Concerns versus influence

Concerns versus influence concept is very simple. You should concern only about things that you can influent.

Lets think a little while about two circles where one contains the other one. We will think about the outer circle as a circle of concerns. This circle will contain all the things in the world that we have concerns about. We will then think about the inner circle as a circle of influence. This circle will contain all the things that we can directly or indirectly influent in any way.

Let us consider two people now where one of them being a proactive person and the other one being a reactive person. Let us explore what this people focus on.

As the proactive person is trying to change things around him he definitely focus on the inner circle that is the circle of influence. He puts the effort there and as he make success his inner circle eventually becomes bigger and bigger. On the other hand we often see the reactive people focus on the outer circle forgetting about stuff in the inner circle at all. Moreover we see that forgetting about the inner circle make the circle smaller and smaller.

As we want to become as proactive as possible we want to focus only on the inner circle with the hope that eventually both circles will become one.

Important versus urgent

Before we start I want you to imagine one thing with the following attribute. You know about the thing that if you will focus very hard on it than it will produce marvelous results in your family working or any other life. Please take a time and imagine one such activity.

The Important versus urgent concept is very simple. It should be a rule for you to put first things first, second things second ...

Each activity we do have two attributes that will interest us. We can think about how much important such activity is for us and we can also think about how urgent such activity is. Therefore let us ask two questions about each activity we do. Is the activity important? Is the activity urgent?

As we can see we can divide activities into 4 categories. Important and urgent category being the first in our mind with the non important not urgent category being the least interesting one.

Now the time has come to think about this two attributes and about the category where the activity from the exercise in the beginning belongs to. The activity that I thought about is very important for me as it will produce so much good. It is not very urgent however as there is no real need for the action. As we can notice most of the activities from the exercise are such.

On the other hand when we think about activities that we are doing all the day and how we pick the activities that we are about to do next we will found out that most activities we just do because they are urgent. Many of the activities that we do are not very important however.

It should be our rule to say no to the not important urgent activities as this activities just take away the spare time we have. We should focus on the not so urgent important activities finish them and benefit from the results instead.