything you did. Accomplishing tasks get you ahead and closer to your goal. Simply being busy will keep you spinning in the same place. If you recall your day being filled with answering the phone, replacing a light bulb, cooking dinner and watching the news, then you pretty much accomplished nothing. All of the above mentioned tasks are important and needed to get done (with the exception of the news) and I'm not saying to ignore these. If every day you can accomplish just 1 task that gets you closer towards your life goals, in one year you will be 365 steps closer! That seems pretty significant to me...

Let me know if any of this doesn't make sense to you. Many of our goals and aspirations at first seem unattainable and far away. For some of us, getting that slim waistline and 6 pack stomach seems impossible. If the reality is that all it takes is accomplishing 1 task every day to achieve that goal, does that seem like too much to ask of yourself?